Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Alberta's oil fiscal deficiencies laid out

Short now of what amounts to 3 years of revenue from our resources they find us in trouble and are using it as an excuse of pushing the Conservative agenda of absolute and total privatization. Now, they can uses the lower revenues which they caused as an excuse to cut funding for programs.

It must be a warp in the conservative physic! Today we see articles the world is awash with oil due to inactivity caused by the recession. We read of whole fleets of tankers being bought to store oil afloat awaiting a port to dump their cargo into. Cheaper than pipelines. Cheaper than tanks ashore for storage.

We read where BP is cancelling its pipeline work designed to move natural gas from Alaska to Alberta and a day later Stelmach is telling the NWT industry wants the gas from the North Shore, put the pipeline through.

Every where we look and everything we see points to the hard fact that oil along with a number of other commodities has tanked!

Today the Conservative announce they are going to kick yet another billion into the oil patch "to keep people working" and a second Billion and a half going to subsidize oil drilling. The Billion is to clean up oil wells according to Mr. Knight. This government has spent years telling us there is nothing such as a dirty site. If you got ill because of the wells, now is the time to lawyer up.

On royalty we are taking a 20% + loss in revenue on exchange alone. I estimated this at 16 billions of dollars but the Liberals have pulled the oil books and pointed out to the Government that their energy regime considering Syncrude alone has cost this province 18 billion dollars.

This runs the estimate up to close to 30 billions of because the deals are passed onto other sectors of the petroleum and gas industry. Pumped into the oil industry coffers that that has all gone to fat stock portfolios. Its gone and the Government is now going to throw another 3 billion on the table to encourage drilling?

We are already taking less money than is Saskatchewan and BC. If someone was going to drill they would be drilling now! This is a blatant slice to move more of Alberta cash into the oil industry.

When the math is done, we are paying the oil and gas companies to take the non renewable resource from the province. At the end of the day we won't even have the jobs.

It is time to elect a Government in Alberta who works for the province rather than the oil industry. They are not one of the same!

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