Monday, March 15, 2010

Alberta to trash balance of payments-Canada Beware!

There has been broad coverage this week about Ted Morton's assessment of losses due to fine tuning the so called royalty regime.  He is saying hundreds of millions of dollars will be lost.

The royalty regime he refers to is a farce; an election document; a lie that put them into office.  The AG bounced them after two years pointing out they were far from achieving their stated targets of 19% royalty.

Then came the crisis.  The minister said the new regime would not be applied any time soon.

The change in the phantom  scale hits to top end; where we won't see the price of oil for many years to come!  It would have nothing to do with our profit and loss picture if it were real.  With our royalty take being half of either BC or Saskatchewan,  we are surly going broke but it has nothing to do with the BS regime.

What Morton has done is positioned himself to press for the abolition of the balance of payments formula which has been long standing and agreed to by all the provinces. This in my view is the fabric of Canada.

Ted Morton, a US citizen was co author of the Alberta Firewall with the members of the Wild Rose Party of which doing away with the balance of payments was a keystone. 

Any savings that came from such a plan would go directly to reducing oil royalty further.  It would do nothing for the quality of life in Alberta.

We can nothing short of treading them as traitors but we can do something about the Federal end of things and shut down Stephen Harper bringing to an end Norton's and the Wild Rose ambitions.

1 comment:

John Clark said...

There is a further danger to their non plans.

The resource royalty is very low, much lower than need be.

This leaves the door open for a Federal party to reach in a do a double tap on the resource industry to an extent that will bring the royalty take up to what BC and/or Saskatchewan are charging.

This means by their brinkmanship they will end up paying double what they are now.

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