Letter: ‘Liberals hate Alberta oil’ doesn’t really jive with facts

By Letter to the Editor on May 9, 2024.

Dear editor,

Re: Trans-Mountain Pipeline start of operation – May 1, 2024

About six years ago the federal government spent 4.5 billion taxpayer dollars to keep Trans-Mountain alive. About a year later, our MP, Mr. Glen Motz, wrote in the News about the “… crippling hurt this government has levied on our natural resource industry,…” (News, Aug. 2, 2019).

In the same column, he wrote that the Liberal government “… arrogantly believe that they (government) create opportunity, that they are the driver of innovation and human progress. Oh, how wrong they are.”

Remember, private enterprise abandoned Trans-Mountain, seeing no benefit in it. The federal government, which Alberta conservatives love to hate, saved that pipeline, at a final cost to taxpayers of $34 billion. The new pipeline capacity, effective May 1, will allow 590,000 more barrels per day to be sold out of Alberta. (News, May 2, 2024)

Grab a calculator. How much is today’s oil price, per barrel, times 590,000? Is that “crippling hurt levied on our natural resource industry?” Was no opportunity created in the spending of $34 billion? Was no human progress made?

The 2019 Conservatives held, essentially, the same doctrinaire views as now, including those of Mr. Motz and of Mr. Pierre Brokenitis, whom Conservatives elevated from a shrill, whining back-bencher for whom nothing worked right in Canada and everything was “broken” because of Justin Trudeau, to a shrill, whining leader, for whom nothing works right in Canada and everything is “broken” because of Justin Trudeau.

The federal Liberals have said Canada will sell the pipeline, after its completion. It will likely not bring $34 billion on sale. The loss will be written-off, effectively becoming an additional taxpayer subsidy to the oil and gas industry, another subsidy being the interest paid on $34 billion, borrowed over six years to complete the pipeline.

But those two subsidies don’t count for us, here in Alberta, because the nasty federal government forever shortchanges Alberta and wants to kill the oil and gas industry, and everything is broken, and it’s all Justin Trudeau’s fault, all the time.

Yours truly,

Gregory R. Côté

Irvine

13
-12