Bringing Alberta Oil To Market....

"When you have a price differential that's up around $42, $50 even, that's a massive challenge to local industry, to the livelihood of a lot of Albertans. I hear that very, very clearly."
"There is no question that folks in Alberta, folks here in Calgary, are living through extremely difficult times. This is very much a crisis."
"You think there's a super-simple easy answer and there's not. There's a multi-faceted complex issue and as much as there is a tendency out there in the world to give really simple answers to really complex questions, unfortunately the world doesn't work like that."
"We need to make sure that we're moving forward in the right way and that is where actually listening to the experts is sort of the best way to make policy."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

"The crisis happening in this province affects the whole country but they [the federal government] are speaking a different language."
"We must get our product to tidewater and nothing today addresses that [urgency]."
Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci

"We need more [rail] cars. We need to order more locomotives in order to get more cars onto rail. That's the bottom line."
"In the meantime however, we need to take a close look at the tools available to us to close the differential where it's feasible."
Rachel Notley, Alberta Premier

"My sense is that we will be able to do that [get projects built, such as the Trans Mountain pipeline which the federal government used $4.5-billion in tax funding to purchase the project from Kinder Morgan Canada Limited whose shareholders were fed up with all the obstacles put in the way of completing the pipeline by the very Liberal government which swears it intends to see that Alberta oil gets transported in a timely efficient manner so that it will no longer be sold at discounted rates] in a way that will provide confidence to the sector."
"I don't accept the argument that this government has not been very, very focused on how we can deal with the challenge of getting our resources to international markets."
"We're the government that substituted action for words."
Bill Morneau, federal Finance Minister

Before he was elected in 2015 by a Canadian public that failed to appreciate the guardianship of the Canadian economy and international relations that had Canada in a healthy fiscal and global position led by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau made no secret of his long-term goal to leave Canadian petroleum products underground. First, he meant to gradually wean Canadians off their dependency on oil with alternate sourcing of energy, and then he would shutter the oil industry leaving Alberta (Saskatchewan and Newfoundland) to find other sources of income) while delivering an ostensible environmental plus under his watch.

In the struggle to build pipelines, he compromised by promising the Trans Mountain pipeline would be built, but the Northern Gateway pipeline would be abandoned, at a time when Canada desperately needs to move its petroleum extraction industry forward both for domestic and trade purposes, rather than rely on oil sourced from Saudi Arabia. The Liberal government has focused on its pet project of empowering women, LGBTQ-2, Aboriginals in every sphere of public life, while ignoring the realities of the country's finances teetering vulnerably with a deficit far higher than anticipated and a growing debt, costly to the country's future.

Ontario along with Alberta were considered the nation's two power-house economies that kept the country strumming along, providing billions in equalization payments to the other provinces to ensure that social programs throughout the country were equally distributed. Ontario lost manufacturing jobs to cheap-labour countries and its wheels of commerce and production groaned to a downward spiral, while Alberta has had to struggle with opposition from the very provinces that benefit from its financial support, while they pursue an environmental agenda hostile to the very source of its wealth.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates the price discount ("differential") that affects heavy oil and has spread to light oil is costing Canada dearly. The impact for the first ten months of this year was a loss of $13-billion in revenue. In October the difference between what U.S. crude sold for a barrel and Alberta crude was a whopping $50-million daily. "The differential has blown out to such an extreme level for two reasons, the lack of access to markets and the fact we really have only one customer (The United States)", explained Tim McMillan, CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.


"If Northern Gateway had come on as planned, we wouldn't be in this situation", he said. "If this keeps up and we start to see either a lack of growth or more shutting in some of this production ... you're losing jobs and even personal income tax as well", noted Kent Fellows, research associate at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, who estimated the differential would translate into a $13-billion economic loss if it persisted for a year; $7.2 billion for the Alberta government, $5.3 billion to industry and $800 million to the federal government.