In British Columbia, both the governing NDP and the Conservative opposition maintain that natural resources primarily belong to the companies extracting them today. Taxes are kept low, subsidies are plentiful, and the idea that future generations deserve a share of today’s resource wealth is effectively dismissed.
Our governments believe that resources belong to those who exploit them today and that future generations have no right to a share of the province’s asset values.
Norway’s oil and gas taxation is far different from Canada’s. The northern country ensures that its future citizens will benefit significantly from resource exploitation, while Canadian governments prefer the immediate privatization of resource values.
In 1996, Norway began depositing oil revenue into a national wealth fund so that current and future generations would benefit from the nation’s oil wealth. Bolstered by oil taxes and by profitable investments in more than 9,000 companies outside Norway, the fund is today valued at C$1.84 trillion.
Long time United States Senator Charles Grassley is an Iowa Republican and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He joined with retiring Democratic Senator Tom Udall to state a position that current BC NDP members ought to heed.
On the day Jason Kenney’s Alberta announced their single year budget deficit will exceed $24 billion, Norway advises it’s national wealth fund had passed C$1.52 trillion in value…
Alberta has long been a puppet of the oil and gas business but Kenney’s compulsion to deliver benefits to this private sector is unprecedented. It is as if Alberta’s right wing government looked at what Norway has been doing and decided to do the exact opposite. In the first 13 weeks of the 2019-20 fiscal year, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund declined by $156 million to $18 billion. In the last eight weeks, Norway’s wealth fund increased by C$55 billion, a rise of 4% to C$1.46 trillion.
Norway has done far more than put aside a substantial part of the value of fossil fuel production. It has has taken aggressive action to deal with climate change…
Norway made a choice to take a material share of oil and gas revenues and distribute the value of its non-renewable resources to citizens over multiple generations. Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan chose to benefit whichever corporations happened to be involved when production of oil and gas took place…
In Norway, with 5.3 million people, upstream petroleum companies are subject to a 27% petro tax plus a special tax of 51%. Alberta petroleum tax is less than 4%. BC’s is near zero.
The Havyard shipyard announced that it received a contract to build seven battery-powered ferries for Fjord1, Norwegian transport conglomerate. The news comes after the operators of the first all-electric ferry in Norway, the ‘Ampere’, reported some impressive statistics after operating the ship for over 2 years. They claim that the all-electric ferry cuts emissions by 95% and costs by 80%. Unsurprisingly, the potential cost savings are attracting a lot of orders for new electric ferries and for the conversion of existing diesel-powered ferries…
Norway sets aside proceeds from oil and gas production and now has an investment fund worth 8,140 billion NOK, which is about $1.3 trillion Canadian. Given the present population, that’s more than $250,000 for every man, woman and child.
Norges Bank Using the Bank of Canada’s average rate of exchange for 2014, the Norwegian oil fund had a value of more than $1.2 trillion CAN as of March 31. The Government […]
This is a small piece of information learned in my recent examination of business in Norway. In the article Two Oil Economies, I mentioned Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the sovereign wealth […]
Note 11 from a study by John Calvert and Marjorie Griffin Cohen of Simon Fraser University, Climate Change and the Canadian Energy Sector: In this regard it is interesting to compare the […]
Good thing we have The Tyee and other independent media. If we did not, politicians and industrialists would have an unrestricted pass to conduct business in ways that best line their own […]
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My sole comment is, it should be in the building code that every new build house/condo, have a government approved…