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 sets an example
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…
Sacrificing the future
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…
Canadian natural resources almost given away to mostly foreign owned producers
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.
Ferry innovation? Wazzat?
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’s national wealth fund
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.
Two oil economies: Norway and Alberta – UPDATED
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 […]
Public service: a rewarding career
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 […]
Different ways, different results
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 […]
Questions about oily business aims
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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