There’s something happening, eh?
by Tom Sullivan
While Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went “full Ted Cruz” and Texas bikers went to guns, I missed the tremors coming out of Canada’s version of Cruz’s petrostate. Canada’s Globe and Mail once called it Saudi Alberta, where, Russell Cobb writes for the New York Times, the Progressive Conservative Party had been in power longer than he’d been alive [emphasis mine]:
Then came the “Alberta Spring,” the May elections in which the Progressive Conservatives were swept from power by the left-leaning New Democrats. In the run-up to the vote Rachel Notley, the New Democrats’ leader, argued that Alberta’s oil belonged to the people, not to the foreign corporations that do most of the exploration and extraction in the oil sands. She called for a review of the province’s current royalty regime, as well as a 2 percent increase in corporate taxes. It’s hard to imagine mainstream Texas Democrats making that case, let alone sweeping the state elections, and yet that’s precisely what happened in Alberta.
But campaign rhetoric is one thing. It’s another for the new premier to fundamentally challenge the backbone of the provincial economy. Especially when one poll suggests that voters threw out the old bums more than voted in new ones.
Notley is already negotiating with oil industry over just what the royalty review will mean, and what the NDP platform meant when it criticized conservatives for “neglecting our opportunity to invest in value-added processing and refining – investment that would create more jobs in Alberta instead of exporting them to Texas.” Hmmm.
Still, Cobb writes, “To my ears, attuned as they are to the sacred American concept of private property, the idea that ordinary people own natural resources sounds, well, kind of socialist.” As Sen. Bernie Sanders might say, what’s wrong with that? As oil interests here in the States lobby for oil and gas drilling off the East Coast (with the Obama administration’s support), just who owns the Commons, makes the decisions about and profits from the Commons is something that here in the States we are overdue to review.