Quote:
Originally Posted by artvandelay
You seem like like a reasonably well-informed individual and I have complete confidence in your ability to connect the dots on your own.
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Well there has only ever been one federal energy policy that touched on oil at all that I am aware of, and that was the National Energy Program of the early 1980s.
The thing is, the NEP never envisaged shipping western oil to Eastern Canada. That would have involved investing money in long-lived infrastructure in the form of an oil pipeline, something that the Trudeau-era Liberals never really liked; they much preferred to ramp up program spending instead.
What the NEP did do is it used the revenue from western oil (sold to the US) to subsidize the cost of oil imported into Eastern Canada. It was also supposed to generate a pile of money to use to on yet more program spending... a kind of Canadian version of trying to duplicate the Dutch Disease, if you will.
So to this day Eastern Canadians continue to buy imported oil at world prices while Alberta is now unable to sell its oil at world prices due to the lack of access to world markets, and every attempt at sending its oil somewhere by way of building pipelines is meeting with problems. But the one direction it seems not to have tried sending an oil pipeline is also the one it would likely have the most success with (we're talking basically about a pipeline through Northern Ontario around Superior and Huron to Sarnia). It would allow Canada to cease importing oil and through the miracle of arbitrage provide Eastern Canadians with cheaper oil and Albertans with higher prices.
Put simply, the lack of an oil pipeline to Ontario has been costing Alberta's oil patch billions of dollars in lost revenue and costing Eastern Canadians through higher gas prices. Nothing quite like losing at both ends at once.
Anyway, if you're aware of some other federal energy policy that proposed shipping western oil to Eastern Canada, please let us know about it.
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