Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Well thank you Mr Stelmach, Exxon appreciates your efforts


Ed Stelmach, the Premier of Alberta came out yesterday to let us know what the oil industry is looking for in this election.
"If there's ever a time we need a strong majority, it's now. Many of the investors around the world are looking for some stability and predictability in policy and we won't get that unless we have a majority government."
The many investors in this case is good old Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO of Exxon who is holding back his decision on the starting date for the Kearl Tar Sands project until the new year.
In case you forgot the Kearl project is the next expansion of the Tar Sands. In this case replacing the existing boreal forests with a $8 billion open-pit, mining operation, with trailing ponds expected to be the size of 20,000 football fields.
The majority Ed is referring to is obviously a conservative one, but he did have some advice for the Tories about just trying to get by on negative attack ads.
He suggested that attack ads aren't the way to win that majority, when asked about the federal Conservative ads. 
"Albertans want to know what you're going to do for them,"
That's a tough one there, Ed.

When you consider the fact that the Harper government has basically delayed placing any environmental restrictions on the existing tar sands projects until well after 2015, promised to pay a third of the development cost of the Carbon, Capture and Storage technology (if it could ever be deployed on a such a large scale), and even redesigned the country's immigration law so that temporary workers headed to Alberta could by pass the queue...

I mean short of moving the physical capital of the country to Calgary, I don't think there is much more Harper can do for you.

At least right now.





References: Advice from Alberta from the Globe here, Carbon Capture Reality Check from Discovery here.


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