Stelmach's Oil Royalties Compromise

Here's how the Conservative party/government operates in Alberta. They set up panels, committees and traveling road shows to pretend to care about the opinions of the voters peasants and then they go ahead and do what they planned to in the first place, despite the input.

So, it comes as no surprise that "Steady Eddie" Stelmach, who had set up his own panel to study royalty revenues from the oilpatch, announced today that, contrary to what his experts advised, he's going to ask for half a billion dollars less than what they recommended. Who cares if Albertans have been ripped off for years now?

Broken down, the government forecast additional royalties in 2010 to be as follows:

* $470 million more for natural gas -- about $270 million less than recommended by the expert panel;
* $460 million more on conventional oil -- about $4 million more than called for by the royalty report;
* $470 million more for oil sands -- nearly $200 million less than recommended by the panel.


The expected $1.4-billion increase in royalties would hike Alberta's total 2010 royalty take to about $8.6 billion from $7.2 billion.

The oil lobby had been extremely vocal and threatening prior to this announcement stating that various companies might "have" to pull out of the province. In other words, if they couldn't continue raking in the megabucks on the backs of all Albertans, they'd take their toys and go home - to the US, to China or wherever they came from in the first place. Let's face it, can anyone in their right mind in this financial climate with oil at $90/barrel and projected to be at $70/barrel in 2008 expect the rest of us to believe that they'd actually suffer if they had to fork over more royalties? Poor them.

In the meantime, because of the oil boom in Alberta, our cost of living has skyrocketed and the influx of people looking for and finding work here has overstretched our (already underfunded) infrastructure. So, who's really suffering here? It's definitely not the oil patch.

And, just as an added perspective of exactly what this government thinks about "governing" in this province, it doesn't get much clearer than this, does it?

Meanwhile, Alberta Liberal Leader Kevin Taft, who was at the premier's press conference in Calgary, declined to comment on the report. Taft said it was "undemocratic" to freeze the opposition out of the technical and media briefing, which didn't give his party advance time to review the plan.

"We need time to study it, and will get back as soon as we can."

Albertans who keep electing these Conservatives, especially after the mess Ralph Klein perpetrated on our province, really need to get their heads out of their ideological bubbles. They, along with the rest of us, have been complaining for decades about people issues like the state of our health care services (why do Albertans still pay health care premiums??), the cuts to education, the inattentiveness to the needs of the poor, the refusal to actually listen to anyone but the sound of their own voices, the backwards attitudes towards civil rights etc etc etc. Yet those Conservative voters just can't bring themselves to kick the useless, arrogant bums out of power.

I've often said that, rewriting another popular saying, 1000 monkeys in a room with calculators could manage Alberta's economy just as well as these Conservative governments do. And they might even do a better job of it - especially during times like this when oil money is flooding the province.

So, I don't have any tears to shed for these oil companies and the fact that Steady Eddie caved to their whining shows that he's just as spineless and beholden to that lobby as Klein was.

I'll post more analysis of today's announcement as it comes in. From what I've heard so far, those who expected Stelmach to follow the advice of his panel are disappointed.

Related:

CBC's roundup of Alberta oil royalties news, background and reactions (includes video of Stelmach's press conference)