Thomas Mulcair disease: Canada’s would-be PM slips on the oilsands

[burn_this_city]

We already have incentives to lower energy consumption and raise efficiency. It's purely an economical one for producers. Less gas means lower operating costs. Lower steam to oil ratio means more production.

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by Smartcar

Actually is was good policy poorly communicated with bad timing. In principle it makes sense to tax things you don't want to encourage (consumption of fossil fuels) and not tax things you do (productivity and income). Since everyone pays income taxes and consumes fossil fuels (the tax would have been at the consumer level, not the producer level) it wouldn't have benefited one region over another. The problem was people didn't believe that income taxes really would go down, therefore it wouldn't be a "shift" but additional taxes.

Except that it targeted producers, not consumers. Under Dion's plan, Alberta would have borne 60% or more of the cost by itself. But he wouldn't place additional taxes on actual consumption because that would have hit Ontario and Quebec the hardest by virtue of population and land area.

Ultimately, my point wasn't to argue for or against the Green Shaft, merely to point out that Dion is a hypocrite who did play east against west, just as his predecessors did, and just as Mulcair is.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by Smartcar

Extracting oil from the oil sands is hugely energy intensive, which is one of the reasons environmentalist consider it "dirty oil". There's no question it would have increased costs to Alberta producers in the short term, but the objective was to create an incentive to come up with better ways to do energy-intensive things, not to transfer wealth to other provinces.

So Dion was not being a hypocrite criticizing Mulcair. There's not much Alberta can do about the high dollar and world commodity prices, but we could be spending more on research into cleaner ways to extract oil.

Energy intensity doesn't make it dirty though. It could be energy intense, but zero-emission. Thing is, many of those environmentalists also don't want the nuclear plant that would cut oil sands CO2 emissions from production overhead.

Regardless of Dion's intent, the actual effect of the green shift would have been wealth transfer away from Alberta and away from Canada.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Perhaps old Tommy isn't as stupid as we think...or some of Canada is...

The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey, released Friday, suggests slightly more Canadians disagree than agree with Mr. Mulcair — 45 per cent compared to 41 per cent — although opinions varied across the country.

The telephone survey of just over 1,000 people was carried out between May 17 and 20 and has a margin of error of 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Most people polled in oil-rich Alberta and the rest of the Prairies disagreed with the NDP leader, while those in Quebec and British Columbia were most likely to agree with him.

The poll indicates most people don’t share Mr. Mulcair’s sentiments in Ontario, the country’s manufacturing heartland, where the economy has been hard hit from the restructuring of the North American auto sector and other blue-collar industries.

But a study by the Canadian Energy Research Institute says Ontario enjoys the lion’s share of oil sands benefits outside Alberta. The Calgary-based think-tank has suggested the oil sands will create billions of dollars in economic spinoffs in Ontario and tens of thousands of jobs over the next quarter century.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2443635/

Thought this would have been a much bigger gap, but BC are hippies so yeah.