Quote:
Originally Posted by StickMan
A few reminders:
NDP appointed anti-oil activist Tzeporah Berman and Ed Whittingham, both enemies of Alberta’s oil and gas industry to oversee it, regulate it and advise on it.
NDP 6 month oil royalty review that created uncertainty in the industry and accomplished nothing.
NDP implemented carbon tax that they didn't campaign on and made everything more expensive.
When NDP took power in 2015, Alberta's debt was $11.9 billion, by 2019 it was $85.9 billion and climbing. In 2015 interest payments were under $800 million a year. When NDP left office, interest payments were over $2.3 billion.
The NDP drove up the debt, drove away businesses, implemented new taxes, raised corporate/individual taxes, and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Alberta was a complete mess after only 4 years.
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I'm reposting verbatim what I had in this thread a while back to address your bolded point.
TLDR: Complaining about a royalty review is at best misguided. Specifically saying "It accomplished nothing" shows you don't know much if anything about it:
I've had this discussion a million times.
But what was so bad about the royalty review?
We ended up with a royalty structure that just about everyone agrees is better for both industry and the government.
So I guess it's the timing that was so bad?
That's such a disingenuous argument. There is never a good time for a royalty review.
If prices are good, people will complain that with prices so high, any uncertainty will chase investment out of the province because with such high prices, money can be made anywhere.
If prices are bad, people will complain that with prices so low, any uncertainty will chase investment out of the province because with such low prices, it's just creating too much risk.
So one party's solution was to bite the bullet, listen to experts and implement a royalty regime that is much better for the province and producers in the long run (the benefits have been clear both when prices were high, and when they crashed during the pandemic).
The other party wanted to stick with an outdate royalty regime that would have cost the province money during the high price era, and would have absolutely killed what little work was getting done during the pandemic (low price era)
So you want to penalize the the NDP for having the guts to make a tough decision that ultimately benefited everyone in the province (including the oil and gas producers that the NDP apparently hates and want to drive out of business)?
Not only that, you want to use that as justification for voting for the party that wouldn't have done anything and would have left us in a much worse spot today?
Make no mistake, a large part of the boom in Royalty Revenue that the UCP is currently suckling off of to buy votes, and use to claim they are the last bastion of the mythical "Fiscal Conservatism" only exists because the NDP did the actual hard work to make that possible.