Alberta Premier Jason Kenney flew to Ottawa on Wednesday with a list of demands and a key message for the prime minister to focus on the economy.
Kenney and his fellow premiers are to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau amid growing concerns about the novel coronavirus pandemic, a stock market crash and plummeting oil prices.
"We need this government to get refocused on the economy. Enough about dealing with every fashionable issue out there and the virtue signalling, the UN security council, all the rest of it," Kenney told reporters before boarding a flight at the Calgary International Airport.
"We are facing an economic crisis in Canada and we need the national government to act accordingly with total focus on that issue.
"We need that more in Alberta, I believe, than any other part of the country."
Alberta needs similar support to what the federal government gave the auto sector during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, Kenney said.
"We've contributed $600 billion net to the rest of Canada over the past five decades. It's time for Canada to have Alberta's back."
Kenney said he's been talking with energy leaders as well as Ed Sims, president of WestJet Airlines, about the downturn.
"Airlines are hemorrhaging cash right now. And one thing I will take in as a very clear message to Ottawa is any benefit that Air Canada receives as the so-called flagship carrier must be equivalent to the assistance that WestJet receives."
Kenney said it's not a secret that the oil and gas sector is likely to see layoffs over the next few weeks, since many companies have announced plans to slash their 2020 capital budgets.
"A number of our energy companies saw their share valuation go down by as much as 90 per cent in the last 48 hours," he said. "Many of them have basically no cash flow.
"A lot of those oilfield workers who are on rig sites will be laid off and probably won't be going back to work."
Kenney said energy companies have become more lean and efficient over the last five years, but some aren't likely to survive.
"There are a range of companies that are not well prepared for this downturn. That's part of the problem. This is after five years of fragility, when a number of companies have been leveraging themselves in debt," he said.
"A lot of them cannot cut operating costs any further and they cannot raise equity."
Kenney said he will be pressing the federal government for guarantees that the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipeline projects will be completed as a way of restoring confidence in investing in Canada.
He also wants Ottawa to provide the provinces with an equalization tax rebate that could be used to help struggling industries. Kenney said in Alberta's case that rebate would be $2.4 billion.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2020
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A crisis is an opportunity
A crisis is an opportunity for Alberta to acquire federal support to change course rather than do the same things over and over again and expect different results, otherwise known as insanity. This starts with accepting certain facts and making the adjustments to changes in the energy, economic and transportation paradigms.
Two facts that cannot be changed are China and European Union legislation necessitating a rapid migration, within a few years, to electric vehicles, respectively in the largest and third largest vehicle markets in the world. This means that ALL global automakers must invest massively to comply and WILL do so.
Since two-thirds of petroleum use is in transportation and 89% of that is in road transportation, peak oil is but a few years away. Even Shell agrees.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/22/opinion/shell-aims-lead-big-...
On natural gas, there is a global glut which will amplify for several reasons. First supply is increasing at astronomical rates. Second, for two-thirds of the world, renewables is now cheaper than natural gas, or at the very least, competitive. This is why Chevron devalued its investment in LNG Canada and GE wrote off $193B over 3 years leading to 2018 for natural gas- and coal-fired plants projects. Third the shale gas industry is experiencing greater expenses than revenues and this has been going on for years. Between May and September 2019, 33 shale firms went bankrupt. Worse, the shale industry is financed by the same kind of fraudulent financing as that which occurred during the subprime crisis.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alta-...
Alberta must diversify and if Kenney approached Ottawa with this kind of message he would acquire empathy from across Canada. An example of a new approach would be to request Ottawa's assistance for setting up in Alberta, a Canadian scale equivalent to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, a 327 acre campus, with 2,685 employees, representing 70 countries.
He can't walk away from
He can't walk away from pension funds' investments and Canadian major banks' investments, which account for the largest or close to the largest shareholdings in the sands.
If he wants Horgan to continue playing ball on TMX (UNDRIP or no: from Horgan's perspective everything that arises out of pre-UNDRIP matters is a done deal wrt CGL.
The BC gov't is already paying for most of the CGL and the Kitimat LNG enterprise, and now CGL is asking for federal funds too.
And that's my fix on how it is that AP (and, utterly not to its credit, this publication) are laying Alberta's tarsands losses at the foot of COVID-19. Frankly, it's beyond dizzying that anyone would think Canadian "taxpayers" are stupid enough to swallow it, but hey: if even the reputable independent media are using headlines saying it's so, how many people will doubt it is?
And that's not only dizzying: it's nauseating. To me. But that always happens to me anyway, faced with such a spinning landscape.
Maybe we can hope that PM during his community-sparing sequestration will have a fever high enough that when it breaks, he'll have had visions that turn the plans he's apparently fomented with Messrs. Morneau and CAPP seem more like the nightmare some of us experience when we consider all the pieces.
There are not many reasons why all of a sudden the precarious positions of petro and gas extraction companies' losses due to the wakeup call delivered by Teck Industries in re the sands, and
When Kenney placed all his
When Kenney placed all his eggs in one basket, he picked a losing path. Ultra Conservative supply side Reaganomics hasn't worked and won't work. Kenney wants no government, reduced government and no public unions yet we are all calling for government help. Brian Jean and Kenney present demands that are impossible to fulfill. Jean starts off by saying stop Alberta paying equalization! Total ignorance yet Kenney's gaslighting has convinced many if not most Albertans that this is a fact! Prior to Alberta discovering oil, Ontario provided the revenue . When Saskatchewan was bankrupted by the Devine Conservatives in 1990, the feds guaranteed their paycheques and bond repayments until the NDP brought fiscal stability back.
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