For the past 40 years political leaders — supported by the majority of professional economists in the academy and private sector — have reduced the role government plays and increased the degree of competitiveness in the economy. The number of public-sector enterprises that have been sold off (such as Manitoba Telephone Services, Petro Canada and Air Canada), and the increasing willingness of governments to downsize the public sector and deregulate key sectors of the economy (e.g., transportation, energy, telecommunications), are testimonies to this shift in governance.
Energy policy
As recorded in Hansard, since the beginning of the Legislative session on April 12, there have been ongoing relentless attacks, on Hydro, the West route for Bipole 3, and the government. The attacks, mainly by Conservative leader Hugh McFadyen, have centred on the costs of the West route, claiming that it will cost $11,748 per family. His erroneous claim distorts the fact that it’s only the extra costs of the West route that should be considered.
The oil industry in Canada is second to none, at least when it comes to spin. It makes the most creative of Canada’s political leaders look like amateurs.
The latest and most audacious story being spun to Canadians is that the oil industry stands to be hurt by high oil prices; that it finds itself in as tough a spot as Canadians as prices escalate. That’s what we started to hear, not when retail gasoline prices were running up to record levels over the past two weeks, but when prices kept going up at the same time as the price of crude oil was going down.
A Brandon Sun editorial of April 2, 2011 (“So what’s the real cost of Bipole III?”) reports that, in his announcement of the revised estimate of $3.28 billion, Bob Brennan, president and CEO of Manitoba Hydro said he “does not like all these crazy numbers floating around...It’s just not good for us.” The editor conceded Brennan’s point and noted that “taxpayers and voters don’t much like it either.”
As the Sun editorial implies, the ‘crazy numbers’ originate with Hugh McFadyen’s Tories, so we contend that taxpayers should be annoyed with them, not Hydro.
At the end of this month (Feb. 28), Quebec’s public consultations body, the Bureau des audiences publiques sur l’environment (BAPE), is scheduled to release its report on potential environmental impacts of developing the province’s Utica Shale gas field - an area of 5,000 square kilometres of rich farmland along the St. Lawrence River basin, from Montreal to Quebec City. The Quebec government intends to table oil and gas legislation later this spring.
In a recent article in the Winnipeg Free Press entitled “Reforming the Jurassic Crown” (Feb 26), law professor Bryan Schwartz launches an unwarranted assault on Manitoba Hydro by means of an argument that is intellectually bankrupt. Despite the subterfuge and without an outright clarion call to action, his argument could be used to lay the seeds for a rationale for a future government to privatize an outstandingly successful publicly owned corporation. This is in keeping with a long-standing endeavour on the part of some business interests and political circles to privatize Hydro.
The debate over the future of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. has been limited to the issue of which private interests should control the potash industry in Saskatchewan. There has been little to no discussion of the most important issue: who should own and control the economic rent received from the extraction and use of Saskatchewan’s natural resources?
Last month the Winnipeg Free Press published a full page of criticism regarding the decision to run the Bipole III transmission line down the West Side of Lake Winnipeg. The critique consists of two parts, namely, an open letter by 18 retired engineers titled, “Engineers united on east side,” and an article by Jim Collinson, “’All or nothing’ wrong approach on east side.” These articles contribute little to the discussion regarding hydroelectric development in Manitoba because they are based on narrow and out-dated ways of thinking about the issues at hand.
This paper is written as part of an ongoing project, Green Energy Project Saskatchewan. GEPS is a civil society group, established to research the conversion of Saskatchewan’s electricity grid to sustainable options by the earliest possible date.
Regina — The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Saskatchewan Office released today Transforming Saskatchewan’s Electrical Future: The Potential for Wind and Solar Power, by Mark Bigland-Pritchard, a member of Green Energy Project Saskatchewan. The report offers a practical and workable set of integrated proposals for electrical generation in the medium and long term that has the potential to transform Saskatchewan from coal-dependent laggard to a renewable energy leader.