Peter Lougheed, back in the day, advocating crazy socialistic policies. Below, Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella as seen on her Facebook page.Will Licia Corbella write another hysterical column assailing the latest proposal to destroy Alberta’s economy, pump all the oil back into the sand, send our workers home to Newfoundland and sow the earth with salt?
One would hope so, if only for the sake of consistency and decency.
Of course, the last time the overwrought Calgary Herald columnist wrote something like this – claiming NDP Leader Jack Layton “would tank our economy” – there was a federal election campaign underway and the Alberta media was campaigning openly for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
The latest version of the proposal to wreak what Ms. Corbella called a “frightening, destabilizing, impoverishing scenario” has now been made by Peter Lougheed, the revered former Conservative premier of Alberta.
In an interview in Ms. Corbella’s own paper on Tuesday, the 82-year-old Mr. Lougheed called for two of the three ideas Mr. Layton proposed during the election campaign that prompted the columnist’s apocalyptic screed. To wit: higher corporate taxes and orderly development of the Athabasca oilsands. Mr. Lougheed appears to have left out a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions in the carbon-intensive oilsands.
Layton’s (and Lougheed’s) proposed tax increases “would be devastating to Canada’s fragile economic recovery,” Ms. Corbella hyperventilated back in the day. Developing the oilsands in an orderly fashion, she added then, “will devastate Alberta.”
Well, here’s what Alberta’s most successful Conservative premier, the one generally credited with keeping this province on the path to prosperity, had to say: “The decline in natural-gas revenues has been dramatic and the degree to which we are dependent on oil revenues, it is time for us to consider an increase in corporate and personal tax.” (Emphasis added.)
Mr. Lougheed also called for Alberta, in the words of the Herald’s reporter, to “take steps now to avoid the overheated economy that made Alberta a high-cost place to do business in the boom of the mid-2000s. … That could be done by moving to ‘orderly,’ phased-in development of the oilsands, he said.”
“No more than two projects should be underway at the same time, one in the early stage and one in the later stage and I think that’s very manageable,” Mr. Lougheed, who was premier from 1971 to 1985, told the Herald. And if the oil companies didn’t like that, he added, “we are the owner and we have the mandate to do that.”
The former premier also sensibly advocated processing as much bitumen as possible within our borders, and not shipping jobs and revenue to the United States.
Mind you, in the Herald’s defence, the way Mr. Lougheed carried on as premier – building hospitals, buying airlines to keep jobs in Alberta and saving money from the oilpatch for the people of Alberta instead of pissing it away on tax breaks and record-low royalties for industry – he might as well have been a New Democrat!
Indeed, Mr. Lougheed was the last Conservative premier of this province to behave like a grownup on economic policy. Every one of the rest of them have merely been coasting on his reputation as a builder, not a wrecker. So where did all that money go?
Mr. Lougheed, in fact, did pretty much what the NDP advocates nowadays, and Alberta is a better place for it.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Herald or any other Alberta media operation to admit the obvious – that our beloved former Conservative premier and the leader of the federal NDP are advocating pretty much the same thing when it comes to developing the oilpatch. That was then, after all, and this is now.
What’s more, don’t expect the Alberta media, the Harper government or the government of Alberta to pay any more attention to Peter Lougheed’s suggestions than they do to Jack Layton’s.
The only way we’ll get sane policies in the oilsands is by electing politicians who think like Mr. Lougheed. And nowadays they’re not Conservatives.
This post also appears on rabble.ca.
Actually, Layton was parroting ideas that Lougheed has espoused for many years, not the other way round as you suggest.
Lougheed thoroughly criticized Ralph Klein for failing to curb growth of the Tar Sands, thereby overheating the Alberta economy and leaving it woefully vulnerable to inevitable boom/bust cycles. Like every other sensible person he also called for higher royalties and taxes.
If you think Laughing Jack came up with that, think again (although I'm sure he would gladly claim the credit).
Still waiting for Albertans to wake up and realize that they're trying to get government services which are at par with what the rest of the country gets without paying a sales tax like everyone else does!
I'm not holding my breath on that one…
Lougheed was the last premier of this province. Since then we have had a string of corporate lackeys that have caused enormous damage to the economy and future opportunities for Alberta. The conservative party has moved so far to the right in the last 30 years that now only a miracle could bring back some common sense and good decision making. They are waiting for the invisible hand of the market to resolve the problems. In my dictionary there is a word for this, it is Lunacy. The scary part is that the supply of these extremists seems to be strong and steady.