Kyoto....could this be dejavu all over again????
This from the Nov 1, 1980 issue of The Alberta Report:
The budget: a political payoff venting an unbridled hatred
by Ted Byfield
PEOPLE rarely collect mementoes of pivotal historic events. We may, for instance, treasure a copy of the newspaper that was published on V-E Day when the war in Europe ended, but we did not keep the paper that recorded the Battles of Alamein or Stalingrad when the outcome of the war was actually decided. Few kept papers from those fateful October days in 1929 when the worst depression of the century got under way. And the first flight of the Wright Brothers became barely a squib in the back of the New York Times. Yet, if we had thought to keep such things at the time, they would have been much valued later. For this reason we would be wise to keep copies of the Alberta papers from last week. History will one day record that it was on Tuesday, October 28, 1980, that a government of Canada by act of deliberate policy tried to destroy the prosperity of the one section of the country that had escaped the recession and offered the best hope for the whole nation's future. At the same time it indentured the country to the Middle East's oil producers and brought its own oil industry to a catastrophic halt. Historians will be hard pressed to find anywhere an act of government so irresponsible, so vindictive and so insane as that which was produced last week by Mr. Trudeau and his thugs at Ottawa. So save the papers. You will show them one day to your grandchildren.
What a calamitous year it has been. Think back to only last November. At that time the final touches were being put on an oil agreement between the then Conservative government of Canada and that of Alberta. Had that agreement been allowed to stand, consider what the situation would have been today. The Cold Lake and Alsands plants would have been going forward at full throttle. Exploration would have been proceeding on the whole northern and eastern rim of the continent. The pipeline construction would have been under way as would the exploration of the further reaches of the Deep Basin which hold such promise. Oil rig operators would have been desperate for men. Investment capital, reaching across the whole West, would have been opening new jobs and new opportunities. Billions of dollars in equipment orders would have been streaming forth to central Canadian plants, and our provinces would have been working hand in hand with the federal government towards a goal which everyone would have clearly understood--oil self-sufficiency by 1990. All that could have been.
But it was rejected by the voters of Ontario as "incompetent" policy. Instead they have wished a pestilence upon us all. They preferred government by thugs because the thugs said they would continue to supply the cheapest gasoline in the world. They voted back into power the rump of the old Liberal government which every respectable Liberal politician had long since abandoned because it was starting to smell. These sinister people--the devious Coutts, the malevolent Pitfield, the crafty Goldfarb, the turncoat Argue, the sycophantic Olson, the fevered Lalonde, the bilious MacEachen, the preposterous Axworthy--these now run the country, and what a job they're making of it. Investment capital pours across the border to the U.S. The oil rigs follow, those that can make it, because 10% of the drilling contractors are said to be going broke through lack of work. Hiring comes to a stop at Calgary because the explorers have lost all confidence in government. Dome Petroleum, discoverer of the Beaufort, entrepreneur of the Deep Basin and one of Canada's top two home-grown oil companies, watches its stock crash down as the thugs advance "Canadianism" in the oil patch. Instead we have the loathsome "Petrocan" spreading its bureaucratic fat all over downtown Calgary, bringing to the oil industry all the notable efficiencies of the post office. Development stops on the tar sands plants. We buy sludge in Mexico at top prices while our own low-grade plants cut down production for lack of customers. Our consumption of oil soars ever higher while that of every other industrialized country in the world goes down. More and more we enthrall ourselves to the rapacious Arab and Mr. Lalonde hastens to explain that all this represents "sound energy policy." And if we can't bring ourselves to believe him, Mr. Goldfarb will explain it for him with our money.
Why have they done this to us? Why have they made Tuesday, October 28, into the blackest day in Alberta history? There are, I believe, two reasons.
First, they must at all costs stay in power. Power comes from Ontario and Quebec. The purpose of the budget was simply to pay off Ontario and Quebec at the expense of the western provinces. But beyond this there is another reason, one that seethes in the heart of Pierre Trudeau. People say that he is indifferent to western Canada, and this may once have been true. I think it is true no longer. He now has a keen feeling about us because we have so long and so decisively told him that we want neither him nor the gang of toadies around him. For this he now hates us, and passionately. It is a hatred that runs to the roots of the man's being. It is the hatred of the socialist for the individualist, the cold fear of the high-born for the self-made, the aversion of the theorist for the pragmatist, the derision of the urbanist for the peasant, the disdain of the intellectual for the uncouth, the contempt of the Gaul for the Slav. All these hatreds have helped to dictate the posture of the Trudeau government towards the West, and on Tuesday, the 28th of October, they were paraded before the nation in the form of public policy. |
