Owning tracks, not the trains

Dear Editor: Today, the geopolitical realities for megaresource projects are more jurisdictional than anything else. The private sector has been shrinking over the years, corporate oil-giants like Chevron and Exxon have already sold out to much larger Chinese, Norwegian, Malaysian and even Polish state-owned multinational resource companies that now operate in Canada’s resource sector.

If Ottawa’s ownership of the Trans Mountain pipeline raises memories of Petro Canada, remember that Petro Canada became Canada’s second-largest oil company. It was created in 1975 to exert more sovereign ownership over Canada’s strategic energy resource, after the 1973 OPEC oil crisis.

The private sector strongly protested the National Energy Program (NEP) that created Petro Canada which purchased, at market value, any foreign-owned Canadian oil companies that came up for sale.

Hostilities from both the Alberta government and American-backed oil companies grew. But, in spite of their anger by the mid-1980s Petro Canada was the fifthlargest company in Canada, with 6,000 employees across the country. It was the country’s third-largest gasoline provider with a nationwide chain of service stations.

Brian Mulroney’s 1984 majority victory was built, in part, on promising westernfree trading continentalists, which later became Reform and Wildrose parties; he would sell off Petro Canada and by 1987 Mulroney had begun a slow process of privatization. By then Petro Canada had acquired more than $10 billion in assets.

By 1990, rapid expansion-created liquidity problems. In 1991, Petro Canada and Suncor merged, the government retained 40 per cent ownership of the new company; however, the process of selling off assets to balance budgets begun first by Mulroney and was continued by Finance Minister Paul Martin in 1996 and completed in 2004 by Finance Minister Ralph Goodale.

Was it worth it? Canada enjoyed two decades of continuous revenue. Petro Canada employed 6,000 highly-skill Canadians, fostering a globally-recognized talent pool of Canadian technical resource expertise and gave policy-makers of all stripes better latitude over Canada’s strategic resource to ensure more benefits went to Canadians. And in the end, we realized $2.6 billion net cash from the final sale.

The Trans Mountain pipeline compared to Petro Canada is like owning the tracks, not the train.

Jon Peter Christoff West Kelowna