Connected to a political party

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 Dear Editor: Regarding electoral reform, in his interview, Doug Findlater commented that he saw proportional representation as “Senators, people appointed by their parties…” (Daily Courier, July 30).

Findlater didn’t notice that along with proportional representation, our current system has candidates nominated by their party. Other than independent candidates, all are connected to a party. When we vote for a candidate, we are also voting for the party.

PR will let us vote directly for a local MLA and a regional MLA based on proportionality. Check Appendix A,B and C (pages 67-74) in the Attorney General’s report on electoral reform. It is the voters; you, me and Findlater who will elect the MLAs. It’s all there in the report. Ron Robinson

Nelson