Of course they are, which is why it doesn’t make a lot of sense that they don’t seem to care about their increasing emissions (China is now the leader in C02 emissions, taking the lead from the US).
I think I was trying to agree with you and expand on your idea. 
Don’t make us have to kick you out of here. 
Because we do?
The world is not going to be made better off by keeping brown and yellow people poor, it’s going to be made better off by coming up with solutions to our problems. Energy use and its effects can be mitigated and controlled.
[QUOTE=Dread Pirate Jimbo]
One of the strongest advocates for much tighter regulation on foreign investment during Trudeau’s first term in office was an Edmonton Liberal by the name of Mel Hurtig.
[/QUOTE]
Mel Hurtig is a xenophobe and a fool, and if he said the sky was blue, I’d start to question my own eyesight.
Canadians don’t seem to complain when OUR companies buy stuff in other countries, as indeed they do. The country, for all that people like Mel Hurtig have been screaming about the inevitable doom that foreign investment and free trade would cause for the last forty years, remains sovereign and as economically stable and productive as pretty much any on the planet.
I honestly don’t know what you’re arguing about here. 
It’s up to other countries to look after their own foreign ownership.
You seem to be missing the point of this discussion about foreign ownership in Canada - even if our government wanted to impose stringent controls on the energy sector, it is made much more difficult because the companies exploiting the oil patch are mostly NOT Canadian owned. The Alberta government under Ed Stelmach took a run at increasing the royalties paid by the oil companies involved in the oilpatch a few years ago - it lasted about 30 seconds before he folded.
If memory serves (and I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong), close to 10% of our GDP gets sent out of country to foreign investors. Forty percent to two thirds (depending on whose stats you believe) of the oil patch is owned by foreign interests, which is why Alberta (and the Federal government) receive cents on the dollar for our oil—the famous “Bitumen Bubble”—which directly impacts taxes and prosperity in our nation. That’s a percentage of resource ownership that is more in line with a Third World country, not a member of the G-8. Hurtig may be a one-trick pony who has had this particular burr up his butt for decades, but that doesn’t mean his point is wrong. Our current economic prosperity is directly tied to interests outside of our nation and that is troubling, even if it doesn’t mean that the sky is falling at this exact moment.
I remember that. What is it about foreign oil companies that they could beat it down so quickly and thoroughly? I don’t think threatening to pack up and leave would be a realistic option for them.
I wondered about that, too - they threatened to take their ball and go home, but if they pull out of the oilsands, they lose all that money, too.
This begs the question. Where’s the evidence that it was foreign ownership that caused Stelmach to fail to increase oil royalties? Why would a Canadian company be any less resistant?
I can’t help but notice that, quite unsurprisingly, what’s being defined as “Foreign owned” includes companies that are in fact headquartered and operated out of Canada; Suncor, for instance, is one of the companies claimed to be “foreign owned” but while some of its shareholders may not be Canadian, the company is a Canadian corporation, operating largely in Canada, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and paying Canadian taxes.
Rickjay, I think it goes like this:
Foreign ownership is bad because, being foreign, they can more easily leave and go to another country. This gives them more leverage.
One might then reply “Let them leave, then, if they don’t accept the regulations”.
The response to which is likely: “But then we wouldn’t benefit from the investment they’ve made here because they’d pull it out.”
See, we don’t want to let foreigner investors’ capital in because they might threaten to pull out and then what would we do?!
Foreigners putting investments in Canada is good.
Foreigners owning Canadian companies is bad.
How one could setup a situation where Canada gets foreigners’ investment without foreigners owning Canadian companies, I am not quite sure.
Sorry about double post.
Emphasis mine.
Care to explain the causal link between foreign ownership and (according to you) low royalties?
As to this, I don’t even understand what this means. (It’s also a suspiciously round number, but never mind that.) What does it means that “10% of our GDP gets sent out of country?” Canada’s GDP is by definition the value of things made in Canada, which is, by the way, just short of $2 trillion a year. So you could mean any number of things; that we export some $200 billion of goods and services a year, that $200 billion of profit in Canada is technically owned by a non-Canadian investor, that $200 billion actually leaves the country every year in monetary instruments, or any number of things, some of which may be bad and some of which would actually be good. Could you explain what precisely this means?
That isn’t what the term “Bitumen Bubble” means at all. Not even close, in fact.
The government of Alberta sets royalty rates. Those rates apply to all mineral rights owned by the Crown in right of Alberta and leased out to development companies. The rates don’t vary depending on the ownership of the development company. If rates are too low, it’s up to the government of Alberta to raise them.
And, since natural resources are owned by the province, not the federal government, I don’t understand the suggestion that foreign ownership is restricting federal oil revenues. It doesn’t matter who is developing the resource, domestic or foreign - royalties are only paid to the province.
It’s very big of you to admit when you don’t understand something. Kudos to you!
Anyway, to more adequately answer your question, I got some of my off-the-top-of-my-head details and terminology wrong. Mea culpa. From this cite, “In 1995, when the National Income was $558 billion, investment income payments to foreigners totalled $49 billion.” That’s about 8.8%. If you want to call me a liar over 1.2%, feel free.
Did I just accidentally wander into a thread on Monty Python’s Argument Clinic? I believe the correct response is, “Yes it is.”
I win the thread!
In conclusion, aside from nitpicking, you’re getting away from my initial point, which was that Trudeau sucked harder than a two dollar hooker. Hope this clears things up for you.
The focus of our discussion has been on high foreign ownership in the oilsands - my understanding is that the “bitumen bubble” is caused by Alberta receiving lower prices for its oilsands bitumen than world prices because we ship our Western Canadian Select bitumen to the US to be processed to West Texas Intermediate crude oil standards. Alberta has gone from 40 to 19 refineries since 1989; it appears to me that American companies want to ship their product to the US to be refined, so that’s what happens.
What is your understanding of what the “bitumen bubble” is?
I’m not sure where restriction on federal oil revenues comes into the discussion; my point was just that it is more difficult to impose environmental regulations on the oilsands because of the large foreign ownership.
That said, let’s not forget that the federal government gets their taste of the oil & gas industry revenues, too (at a 15% net rate as of 2012).
With respect to the feds, I wasn’t responding to your post, Cat, but to Dread Pirate Jimbo’s:
[QUOTE=Dread Pirate Jimbo]
which is why Alberta (and the Federal government) receive cents on the dollar for our oil
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t understand the point he was making, since the feds don’t get any royalty revenues from mineral extraction in the provinces.
Sure, the feds get tax revenue from the oilpatch, but that tax revenue doesn’t link in any way to whether it’s a foreign company: if it’s revenue earned in Canada, it’s subject to federal tax; doesn’t matter if the company is wholly-owned Canadian, wholly-owned US, or any other mixture. If the income is earned here, the feds tax it. So that seems irrelevant to the discussion.
[QUOTE=Cat Whisperer]
my point was just that it is more difficult to impose environmental regulations on the oilsands because of the large foreign ownership.
[/QUOTE]
Why?
And in other news, Jon Ryan of Regina is about to become the first Saskatchewanian (and Reginan) to play in the Superbowl!
Regina’s Jon Ryan Super Bowl bound
Good luck, Jon!
Ah, I gotcha.
Because we don’t have the same sticks we can use on foreign companies as we can use on Canadian companies, in my opinion. Do you disagree? Why not?
He folded because money started leaving Alberta. It wasn’t just foreign owned companies. A local company can decide to lease land or operate in Alberta, Saskatchewan or BC. If it looks more attractive to invest in operations in BC, then they will do so. An international company, even if Canadian owned, can decide to put money into the oil sands, or developing a field in Nigeria. They base that upon where they will have the least risk for the best returns. If Alberta doesn’t compete with other jurisdictions, then those places will reap the reward, not Alberta. That is true no matter what part of the country, or world, oil (or anything) is produced in.
You are objectively wrong. The “Bitumen bubble” describes the difference in market price between Alberta’s oil and the benchmark oil price, West Texas intermediate, a variance that goes up and down and so affects Alberta’s revenues, negatively when there is a big spread but positively when there is not. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with foreigners owning the oilpatch; the bitumen bubble phenomenon occurs irrespective of foreign investment. It would be a phenomenon even if Canadians owned every single square inch of Alberta’s oilpatch.
The sticks that Alberta has that it can use to enforce environmental standards are laws, enacted by the province. Those laws don’t distinguish between foreign-owned and Canadian-owned companies, and foreign-owned companies don’t have any immunity from provincial laws. So the sticks are the same.
Whether a province will pass stricter or laxer environmental standards is a political question. There are at least two things that the Alberta government would likely consider: what effect would passing stricter environmental standards have directly on the oil-patch? and, how would the voters react to those standards?
On the first point, as Uzi points out, Canadian oil companies aren’t tied to Alberta, and operate under the same basic economic rules as foreign-owned companies. If they think that environmental standards are too strict, they can go elsewhere, just like foreign-owned companies. The bottom line principle is the same for all of them - maximise profits. So I doubt very much that if Alberta brought in tougher environmental standards, foreign-owned companies would pull out, and Canadian-owned ones would stay in. They would all react in the same way, to the extent the standards affect their bottom line. That effect on the oil-patch is something that any Alberta government would have to take into account.
Then there’s the effect on the voters. As you mentioned upthread, there’s a lot of Albertans whose jobs depend directly on the oilpatch; there’s a lot more whose jobs depend indirectly. If those people start to think that stricter environmental standards for oil companies will affect their jobs, how do you think they will react? That’s a reality that any Alberta government has to take into account.
So no, I don’t think that the Alberta government has more sticks it can use on domestic oil companies than it can use on foreign based companies.