Alberta Elections

[Marina Schwarz + 1,576]

Looks like the opposition is leading in the polls for now but it's just the start of the campaign. How much weight do their pro-oil promises carry?

Here's the latest I found.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

39 minutes ago, Marina Schwarz said:

Looks like the opposition is leading in the polls for now but it's just the start of the campaign. How much weight do their pro-oil promises carry?

I would not put a lot of weight on some Reuters article.  I don't think that Reuters really grasps the subtleties of Alberta politics - which themselves are being skewed by the ideas of migrants from other Provinces.  First up, Alberta has always had their own version of "Conservative Party" politics, which they called "Social Credit."  The Socreds had this fuzzy thinking that nobody understood, other than (It was not what Ottawa was doing."  OK, but remember that the NDP is not in charge in Ottawa, either - those guys are the Liberals, mostly from Quebec and Ontario. 

Second, the reality is that Alberta is not going to get any new pipeline capacity, at least not any time soon.  It is stuck with what it has.  Premier Rachel Notley recognizes this, and she (commendably) immediately leased rail tank-cars, and put in orders for apparently some additional 7,500 rail tank-cars to boot.  Remember that a Railroad oil unit train is a pipeline eight feet in diameter moving oil at 50 mph, which is not so shabby.  That the charges for moving that oil are higher than pipe is a reflection on the railroads, not on the actual hard costs.  In Canada (and most of the USA) the hauling railroad effectively has a monopoly, and the prices reflect that. 

Promising the scrapping of "carbon tax" projects in the tax code is going nowhere, simply because Ottawa will jam a carbon tax default down the throats of Albertans if they do not impose their own version.  You are getting into the religion of the Left, and local control would go out the window.  If Alberta has its own tax, then at least it can control the structuring of the tax and how the money is redistributed.  If you let Ottawa do it, you already know it will end up swallowed up into the morphing tax expansions there.  In Canada, taxes are on the march - the real reason "hot capital" investment has fled, back to the USA.  

Finally, foreign capital from China tends to flow into real estate, with the result that housing units are taken off the market and the remaining units end up getting bid into the stratosphere, with lots of Canadians outbid and becoming permanent renters  (and in units too small for their families, another big problem).  I don't see the Notley Alberta NDP government encouraging Chinese investment in Calgary real estate, and the locals probably would agree. In Canada, as in Chicago, all politics is local!