In offering to give Alberta’s premier a million dollar investment in the oilpatch in return for her resignation, O’Leary declared both what he and his class stand for — and, more importantly, what they think of democracy.
What they stand for is the greedy, reflexive urge to run everything to the financial advantage of the one per cent. As for society at large — and especially for those who wonder why there’s so much month left at the end of their money — a Great White shark has more social conscience than O’Leary and his ilk.
As Premier Rachel Notley found out, democracy only works for people like O’Leary when it joins hands with plutocrats for a whirl around the Golden Calf. Kevin O’Leary has simply morphed into a human piggy bank. He imagines that, because he is full of coin, he is also full of wisdom. He’s certainly full of something.
Now there’s talk of a run at the Conservative leadership. In a way, O’Leary is the perfect candidate to replace Stephen Harper. They’re both Tin Men without hearts lurching down the Yellow Brick Road towards an oily Oz that has disappeared. The ‘socialists’, you see, have gotten over the wall.
Like some illegitimate spawn of Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump, this baby blowhard is giving the middle finger to the people of Alberta. O’Leary apparently has forgotten that bloviating is for billionaires. Millionaires only get to bitch, no matter what puffery the Report on Business Magazine produces about them. Market price for a newly elected majority premier, according to the O’Leary Exchange? A measly million-dollar investment. O’Leary’s accidental self-revelation: priceless.
When dealing with crass capitalists with a yen for the limelight, it is a never-ending job separating the pepper from the fly shit. In the case of Kevin O’Leary, he doesn’t seem to realize that if his rant on Power and Politics skewered anyone, it was his own class and political party. Permit me to remind him of some inconvenient facts:
For now, Rachel Notley may indeed feel like the captain of the Titanic, nursing the largest deficit in Alberta history. But it was Skipper Prentice and his Tory predecessors who strayed into the icefield in the first place, eventually hitting the Big Berg.
Has Kevin forgotten that it was Premier Prentice who warned Albertans before the last provincial election that the province was facing a $7 billion shortfall in the budget after eons of Tories calling all the shots? The arse was out of the oil market long before Ms. Notley appeared on the scene.
In fact, all of Alberta’s fundamental problems were created over decades of PC leadership by a bunch of self-styled market messiahs who gave away most of the treasure of the tar sands to foreign corporations — while severely under-taxing them. They virtually ignored the people’s stake in their own energy resources, while fouling other, more precious public commodities, like fresh water.
Nor did these oil-junkies, who passed themselves off as solid fiscal managers, ever ask the most basic “what if” questions about their economic stewardship of non-renewables.
What if cheaper alternatives to tar sands oil could be found — like improved solar? What if new oil and gas supplies were to be discovered in the U.S. using new technologies — like fracking? What if the Saudis drove down the world price of oil to preserve their market share from the threat of plentiful but more expensive crude?
Why would Riyadh eternally support $100-plus oil prices to finance the competition? Remember, they’re still profitable at $15 a barrel. The answer should be obvious — even to Kevin. So much for prudent fiscal management.
Knowing how much Kevin likes numbers, here are a few for him to chew on. Both Norway and Alberta have sovereign wealth funds from sales of their non-renewable energy resources. Norway’s fund — the largest in the world — holds over a trillion dollars. In Alberta, the fund was valued at $17.9 billion in 2014. Chump change.
The main difference between the two approaches and their staggeringly different outcomes is that Norway taxed oil companies at a rate that expressed the public ownership of the resource. Oslo also salted away 100 per cent of the government’s share of revenues from North Sea oil.
Finally, the Norwegian government prohibited investing any of the fund in the domestic economy. Now, a country of five million people owns more than one per cent of all stocks and bonds in the entire world.
By comparison, Alberta gave away the farm to the same oil interests. While it’s true Alberta is a province, not a country like Norway, and therefore lacked full control of tax policy, Wild Rose country went from putting aside 30 per cent of oil revenues for future generations under Premier Peter Lougheed to saving virtually nothing for decades. Now that the fat royalties and dividends are gone, the foolishness of that approach ought to be obvious.
Using O’Leary’s standards, the guy with the biggest bank account is the smartest dude. Which means that Norway wins because it both got North Sea oil developed, and it exacted the public’s fair share, which it refused to merge into general revenues. Alberta and Canada caved in to energy investment at any price, blew the windfall, and now have to face the music. With oil dipping below $30 a barrel, it might be a dirge.
So let’s not forget the real authors of this mess. O’Leary would have you believe that Alberta now has catastrophic political leadership. What he actually means is the free lunch for Big Business is over.
The NDP might have delivered a $5 billion deficit budget, replete with new taxes — but it was past Conservative governments which made both the deficit and the tax hikes inevitable. They were put in charge of massive amounts of money and mismanaged it tragically.
It’s ludicrous for O’Leary to now complain that Rachel Notley is the wrong steward for what he calls Canada’s most important resource. The only people who believe that are the ones whose heads are “for rent, unfurnished”, as the saying goes.
There is no surprise in any of this. O’Leary, like Harper, has always carried a brief for Big Business. But it should be remembered what the corporate sector did with all those big, fat tax cuts given to them by both Alberta and the former Harper government, making this country the cheapest place in the world for Big Oil to operate.
Did they invest them in Canada? Did they hire new workers? It would be nice to think so. But according to former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, they did the opposite. They hoarded the cash windfall like misers trying to keep the relatives from their stash. They sat on a pile of “dead” money — estimated to be pushing $650 billion. They did what they always do, from the bankers who fiddled the Libor rate to Ken Lay at Enron. They looked out for themselves.
Those who confuse that with cleverness ought to forget about politics — and stick to the vulture funds.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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