Fair Share??

[mustardman]

This could cause Exxon's profits to tumble from $47 Billion in 2006 to $46.9 Billion .

[wilagro]

ivbinconned: Thank gawd our Premier (not yours), took decisive action regarding royalties...not as much as I would like to have seen though.

If the oil companies move to Saskatchewan, I am sure that you will be out there welcoming them with open arms and letting them steal you blind as Ralph Klein did in Alberta. WE wouldn't have had near the problem in determining a fair royalty return if Getty and Ralph had not stacked the deck in favour of the oil companies in the first place.

Ralph Klein and his gang cost us a mint in more ways than you can imagine. Stelmach is doing something FOR Albertans instead of TO Albertans. What a refreshing change.

[ivbinconned]

Royalty decision all about politics
Stelmach seeks support, but most Tory voters not interested in making 'Big Oil' pay
Lorne Gunter, Freelance
Published: 2:47 am
The first indication I had that Premier Ed Stelmach's Thursday royalty announcement was going to be as atrocious as it was -- and it was just about as atrocious as it could be -- came Wednesday when a source inside the government boasted to me "It's going to be politically popular, but the oil companies are going to hate it!"

That's something to be proud of? Knowing, deliberately angering the province's biggest industry purely for the sake of political gain?

And that is all Thursday's announcement was all about -- politics. It was not about being fair to both Albertans and the energy companies -- the resource owners and the extractors. It was not about planning for the future or ensuring a legacy for our children and grandchildren, as the premier claimed.

And it certainly wasn't about "stability and predictability," even though the premier claimed at least a dozen times that that was his goal.

By breaking existing royalty deals with Alberta's two largest oilsands companies -- Syncrude and Suncor -- Stelmach has shown his government is unreliable, that even after companies have invested tens of billions under signed-and-sealed investment contracts, the Tories are willing to go back on their word whenever it suits them.

Thursday's ill-advised, unnecessary, investment-repelling cash grab was purely and simply about saving the political skin of a floundering, indecisive, tin-eared politician.

And in the end, the crew around Stelmach couldn't even get the politics right.

The general mood in Alberta has shifted since the royalty review panel released its report in mid-September.

After the province's energy companies started showing how the recommended royalty gouge would hurt their bottom lines and provoke them to move jobs and billions in investments elsewhere, many Albertans (though not all) lost their initial zeal to make "Big Oil" pay and pay and pay.

This is, I would guess, especially true among people inclined to vote for, donate to and work on behalf of Tory candidates.

Just as the premier earlier this year badly misjudged the enthusiasm within his party for rent controls, he has also misjudged the support his new high royalties will garner among bedrock Conservatives.

A turnoff to Tory voters?

After having built expectations so high of new riches in the public trough, Stelmach had to agree to raise royalties. Still, by raising them as much has he has -- almost as far as the poorly crafted royalty panel report recommended -- he will very likely turn off tens of thousands of Tory voters, without winning over enough Liberal and NDP vote to compensate.

That's especially bad news for Tory re-election hopes since Tory seat totals fluctuate up and down based not on increases and decreases in opposition party vote totals. (The Liberals, for example, have lost popular votes in each of the last three elections.) Rather, Tory success depends on convincing their own base to come out and vote rather than sitting on their hands.

Unfortunately, Thursday's assault on the province's principal employer and the source of its current prosperity will do nothing to marshal Tories to get out and cast ballots. Energy investors, oil and gas executives, oil service entrepreneurs and even rig workers are disproportionately Tory, and since yesterday's announcement will disproportionately harm their livelihoods they are likely to stay home in droves at the next election.

[wilagro]

Ivbinconned: Lorne Gunter is so full of it most of the time. All of the neighbours that I have spoken to, agree with Stelmach and believe that his plan will work just fine. Such a relief to have that ignorant Ralph Klein OUT (but unfortunately not forgotten), and a sensible man as Premier.

The oil pool that I live over is 3/4 gone and what did we get out of it...practically nothing...but boy did they ever screw up the highways. Costs a fortune to repair them and the wear and tear is constant.

BIG OIL should pay BIG royalties.

[ivbinconned]

Wilagrow...if you owned the mineral rights on your land, would you rlease your claim to the government for the benifit of the government to do with as it pleases??

Render not unto Caesar

Terence Corcoran
Financial Post


Friday, October 05, 2007


Two thousand years ago, the Roman emperor Tiberius, no friend of freedom and under whose reign Jesus Christ was executed, declared the Roman state to be exclusive owner of all mineral rights. Since around that time, just about every government through history has found it convenient to seize ownership of underground mineral rights and extract fat "royalties."

The idea of government ownership of mineral rights -- gold, copper, coal, oil, gas, etc. -- is today so entrenched it is beyond question, even among the extraction industries who pay the royalties. "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," as Jesus Christ reportedly said before Caesar's underlings orchestrated his execution. Today in Canada, rendering unto Caesar means rendering unto the emperor of Alberta new royalties that would pull another $2-billion into government coffers.

Modern Caesars, of course, have reworked the language, so that the rendering is now supposedly done onto "the people," the citizens and voters for whom the government claims to act as beneficial surrogate. When the Alberta Royalty Review Panel last month recommended a new royalty regime for Alberta oil and gas, it said the resources "belong to the people" and the people are not getting a "fair share" of revenue from their mineral rights.

The review panel's report played this angle to the hilt. Royalties, it claimed, are different from taxes. "When a government designs a tax system, it must justify every dollar or fraction of a dollar it takes away from wage earners and business, because that money belongs to the people who earned it. Alberta's natural resources belong to Albertans, and this is a different proposition. The design of a royalty and tax system for energy resources therefore must justify every dollar that does not go to the owners."

Even Tiberius could have used these guys. So now "every dollar" of revenue from mineral resources belongs to Caesar, and every dollar that Caesar doesn't get must be justified.

Not to make too sensational a point about this, but we have over the centuries moved from Caesarism to communism in resource ownership. It need not be this way. In fact, it isn't always this way, even in Alberta. Private owners, under freehold, own almost 9% of mineral rights in the province. These owners render nothing onto Caesar, although they do pay a special freehold tax.

These freehold lands, the result of the evolution of land allocation through Canadian history, control their own mineral properties. Some freehold land is owned by major corporations, including EnCana and Imperial Oil. Parts of Imperial Oil's original Leduc find were on freehold land that the government had no control over. The government received no royalty payments.

Alberta historian and author James Gray, in his book Troublemaker!, writes that after Imperial found oil at Leduc in 1947, "the lucky farmers who had their oil rights were able to set themselves up for life with the cash bonuses and royalties they got from the oil companies. Across the road, their neighbours on land for which the government retained the mineral rights were lucky to get a few hundred dollars compensation for the damage done by a drilling site on their land."

In earlier days when Canadian governments granted land to homesteaders and others, including the CPR, the owners assumed both surface rights and sub-surface rights. Over time, in Alberta, the government came to control 81% of mineral rights (Ottawa and native bands control the remainder). But governments did not come to own resources by any natural right. They took it -- through legislation, federal-provincial agreement and other means.

Today only 3% of Alberta's oilsands mineral rights are owned by freeholder. If private owners owned 100% of the oilsands, the scale and form of development might today be much different. How different is impossible to say. Without governments trying to manage and direct things, there might be a lot less of it, or maybe a lot more development but through smaller-scale projects.

Under freehold, royalty payments-- if the rights were owned by other than the developer -- would get negotiated on a case-by-case basis. How and if royalties were paid would be a private matter, determined by contract and property rights. It happens all the time in any business and property development. There's no Caesar sitting by claiming ownership and demanding payment.

Public ownership and royalties are a pretext for taxation and political control. The government of Alberta collects no royalties from farmers who grow grains, the raw material for ethanol, on surface land. But the province arbitrarily demands royalties from energy firms that produce oil, the raw material for gasoline, from land underneath the grain field.

The greater sham, however, is the claim of the Alberta review panel that higher royalties are needed to raise the "people's share" of underground mineral resources. On the contrary, the plan will reduce the people's share. If new royalties drive away investment -- which even the panel agrees will happen -- the lost investment and spending -- in the tens of billions of dollars -- will be much greater than the increased royalties collected by government.

Contrary to the review panel's fraudulent claim that "the people" will win, the fact is that the people will lose and the winner will be Caesar.

© National Post 2007

[ivbinconned]

Stelmach at mercy of voters, oilpatch
Don Braid, Calgary Herald
Published: Saturday, October 27, 2007
When a premier rides down the middle of the road, the people watching might throw flowers, but they could also lob pies.

Premier Ed Stelmach is wide open to both greetings as he hits the open highway in his political convertible, a nakedly vulnerable leader through his own choice.

The farmer from Lamont has upended the province with his royalty policy. He did it against the advice of many Tories who have kept this party in office since 1971.


Stelmach has a truly curious habit of doing things backwards.

With no public mandate as premier, he could have postponed the royalty review until an election was safely won, as Peter Lougheed did in 1972.

Lougheed had four years left on his mandate when he began his own royalty upheaval. There was plenty of time to iron out kinks and recover from disasters.

Stelmach decided to do the royalty fix first. Now his future is at the mercy of voter and industry reaction.

This is risk-taking on a scale that would terrify a high-wire artist at Cirque du Soleil. The gamble could destroy Ed Stelmach by next spring, when his party holds its next convention.

This is the same party, remember, that dumped Ralph Klein, the longest-serving and most popular premier in modern Canadian history.

In 1992 these same Tories started an internal campaign against Premier Don Getty. He was gone in little more than a year.

A party that dumps premiers who win majority governments will tear Ed Stelmach apart in a heartbeat.

He has governed on sufferance so far because the amiable Alberta public was ready to give him a chance.

Sensing this, his caucus retreated into watchful, nervous silence while Stelmach took the government down untracked paths.

But if the public rejects the royalty policy, Stelmach will have no fallback authority.

He was third pick to lead a government still packed with Ralph Klein's friends and fans. The royalty battle was his idea alone. Some leadership candidates didn't think it was the big issue Stelmach insists he heard about so often.

On Day One of reaction to the policy, catastrophe was at least averted in the stock market. Hence the deep shudder of relief in the premier's office.

The overall business estimates, from expert companies like FirstEnergy Capital, were quite positive. Nobody is calling for a wholesale flight of capital.

Ominously, though, FirstEnergy also concluded: "Big Oil Wins, Little Oil Loses."

"Economics will be challenged for both natural gas and oil projects . . . You're a technically proficient geoscientist or engineer and want to be an entrepreneur in Alberta? Go somewhere else."

In the small oil and gas sector, a solid core of Tory support, boiling anger was building even before the policy came out.

For weeks I've been in contact with Lee Baker, a sincere and honest small player in the patch.

He concluded Friday that although his deep gas well might survive, "our high-volume project in northern Alberta is hit hard. We will likely cancel a six-well project for the area."

Mark Rennenberg, a Calgary consultant, sent a bitter e-mail to Stelmach Friday.

"I am one of the 'little people' in this province who go to their job everyday and work hard to earn a living," Rennenberg told the premier.

"After today, I will not be supporting the Progressive Conservative party of Alberta. And I doubt that I ever will again." Today Ed Stelmach totters on his own high wire with political safety a misty distance ahead. Mysteriously, he doesn't even seem aware of the long fall below.

[wilagro]

Ivbinconned: Cry me a river!!! Your articles aren't worth the paper they are written on. Sore losers who made a mint off of stupid Getty and Klein policies will now PAY for their **** of the land and its resources.

Most of the people I talk to say..."go gittum Ed", "thank gawd we have a Premier with guts."

In an old Edmonton Journal many moons ago, there was an article which revealed that between 1/4 and 1/3 of Ralph's cabinet had connections to the resource industries (primarily oil, natural gas or timber). It also detailed SOME of the ex-politicos and former government employees who "found" jobs with the resource extraction industries AFTER they left government.

Darn, I wish now that I had saved it.

So what do you say to that? Do you think that government policies are not shaped by self-interest? Is that the reason the oil companies got such a sweetheart deal in the past?

[ivbinconned]

I will gladly answer that!!! When you stop ignoring what I ask you.

"Wilagrow...if you owned the mineral rights on your land, would you release your claim, giving it to the government, for the benifit of the "government" to do with as it pleases??"

And, as you well know, I have NEVER been a defender of Ralph Klein...the liberal.

[wilagro]

ivbinconned: ...if you owned the mineral rights on your land, would you release your claim, giving it to the government, for the benifit (benefit) of government" to do with as it pleases??"

The answer is NO. Government has laws however, that say that they can expropriate...so we as individuals have limited control.

However, your question is moot as WE as individual Albertans, have not owned the mineral rights since 1905...same as Saskatchewan. The few people in this area with mineral rights inherited land owned before 1905. When oil companies buy a Crown lease, they don't OWN the mineral rights either, only the right to the use of the lease and extract the named resources. However, the government has the final say...the lease has limitations.

[coppertop]

I've been too busy to check out this site for a few days, but this post intrigues me. As Ivebin says my sons have been very busy and fortunate working in the resource industry. One will remain busy, but the other has already been advised that some of his winter work program is being put on HOLD. My son's and I do not agree on the royalty issue, in fact, we have agreed to put the subject in the PARKING LOT when in each other's company.

The Premier got handed a mess as far as royalties go from Ralph, and he had the guts to order the royalty review, make it public and act on it.
Stocks haven't tumbled into the toilet, in fact, some, including the company my #2 son consults for have increased.
There was a downturn in the drilling industry long before this issue arose, rigs have been sitting idle all year, but it is convenient to now blame Ed.

To put it plain and simple, I am a lot more concerned about the future of the cattle producers in our Province than I am in the fallout from the new royalties.

[ivbinconned]

And on that point I hope that the dollar keeps climbing to the point that some canadian enity will buy the packing plants.

[Burbert]

Review was long overdue, thanks for the firesale (to date) Ralph. Alberta deserves the better deal that has been outlined by P Stelmach. Now lets address the issue of pollution, caused by oil & gas guys. Land, rivers, streams, and lakes used/abused by industry. Fresh water depleted and ruined. The air quality we suck in, being ruined. Enough buck passing. LETS DO SOMETHING! How about it PM Harp, not just a continuing release of hot air, which by the way contributes to global warming. The economy is very important, but not the only thing that makes for a decent life in Kanadia.

[spudchucker]

Easterners like me came to Alberta to make money working in the oilfield. We didn't come out to shovel S*%& for bitter old ranchers for $5/hour.
Anybody on this forum including they naysayers cannot deny that the province would be a backwater of dying little towns without the oilfield but I guess that would make them happy.
Wilagro says he wants everyone who gets ahead to pay more? Kind of takes away the incentive to work harder doesn't it?
When I left PEI in 94 to find work in the oilfield, I called a bunch of guys back there to come on out as there was money for the taking. They are still back there 13 years later collecting unemployment. I guess they are getting their "fair share" of my tax dollars.

[ivbinconned]

One would have to be a narrow minded shallow thinker, driven by envy and jealousy, to not acknowledge the fact that those good paying oil and gas sector jobs are an indirect kind of "royalty"! That you don’t work there Willy and Burburt…is your choice!

Try to look at the big picture!!Not just whats in it for little old me.

While socialists are always building castles in the sky, capitalists and free enterprisers build them on the ground.

[wilagro]

For gawds sake ivbinconned, I AM A CAPITALIST. I bought my farm with real money, I equipped my farm with real money, I broke up land and employed real money to do so. So stick it in your ear.

Because I would like to see realistic royalties paid to the province for tar sands exploitation, you go on that socialism rant again.

Increased royalties will not decrease the high wages that "spudsucker" gets. Nobody said "cut the oil workers wages". Even executives in the Calgary offices for these oil companies ADMIT that it won't affect their bottom line...they have already made multi-billions under old Ralph's weak scheme.

Bleeding this province dry of oil without proper compensation to US is unforgivable. Oil hit $93 a barrel today and the current royalty scheme returns a pittance.