Isn't It a Bit Like Paying Someone to Marry Your Daughter?


How desperate do you have to be to marry off your daughter if you have to "hire" her groom?  A dowry, sure, but this?

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is a bit cash strapped these days but it has offered nearly $300 million to fossil fuel giants to keep drilling for offshore oil. 

Angela Carter, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, says it's increasingly difficult to watch the government offer hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to oil companies while not taking effective steps toward building an economy that isn't reliant on oil.

"What oil producers are trying to do is get whatever they can out of the remaining reserves," Carter, author of the 2020 book Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada's Petro-Provinces said in a recent interview.

The money comes from a $320-million fund provided to the province by Ottawa, earmarked for safety improvements, maintenance and upgrades for facilities, research and development, and clean technology in the oil sector.

"This is about jobs in our province," federal Natural Resources Minister Seamus O'Regan told reporters last September when the funding was announced. "This is about the future of our sector."

Premier Andrew Furey and Energy Minister Andrew Parsons have justified the aid by saying if the project didn't go ahead, there'd be no royalties at all. And with the money coming from Ottawa, the move hasn't cost Newfoundland and Labrador a cent, nor could it have been spent elsewhere, they said.

"We're going to get money back from the indirect jobs and the direct jobs that come from this," Parsons told reporters in mid-June. "I think it's a really good move for this province [...] we've protected the future, we've saved jobs and we're using the resource in the best interest of the province."

So, Ottawa made the money available for designated purposes - safety improvements, maintenance and upgrades for facilities, research and development, and clean technology in the oil sector - but it's being used to bribe the oil giants not to abandon the nearly tapped out Terra Nova oil field.

And Mr. Trudeau's resource minister, Seamus O'Regan, says it's about jobs. No it's not. It's about votes in an upcoming election. Besides, after the Liberal government is squandering somewhere between 12 to 16 billion on a pointless pipeline to the West coast, 300 million from the federal treasury is peanuts.

Relax, Liberals, I'm not picking on you. I know your rivals would do the same. I think they would although Harper never lavished a ridiculous amount of money on Kinder Morgan to buy their defunct pipeline project.

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