Pierre Elliott Trudeau Eulogy From An Oil Magnate In Alberta

Pierre Elliott Trudeau Eulogy- From an Oil Magnate in Alberta

By Jake Huang

September 28, 2000, is day when the man who brought great tragedy and torment to the people of Alberta finally passes away. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is John Smith, one of the oil magnates from Alberta; and this is how I remembered Pierre Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau was a terrible leader who had no respect for individual rights, supported dictators and abused Alberta. Despite being a classless elitist, he managed to develop a cult of personality.

Looking back at his many biases and failures during his political life, I am going to chose only one to talk about. It is the one that destroyed thousands of jobs and hurt the economy greatly in Alberta. It

Second, it must offer Canadians, all Canadians, the real opportunity to participate in the energy industry in general and the petroleum industry in particular, and to share in the benefits of industry expansion. Third, it must establish a petroleum pricing and revenue-sharing regime that recognizes the requirements of fairness to all Canadians no matter where they live."

However, here is the real reason behind the National Energy Program, as Rt. Honourable Marc Lalonde, Minister of Energy, put it, "The major factor behind the NEP wasn’t Canadianization or getting more from the industry or even self-sufficiency. The determinant factor was the fiscal imbalance between the provinces and the federal government.... Our proposal was to increase Ottawa’s share appreciably, so that the share of the producing provinces would decline significantly and the industry’s share would decline

The entire National Energy Program was based upon shoddy management of decision making under uncertainty. The Program simply assumed that energy prices would continue to rise. By 1983, prices fell dramatically. Instead of finding themselves with a rich industry that they could tax at higher rates, they found a depressed industry that was even less attractive after the seemingly punitive National Energy Program was taken into consideration.

In addition to hampering the energy industry, the "Canadianization" aspects of the National Energy Program had measures that halted and sometimes reversed foreign ownership, and even by retroactively changing resource ownership conventions. This caused a flight of capital in the energy industry, but also in other sectors of the