All about investment in oil in Alberta -- remember we TOLD you that Calgary is an unmitigated disaster zone, without enough money to build a proper social infrastructure long ago. Now look at the craziness .. it grows EVER worse.

Thanks again to mediascout and Daniel Casey. The links should work nicely here and you can get a more in-depth idea of what is coming DOWN. This is the wave of the future . the working class honestly BELIEVING that they must stand up for the corporations - even when it is abundantly clear that they are only messing themselves over when no social consessions and environmental standards are actually in place . just PROFIT MAKING Rules. And under the SPP this will grow every worse, of that you can bet your very last dime.
One thing NOT mentioned is how Alberta revenues get spent on EDMONTON, not CALGARY - that's just how the Conservative party likes it.

Veeger

PAYING THE TAB

The Post fronts while The National, the Globe and the Star go inside with Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s hints at the province’s new oil and gas royalties regime, given in a TV address last night in advance of a detailed plan to be released this afternoon after the markets close. After a specially convened government panel studied the existing royalties system, it recommended a 20 percent increase in the fossil fuels royalty rate. This was welcomed by many Albertans, particularly around Calgary, who are feeling the squeeze as the government’s reluctance to make infrastructure investments runs up against a ferocious oil-driven economic boom. The oil industry, by contrast, has thrown a fit and excoriated the proposal, threatening to punitively withdraw billions in planned investments in response. The hints are that Stelmach will propose a more moderate royalty increase, perhaps deferred far into the future; what this proposal amounts to depends on who you read. The Post is withering, casting Stelmach as a weak, election-minded politician who has not been “significantly” influenced by oil-industry lobbying, likening the “divisive debate over whether to squeeze the dominant oil industry” to policies “in such oil jurisdictions as Venezuela or Kazakhstan,” and running a cropped, uncredited and uncaptioned photo of a protester holding up an anti-rate-hike “We Value Our Jobs” sign on its front page. The Globe, however, opens with the assertion that Stelmach is likely “bowing to intense oil industry pressure” and gives ample room to his Alberta critics while noting that record-high oil profits would remain so even with a royalty increase.

Daniel Casey is a Montreal-based MediaScout writer for Maisonneuve Magazine.