Making Canada Relevant Again- The Economic Super-Thread

[larry Strong]

Agreed, which is worse keeping dangerous criminals behind bars, or allowing them out on the streets to commit more crimes. Liberals would prefer that dangerous criminals be let out early.

A "True" Liberal doesn't think any prisoner is dangerous. It's not his/her fault, it's all societies fault that they are in there.

 

[JBP]

Agreed, which is worse keeping dangerous criminals behind bars, or allowing them out on the streets to commit more crimes. Liberals would prefer that dangerous criminals be let out early.

A "True" Liberal doesn't think any prisoner is dangerous. It's not his/her fault, it's all societies fault that they are in there.

YEAH, and look how good that philosophy has worked....

Load of crap if you ask me, society plays at best, 30% of thier decisioning to do something illegal/immoral, the rest is them being loosers.

I know, I've been there, my family was heavily involved in crime and I could have jumped in any point I wanted to. I've never done drugs, drank alcohol or smoked ANYTHING ever in my entire life and never committed a crime because my family and others like them so thoroughly disgusted me.

It's b*llshit to blame it all on society, I may have swallowed that load when I was a young pessimistic teenager. That's like how psychologists always say, "Oh, he brutally raped and ripped apart that girl because he was severely abused as a child, IT'S NOT HIS FAULT!"...  :

Yeah, that may have had a big part of it, but I suppose the world is flat too eh?

 

[Kat Stevens]

Blaming society, or Daddy, or God himself is pure unadulterated, undiluted crap IMHO.  Everyone makes choices every day. You CHOOSE not to be an assh*le today, you won't be an assh*le today. Pretty cut and dried in my book.  I'd love to know when blaming everyone else for your behavior stops, and a little old fashioned accountability begins.  Again, just MHO.

CHIMO,  Kat

 

[Edward Campbell]

But think about it. Bombardier is labelled "unhealthy", yet they are the world leader in regional jets and trains. They bring Canada immense prestige and are a great talent base. How can one of the leading aerospace companies be unhealthy? I think this proves that the market is too unstable when it comes to large, expensive products that most people don't buy. This is why I think it should go public again, or at least give us shares.

It's like trying to make money on airlines. Rich people keep trying to make money on airlines, and will forever fail because airlines are simply a horrible business plan. Air Canada WAS public and was best in the world, privatized and almost bankrupt, higher costs, less serivice.....

This, along with jobs, Jobs JOBS! is the classic argument for subsidies or, worse, state-owned industries.

We operate, or try to operate a global system of regulated capitalism.  Unfortunately it is an essentially voluntary system which means that the race to the statist bottom is always (politically) easier than trying to compete in a real free market such as Brad Sallows describes.  It is a sad but true fact that Brazil, Europe and the United States all provide huge subsidies to their aerospace firms â “ to not provide subsidies and export supports to Bombardier is, knowingly, to condemn them to failure and their employees (voters in Québec!) to the bread-line.

(We used to have a quite legal, proper, challenge-proof â “ sanctioned by the GATT/WTO â “ subsidy and support programme; it was called the Defence Industries Productivity Programme (DIPP).  We could pour as much money as wanted into Bombardier and White Star and CDC and GMDD and, and, and ... all legal and above board so long as we said we were supporting our defence industrial base to protect our own national security.  All international trade law must ignore national defence/security.  The biggest idiot to ever be Canada's foreign minister, Pink Lloyd Axworthy (dumber, by far, than Howard Green (1959/63), convinced Chrétien to cancel the programme, over the screaming objections of almost all of the bureaucracy, because he didn't like the optics of the name.)

We are a long, long way from a global or even a regional free market and so wasteful subsidies, which encourage lower productivity and corruption, are, like the poor, always with us; that doesn't make them useful, just inevitable.

By the way, I understand that Bombardier will ensure that they can produce glossy brochures and slick videos showing military versions (AWACS and Medium range Maritime Patrol) of the C series jet so that the government can give them hundreds and hundreds of millions â “ maybe a billion plus, in (perfectly legal) R&D contracts.

 

[larry Strong]

Blaming society, or Daddy, or God himself is pure unadulterated, undiluted crap IMHO.   Everyone makes choices every day. You CHOOSE not to be an assh*le today, you won't be an assh*le today. Pretty cut and dried in my book.   I'd love to know when blaming everyone else for your behavior stops, and a little old fashioned accountability begins.   Again, just MHO.

CHIMO,   Kat

I think that will start when the general population starts seeing our "Leaders", and I use that word with great trepidation, begin to take respresponsibilities for "Their" actions.

 

[a_majoor]

Capitalism and democracy have other benifits besides high standards of living, they are good for trees and mountain lions as well!

It's the End of the World as We Know It...
...and, yes, I feel fine. As does the U.S.

It's the end of the world, and I feel fine

The bad news is that a new United Nations report says the world's coming to an end.

But, first, some good news: America's doing great!

Seriously, forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it's 76 percent forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10 million acres of forestland.

There are many reasons for America's arboreal comeback. We no longer use wood as fuel, and we no longer use as much land for farming. Indeed, the amount of land dedicated to farming in the United States has been steadily declining even as the agricultural productivity has increased astronomically. There are also fewer farmers. Only 2.4 percent of America's labor force is dedicated to agriculture, which means that fewer people live near where the food grows.

The literal greening of America has added vast new habitats for animals, many of which were once on the brink of extinction. Across the country, the coyote has rebounded (obviously, this is a mixed blessing, especially for roadrunners). The bald eagle is thriving. In Maine there are more moose than any time in memory. Indeed, throughout New England the populations of critters of all kinds are exploding. In New Jersey, Connecticut, and elsewhere, the black bear population is rising sharply. The Great Plains host more buffalo than at any time in more than a century.

And, of course, there's the mountain lion. There are probably now more of them in the continental United States than at any time since European settlement. This is bad news for deer, which are also at historic highs, because the kitties think "they're grrrreat!" In Iowa, the big cat was officially wiped out in 1867, but today the state is hysterical about cougar sightings. One of the most annoying tics of the media is always to credit the notion that human-animal encounters are the result of mankind "intruding" on America's dwindling wild places. This is obviously sometimes the case. But it is also sometimes the case that America's burgeoning wild places are intruding on us.

Anyway, there's more good news, of course. According to Gregg Easterbrook, air pollution is lower than it has been in a generation, drinking water is safer, and our waterways are cleaner.

America's environmental revival is a rich and complicated story with many specific exceptions, caveats and, of course, setbacks. But the overarching theme is pretty simple: The richer you get, the healthier your environment gets. This is because rich societies can afford to indulge their environmental interests and movements. Poor countries cannot.

Unsurprisingly, rich countries tend to have a better grasp of economics and the role of markets, private stewardship and property rights, reasonable regulations, and so forth. With the exception of some oil-rich states, they're also almost always democratic and hence have systems that can successfully assign blame to, and demand restitution from, polluters. In socialized economies, a "tragedy of the commons" almost always arises. As Harvard president Lawrence Summers says, nobody's ever washed a rented car.

So let's get back to the bad news, the world is coming to an end. O.K., not quite. But the coverage of the United Nations new "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment" report was very close to a doomsday scenario, complete with references to "running out" of resources and the rest. And let's be fair, unlike the situation in America and Europe, there are some enormous environmental problems in the world. Even if you're a global-warming skeptic, there's no disputing that such problems as overfishing are real.

But fear not. There's some unexpected good news. The United Nations seems to have some good ideas (!) for how to solve these problems. Tim Worstall of TechCentralStation was the first, and perhaps only, commentator to notice that the U.N. report entertains the possibility that market mechanisms â ” property rights, credits, trade â ” are solutions to environmental ills, not causes of it.

If the United Nations is actually serious â ” fingers crossed! â ” this would constitute enormous progress and a sign that the global environmental community has finally conquered what I call the cultural contradictions of environmentalism. Broadly speaking, environmentalists want to end poverty, hunger, and disease, but they also want to keep indigenous cultures unchanged. But you can't have both simultaneously. It is the natural state of indigenous cultures, after all, to be constantly vulnerable to disease and hunger, and no man fighting to keep his children alive cares about "biodiversity."

For decades, environmentalists pointed to various calamities and boasted that they were identifying the problems, which is the first step for providing a solution. But they were wrong; environmental distress is a symptom of political and economic corruption. There's reason to hope the United Nations has finally recognized the real problem, and that's great news.

â ” (c) 2005 Tribune Media Services
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200504010938.asp

and a bit of advice as to how to slip in some ownership even in a "Big Government" environment

What's the thinking behind the Ownership Society?

The Ryan Sager article mentioned by Glen Reynolds today is a type of attack that's really starting to bug me.

    ...This represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident. Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending, the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington, D.C....

There's something missing here (And I'm partly quoting myself from this post about Bill Quick's recent similar argument. Sorry, time is short). I don't like the lard either, but in both cases Bush traded (and this was at a time when we didn't control the Senate) spending increases for important components of the Ownership Society. The Medicare bill included HSA's, and NCLB included the parental-choice provisions.

What's the thinking behind the Ownership Society? First, that shrinking the government isn't going to happen. Not now, not never. Every law, subsidy, tax-break or program creates a constituency that will fight to preserve that bit of big government. It's a trap that liberals have created for us, and no number of grumbling fiscal conservatives will ever get us out of it.

BUT, there is a way out of the trap. Even though Social Security (to take just one example) is a big-government program, any diversion of dollars into Private Accounts is, effectively, shrinking government. And that creates a trap of the opposite sort, one that will make people want more and more privatization as they start to see their accounts grow. (Or, similarly, more and more choice over which school your kids go to. Or more ability to just choose any medical service you want and pay it yourself without consulting any bureaucracy)

That's why the Left is fighting private accounts so bitterly. Sager most likely doesn't agree with the strategy, but he ought to be aware of it. Bush has yielded on spending increases to gain long-term benefits of Choice and Ownership. I think Bush's plan is clear enough that Mr Sager has an obligation to try to refute it. I notice that these libertarian types never mention Social Security when they complain about Bush. Nor do they mention the Faith Based Initiatives, that put government spending into the hands of local groups.

I wonder if Mr Sager has an HSA?
Posted by John Weidner at April 1, 2005 08:06 AM

 

[BDG.CalgHighrs]

Actually, Daniel, the four countries most other people wan't to emigrate to are the USA, Canada, Norway, and Switzerland, in no particular order.   Those four countries also have the worlds highest rates of the private possession of firearms, though I won't go into that here.

Tom

While this might be where people actulay want to go, last I checked (this could be out of date) actual Imigration stacks up like this:

Total foreign pop inflow,

Germany
Japan
UK
Italy
France

Asylum seekers:

UK 92k per anum. Accpeted: 43%
US 88                                43%
Germany 86                        9.9%
France 47                            20%
Canada 42                            61%

 

[Edward Campbell]

As I understand it, she is literally doing the writing, as opposed to doing the stimate and coming up with the plan.

Not any more, it appears.

This is from this morning's National Post at: http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2cdf17f1-2b38-46ee-89b5-ab2504625b99

PMO lets global policy author go
Controversial choice
 
Mike Blanchfield
CanWest News Service

Saturday, April 02, 2005

OTTAWA - Jennifer Welsh, the Saskatchewan-born author and Oxford scholar recruited by Prime Minister Paul Martin to salvage Canada's much-delayed international policy review, has parted company with the Prime Minister's Office.

Ms. Welsh's contract expired on Thursday with the end of the government's fiscal year.

The fact that she had been brought in to help draft a final version of the policy statement, which is months overdue, caused much consternation among academics and government officials, who have been toiling since December, 2003, to complete the review.

Many questioned why Mr. Martin turned to an academic so late in the process to release a blueprint for Canada in the world.

Federal government sources say the review could be released by mid-April -- several months later than promised -- but there have been so many fits and starts with the process, that most in government circles are wary to commit to a release date.

As a senior federal official, who is integrally involved in the process, said yesterday: "When the IPS is ready, it will be released. When it's released, it will be ready."

Foreign Affairs had been in charge of the policy review, but when the department presented its final draft to the Prime Minister's Office early this year, it was rejected as lacking a coherent vision.

Ms. Welsh was brought in to consult on the strength of her book, At Home In The World. She has declined to discuss her involvement in the review process, but told the Ottawa Citizen her book "got many positive reactions ... including from people in the government of Canada."

The Ottawa Citizen has also learned part of the delay is due to dissatisfaction with the contribution of the Department of International Trade. Along with Foreign Affairs, the Defence Department and the Canadian International Development Agency, Trade is one of the key partners in the final product.

The Defence Department also revamped its contribution after Gen. Rick Hillier, the new chief of the defence staff, was appointed earlier this year.

Gen. Hillier personally oversaw the rewrite of the military's contribution, which has been ready for about a month.

Meanwhile, aspects of the policy statement have already been implemented.

International Co-operation Minister Aileen Carroll has already announced Canada will scale back its foreign-aid contributions from the more than 150 countries that continue to receive development assistance.

Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has also said Canada will try to boost its percentage of diplomatic staff that serves abroad, which currently stands a G-8 low of 25%.

© National Post 2005

I love this line from a 'senior official': "When the IPS is ready, it will be released. When it's released, it will be ready."

 

[daniel h.]

Quote,
Norway is ranked the best country in the world in which to live, and they have oil like us.

...and, once again, have you been there? I have[twice] , please tell me what I missed over there to make it the "best" place to live, oh guru?

If you don't live there, maybe you didn't miss anything. However, I think things like literacy and social well-being can go hand-in-hand with economics and military issues.

Norway uses its oil revenue to give Norwegians the best service and programs in the world. Canada has much more wealth than Norway and we allow it to be foreign-owned and the revenue we do get is thrown away in the form of corporate tax cuts and debt repayments.

 

[daniel h.]

Let me get this straight, we should keep our oil and not sell it to the US because we should be more like Norway and ...wait here is a quote I just found "since Norway exports 90 per cent of its entire oil production."
http://www.explorenorth.com/library/weekly/aa091500a.htm

But we should be like them? no we should be ..no, wait here's what I meant...

Will you at least try and stick to ONE arguement?

yeah sorry. I think we can export some, but we should make sure we are getting more of the wealth than we are currently getting. Why should Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell make a fortune off Canada?

We can export oil but we must ensure that we aren't forced to keep exporting oil and gas in a shortage. Norway has no NAFTA obligating them to keep trading. Neither does Mexico, because they have an exemption.

 

[daniel h.]

This, along with jobs, Jobs JOBS! is the classic argument for subsidies or, worse, state-owned industries.

We operate, or try to operate a global system of regulated capitalism.   Unfortunately it is an essentially voluntary system which means that the race to the statist bottom is always (politically) easier than trying to compete in a real free market such as Brad Sallows describes.   It is a sad but true fact that Brazil, Europe and the United States all provide huge subsidies to their aerospace firms â “ to not provide subsidies and export supports to Bombardier is, knowingly, to condemn them to failure and their employees (voters in Québec!) to the bread-line.

(We used to have a quite legal, proper, challenge-proof â “ sanctioned by the GATT/WTO â “ subsidy and support programme; it was called the Defence Industries Productivity Programme (DIPP).   We could pour as much money as wanted into Bombardier and White Star and CDC and GMDD and, and, and ... all legal and above board so long as we said we were supporting our defence industrial base to protect our own national security.   All international trade law must ignore national defence/security.   The biggest idiot to ever be Canada's foreign minister, Pink Lloyd Axworthy (dumber, by far, than Howard Green (1959/63), convinced Chrétien to cancel the programme, over the screaming objections of almost all of the bureaucracy, because he didn't like the optics of the name.)

We are a long, long way from a global or even a regional free market and so wasteful subsidies, which encourage lower productivity and corruption, are, like the poor, always with us; that doesn't make them useful, just inevitable.

By the way, I understand that Bombardier will ensure that they can produce glossy brochures and slick videos showing military versions (AWACS and Medium range Maritime Patrol) of the C series jet so that the government can give them hundreds and hundreds of millions â “ maybe a billion plus, in (perfectly legal) R&D contracts.

Great posts on here. I hear you. I realize globalization is what is being promoted, is just can't see how it can work when some countries are so much more powerful than others.

 

[Zipper]

Just a note on Majoor's environmental article.

All of those "improvements" to the environment that are claimed in that article would have taken place over many years.

In other words. Its not Bush's policies that did it. Nor can you say it was even Clinton's.

Environmental damage is very quick. A few days even depending on size of impact. Recovery on the the other hand takes years if not generations.

So who can you thank for these things? Your going to have to go back to Regan and well before to find policies that may have changed those degradations. Not to mention the citizens of those areas who either fought for, or took responsibility for those areas that are now in "recovery".

 

[mdh]

So who can you thank for these things? Your going to have to go back to Regan and well before to find policies that may have changed those degradations.

As Reagan said there are more trees now than in the time of Columbus. 

 

[a_majoor]

Styen should get in another word here:

We need professional help


Monday, 4 April 2005
Mark Steyn


One of the striking features of the soft, seductive, remorseless, nanny-state totalitarianism-lite of Trudeaupia is the media's coverage of bad news. When things go wrong, you can't help noticing how reflexively our reporters lapse into their preferred portrayal of Canadians as victims. The four RCMP officers murdered by James Roszko were merely the latest example: â Å“Tragedy Latest Setback for Struggling Townâ ? (Calgary Herald); â Å“Investigators Scour Farm for Clues to Tragedyâ ? (Regina Leader-Post); â Å“Worst Force Tragedy since Riel Rebellionâ ? (The Daily Miner). A â Å“tragedyâ ? would have been their car going off a bridge en route to the Roszko place. Even the historic comparisons with the Northwest Rebellion only emphasized the outrageousness of what had happened: when one guy--known to everyone in the neighbourhood as the ne plus ultra of â Å“angry white lonersâ ?--manages to kill four Mounties, that's not a â Å“tragedyâ ? but an operational fiasco. Or, as my colleague Colby Cosh put it on his website, â Å“Canadian policing's greatest tactical clusterf--.â ?

Oh, to be sure, not all folks adopted the heavily sedated Remembrance Day tone of the CBC's coverage. Some Canadians were angry. They called the talk shows demanding new laws--laws to decriminalize drugs, laws to recriminalize drugs, laws to set up an even bigger and better multibillion- dollar gun registry, laws for this, laws for that. Hey, why not? The unlovely Mr. Roszko had already broken scores of laws; if only we'd given him a few dozen more to disregard. Assault with a weapon? Unlawful confinement? Sex attacks on underage boys? Property crimes against state officials? Been there, done that, over and over.

By demanding that â Å“the governmentâ ?--any government, feds, provincial, municipal, preferably all of them--carry on frantically legislating into the wind, the angry talk-show callers were, in effect, being just as victimologically inclined as the somnolent correspondents of big media. Fuming and furious, they were tonally different but philosophically indistinguishable, both parties subscribing to the view that Canadian citizens are the passive charges of the nanny state and that nanny needs to put more safety bars round the nursery.

The same day as the killings, I saw a picture in the Montreal Gazette--a fireman bearing a sooty blackened baby from the wreckage of a home in Saskatoon. It--the home and the baby--belonged to Jennifer Bowron and her common-law husband Mike. Newspaper reports seemed unable to establish Mike's last name, and indeed seemed remarkably uncurious about his role in the proceedings. The fire started just before nine on a Thursday morning, and Jennifer and Mike immediately leapt out of a second-storey window. Jennifer went next door to call 911, and her neighbour asked, where were the three kids--aged three, two and six months? â Å“I don't know,â ? said Jennifer. â Å“They're in the house.â ?

Technically, in fleeing for their lives, Jennifer and Mike had followed the handbook. If you take a fire safety course, they tell you don't try to save the kids or the cats; scram outta there and wait till the professionals turn up. Never having taken the course, Jennifer and Mike didn't know that, but, even if they had, I wonder how many other mothers and fathers could put the parental instinct to protect on hold so thoroughly as to abandon three young children to roam around a blazing house. And, even if one accepts the logic of the safety course, couldn't one of the parents have leapt out the window and called 911, while the other attempted to locate the children and, if he couldn't rescue them, at least prevent them wandering deeper into the fire?

In the end, the home was gutted but the firefighters rescued the children and took them to Royal University Hospital in critical condition, suffering from smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and third-degree burns. Mike, on the other hand, walked away all but unblemished. Perhaps none of us can know what we would do in that situation until we confront it, but the reality is that his children will carry on their bodies for the rest of their lives the consequences of his decision that morning. No press reports were boorish enough to dwell on this aspect of the situation: the common-law husband all but vanished from the story, and even from the name of the fund set up to help (â Å“Jennifer Bowron and Familyâ ?).

There's a reason mature societies promote principles like â Å“women and children first,â ? and recite poems that ring slightly nutty to contemporary ears:

â Å“The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled.â ?

â Å“The boy leapt off the burning deck in compliance with a Health Canada safety course he'd takenâ ? doesn't play quite the same, does it? The point is that, even in the most extreme circumstances, we remain at some level masters of our fate. In the last year, no individual has made a greater impression on me than Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14, 2004. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, â Å“I will show you how an Italian dies!â ? He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it. But he understood, even in the final seconds of his life, that he could act and that his actions would make a difference.

In nanny-state Canada, the dominant culture tells us don't act, don't think, don't make adult judgments. Leave it to the government, they'll show up any minute, they'll pass a new law. Not every story has a hero, but every story needs human impulses, and in the Canadian press most of our â Å“human interestâ ? stories are, in human terms, less and less interesting. If the benign theory of state power is that it obliges us to subordinate our selfish interest to the greater good of society as a whole, the reality on the ground seems to be precisely the opposite: a state in which the citizen's response to everything is â Å“the government oughta do somethin' about itâ ? is one in which he's less and less inclined to do anything other than look out for Number One. But what's clear about the coverage of the RCMP slaughter--as with the deaths of four Princess Pats from friendly fire in Afghanistan--is that our victim culture is now so advanced and universal that we prefer even our soldiers and police officers in that mould.

When the Patricias were killed three years ago, Svend Robinson, the Palestinian suicide bombers' favourite gay infidel, huffed indignantly: â Å“If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they're not going to be fired on by Americans, we have no business being there.â ? Sorry: nothing is 100 per cent risk free; ask Canadian jewellers. Not even colossi like Lloyd Axworthy or Bill Graham can extend the fluffy cocoon of the Trudeaupian bassinet all the way to the Hindu Kush.

That week there were two stories involving the PPCLI: the four men killed in Afghanistan, whose deaths prompted an orgy of coast-to-coast mawkish ersatz grief-mongering that was a disgrace to a grown-up nation; and the five of their comrades who'd proved such lethal snipers that the Pentagon wished to accord them the rare honour, for foreign troops, of the Bronze Star. That story was reported nowhere except in the National Post. The Canadian government had nixed the award, officially on some nitpicky procedural ground, but unofficially because they were a bit queasy about letting it be known that our â Å“forcesâ ? (we don't say â Å“armed forcesâ ? any more) still occasionally--what's the phrase?--kill the enemy. In the spirit of that unarmed â Å“peacekeeperâ ? on the $5 bill, we'd rather see our soldiers as victims than warriors. That's why the most famous living Canadian â Å“heroâ ? is Roméo Dallaire, even though some of the decisions he made on the ground in Rwanda were as weedy and self-serving as Mike in Saskatoon.

As for the protagonist bestriding the heroic narrative of our refusal to have any truck with missile defence, it's hard to improve on this quote: â Å“Martin said he would expect to be consulted on what to do about any missile passing over Canada.â ?

By the time it's incoming, I don't think calling Ottawa will be a priority. Still, in the event that it falls short and lands north of the border, Canada can metaphorically leap out the window and wait for the professionals to show up.

 

[tomahawk6]

The reason oil prices are moving upwards is because the easy to market oil is being used up and we will be going after the oil in places like Alaska, the oil shale/tar sands and others. The higher price of oil will make this more expensive oil worthwhile to bring to market. Years ago in Colorado there was a boom in oil shale leasing. Colorado has enough oil shale to make the US self sufficient for many decades [2 trillion barrels of reserves]. The problem at the time was the cost per barrel was $20 and it just wasnt economical. Now with $50-60 oil that $20 cost per barrel is now economical. We could never have developed Alaska's oil unless oil prices made it feasible.
If oil hits $75 - 100 a barrel then alternative ebergy sources now become cost effective.

 

[daniel h.]

The reason oil prices are moving upwards is because the easy to market oil is being used up and we will be going after the oil in places like Alaska, the oil shale/tar sands and others. The higher price of oil will make this more expensive oil worthwhile to bring to market. Years ago in Colorado there was a boom in oil shale leasing. Colorado has enough oil shale to make the US self sufficient for many decades [2 trillion barrels of reserves]. The problem at the time was the cost per barrel was $20 and it just wasnt economical. Now with $50-60 oil that $20 cost per barrel is now economical. We could never have developed Alaska's oil unless oil prices made it feasible.
If oil hits $75 - 100 a barrel then alternative ebergy sources now become cost effective.

I had heard that the U.S. only had 5 years domestic supply, and only 1 year in Alaska....maybe that was easy-to-access reserves? Very interesting post, thanks for sharing.

Still would rather Alaska not be developed too much in the arctic, but oh well.

 

[a_majoor]

We seem to have sprung a leak from the oil and security thread here.

The question is how to make Canada relevant again.

Certainly the issue of wealth and economic well being is important, the former USSR had natural resources in abundance and human capital which should have made the world green with envy (Russian mathematicians, chess players and scientists of all types were at or near the forefront of their fields), but due to their socialist political and economic structure, simply squandered their potential, and now Russia is a ghost of the former "Superpower".

Implementing policies which promote the efficient use of economic and human capital has always been the energy source of any expanding power, ancient Greece had a small fraction of the agricultural or manpower resources of the Persian Empire, yet soundly thrashed the Persians in two wars, and was the basis for the Hellenistic destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great. Why? Greece was the home of the first democratic society in history.

Similarly, the Dutch built a globe spanning empire in the 1600s and 1700s, despite a tiny population and resource base, since the Estaat Generale was one of the most liberal and market oriented governments of the era. They defeated autocratic Spain, but were eventually outperformed by the English (oddly enough, AFTER the Restoration), who were also quite liberal, but had a larger resource base to draw from. Sweden had a similar story during the 1600s, with fairly liberal governments and free markets providing the muscle behind their expansion.

Canada has two closely related problems. Problem one is most Canadians world view encompasses their belly buttons, and nothing else. Problem two is their navel gazing causes them to see things only insofar as "how does it benefit me right now"?, which accounts for the support of organized looting in the form of socialistic "redistribution of wealth", without spending the extra minute to ask "Where did that wealth come from anyway"? (Perhaps the most horrendus recent example is the porovince provided a $13 million dollar grant to the city of London. People and politicians are cheering this as a way to reduce the property tax hike, forgetting that this is $13 million dollars of their own tax money as well.....)

If Canadians actually want to be a force for change in the world, they will have to take a very close look at the world as it actually is, and determe just how much blood and treasure needs to be spent in support of the national interest. If the cost is too high, then the definition of the national interest is not well thought out, or we are in a death struggle with a vastly superior opponent (taking on mainland China would be an example).

Liberalizing (in the true sense of the word) our economy and human capital would provide the muscle to carry our these tasks. Free trade provides more wealth than autarky, but if the wealth is just being squandered in Adscam after Adscam, then we could receive trillions of dollars without materially changing our circumstances.

 

[Zipper]

Well that was some spun story there.

Its amazing how many people and levels of government can be attacked in one article.

Raving? Or journalism? You decide.

 

[mdh]

Well that was some spun story there.

Its amazing how many people and levels of government can be attacked in one article.

Raving? Or journalism? You decide.

Actually it's an opinion column, not a news story. I prefer to call it "raving journalism" (a term that I suspect Steyn himself wouldn't mind) of the higher kind. But if you have an argument against it, why not share?

 

[tomahawk6]

To be relevent Canada needs to spend more money on defense, plain and simple. The Navy needs to go ahead with the CADRE project. They could use more CPF's. This would enable Canadian warships to fully participate in naval operations in support of the war on terror. Another area would be in transport aircraft. I would like to see Canada buy 15-20 C-17's. With C-17's the CF could support airlift requirements. Two tankers are coming on line, but could use 2 more. Supporting the US doesnt necessarily require ground forces.