To the Editor,
Alberta Premier Notley should spend some time studying our economic history before shooting herself in the foot. Their past 15 years of relying on oil to the exclusion of other economic factors has been pulling the Canadian dollar up to the level of the U.S. dollar, allowing the tar sands to be exploited during high oil prices while having a negative impact on almost every other aspect of our economy, especially manufacturing. Alberta’s oil policy has cost the rest of Canadians hundreds of billions of dollars.
Then there is the $600 billion-plus yearly taxpayer subsidy to the fossil fuel industry that has allowed oil corporations to bank obscene profits while living off the rest of us. Corporate welfare is what real NDP activists used to call it.
And we shouldn’t forget the increased climate change costs of spruce budworm, forest fires, crop failures, floods, increases in diseases and loss of wildlife and ecosystem diversity. Nor the physical accidents to workers in the oil industry.
Fortunately the fossil fuel industry is dying. The rest of Canada should get aboard the clean and sustainable energy industry and leave the fossils to freeze in the dark.
Jim ErkiletianNanaimo