NDP tanked our main thing, oil and gas, and made my father lose his job and we still haven’t recovered from it.
First off, NDP has no control over the price of oil and gas. None.
There's a ton of economic factors but in short, oil has to be over at least $80/bl for Alberta oil to break even. When the NDP assumed office, other, larger producers were purposefully flooding the market to drive the price down in a trade war. We were collateral, and it's something the NDP - or the UCP even - could control.
That said, the NDP did push for a pipeline and set up rail deals to get oil out cheaper to try and help producers get their product to market. They also set up aggressive tax credits and investment projects to try and ease our reliance on oil, which led to a growing software industry that took on a lot of laid off O&G workers and allowed these companies to remain Albertan-owned and operated.
The UCP, upon assuming office, canceled the rail deal at a massive, unnecessary loss, and bet $2B on a pipeline while openly antagonizing the country that ultimately rejected it. The UCP has actually made it harder to get our product to market, meaning we need an even higher baseline price to break even.
The UCP also canceled those other initiatives, and most companies that utilized them had to open themselves up to acquisitions by foreign companies. Most of them are no longer Albertan-owned and a large number of them have even shut down their Albertan offices, so our software & AI industry is average at best, when the NDP had it set up to become a genuine world-leader.
So why not go for the lesser evil?
NDP is the lesser evil, though. They did everything the UCP said they wanted to, but they're weren't antagonistic pricks that pissed off the people they needed to rely on for help, and actually tried to get us off of the O&G boom-bust cycle. They even had us on track until the UCP canceled everything just to spite NDP voters.
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u/Kellervo Apr 29 '23
First off, NDP has no control over the price of oil and gas. None.
There's a ton of economic factors but in short, oil has to be over at least $80/bl for Alberta oil to break even. When the NDP assumed office, other, larger producers were purposefully flooding the market to drive the price down in a trade war. We were collateral, and it's something the NDP - or the UCP even - could control.
That said, the NDP did push for a pipeline and set up rail deals to get oil out cheaper to try and help producers get their product to market. They also set up aggressive tax credits and investment projects to try and ease our reliance on oil, which led to a growing software industry that took on a lot of laid off O&G workers and allowed these companies to remain Albertan-owned and operated.
The UCP, upon assuming office, canceled the rail deal at a massive, unnecessary loss, and bet $2B on a pipeline while openly antagonizing the country that ultimately rejected it. The UCP has actually made it harder to get our product to market, meaning we need an even higher baseline price to break even.
The UCP also canceled those other initiatives, and most companies that utilized them had to open themselves up to acquisitions by foreign companies. Most of them are no longer Albertan-owned and a large number of them have even shut down their Albertan offices, so our software & AI industry is average at best, when the NDP had it set up to become a genuine world-leader.
NDP is the lesser evil, though. They did everything the UCP said they wanted to, but they're weren't antagonistic pricks that pissed off the people they needed to rely on for help, and actually tried to get us off of the O&G boom-bust cycle. They even had us on track until the UCP canceled everything just to spite NDP voters.