In 1913 a Senate report on Western Canada's resources lamented that the oilsands were too far from market. Rugged terrain and distance defied economical pipelines.
In 2018, new pipelines to markets are again the roadblock to this wealth, fiercely opposed by a powerful array of Canadian interest groups.
There are milestones that illuminate the isolation that Albertans feel in times like this.
In 1875, Geological Survey of Canada explorer John Macoun led a field party from Victoria, B. C. to the Peace River, then canoed east to Great Slave Lake and south to the fur trading post of Fort McMurray.
He passed the high riverbanks of sandstone inter-bedded with gooey, odoriferous outcrops of oily sand. Bedded beneath his canoe that night, he wrote in his field report to the GSC of the misty campfire light and his shadowy companions hunkered by the blaze. He wrote of “man with his tool of steam raising wealth” from the oilsand.
After that autumn there was an unbroken effort to study the oilsands. The holy grail of finding a way to separate oil from the sands pitted Ottawa against Alberta. Alberta won the race.
In 1905 when Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier gave Alberta and Saskatchewan their provincial autonomy. But Laurier withheld the Crown ownership of resources that had been given to every other province. Alberta’s economic independence was crippled because it could not grant lands to build railroads, collect homesteading fees, grant timber leases and coal concessions – sources of lucrative revenues.
In 1906, the Times of London warned that the decision would drive a permanent wedge between Alberta and the rest of Canada.
It took Alberta a quarter century to wrestle land and mineral rights from Ottawa in 1931. The federal government botched the transfer so badly that it took another 10 years of lawsuits and politics before the province could set oil and gas royalties.
In 1937-38, Alberta's minister of mines, Nathan Tanner, went to Toronto, Montreal, New York and London to persuade investors in these financial capitals to finance oil and gas in Alberta.
Tanner failed. Financial men wouldn’t invest so far from the centre of their universe.
In 1940 the province, facing pressure from its farmers to take over fledgling oil refineries, commissioned a Royal Commission on Alberta’s Oil Industry to call witnesses and collect evidence. It concluded that the government should leave refining, marketing, exploration and production in private hands.
Premier William Aberhart adopted its recommendations. Oil and gas exploration and production in Alberta remained a free enterprise.
Meanwhile, British Columbia and Saskatchewan held back oil and gas development with failed experiments in public ownership.
In 1945, Premier Ernest Manning travelled to New York to refinance $100 million of bonds that had been in default since the Depression. For 10 years, the province had been technically bankrupt.
The bonds issued to complete the refinancing were repaid with oil royalties that poured in after the Leduc discovery. Oil freed Alberta from a bankruptcy that was seeded by federal policy.
Before the modern oil era began with the iconic Leduc discovery, oil shaped Alberta’s political culture as a rivalry with the rest of Canada.
The Trans Mountain expansion fiasco is the newest chapter in this rivalry.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist and author.
