If Kitimat residents can vote no on a pipeline in a plebiscite, why can’t we vote no on the PAC? Oh, that’s different, eh? Now I understand.

key words, “non-binding plebiscite”.

A random poll of 200 or so people would have given a similar result.

Too bad it was Enbridge (with their record) that proposed the pipeline in the first place and then with them being far from honest throughout their whole ‘sell’ campaign hasn’t helped at all. It has been sort of like listening to a used car salesman.
I think they really grossly underestimated the resistance they would face here.

I don’t think it matters what the resistance is. They (the Gov’t and those with financial gain), will get the bitumen to the west coast.

I think the real question should be, “Which would you prefer? Pipeline or rail tanker?”.

It’s sad that in the year 2013 in one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world, that we get to choose between Enbridge and CN as being the caretaker of our environment and safety as they transport oil across the Province. God help us.

Stupid small touch screen. Make that 2014!

I disagree Pylot. Is it written in stone that this stuff HAS to be moved west? There are refineries with existing lines that can and most likely will use it. Besides when a tanker has an issue or leak the resulting leak would be miniscule in comparison to a mainline burst. I still maintain that people aren’t against a pipeline so much as WHAT they are piping. LNG as per example.

trucker16x… written in stone? No. The problem at the moment is that these oil companies want to increase the flow to market. Existing lines can’t handle the quantity. Going west is an easier pathway to China.

Take Kinder-Morgan for example. They want to triple the capacity of their current pipeline from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels of oil a day, plus raise the amount of supertankers in Burrard Inlet from 5 to 34 per month. This is in my backyard.

Harper’s opinion is that it’s “critical” that Canada expand it’s markets. Harper is the dancing puppet for big oil. I have little to no faith he has any regard for the Canadian public and their opinion.

Pylot, the feds receive a huge amount of revenue from the oil and gas sector. You know, the money that pays for all our social programs, etc. Any PM would be an idiot not to recognize the revenue from this sector. Dosen’t mean the oil sector can do as they please without oversite, but it a very important sector for this country.

dow7500… I’m not in denial of that fact of what natural resources bring to this country as far as financial gains are concerned.

But if we are doing so well, why are all the social programs you speak of, constantly getting their funding cut or axed? But big oil gets corporate taxes slashed?

You can’t tell me their isn’t something seriously wrong with this picture.

This is why I have such little trust in them. There is a lot of money being made (and more to be made) but it never seems to trickle down to the rest of us, does it? We as people take all the risks with not much benefit except lip service.

Corporate tax cuts were fo ALL corps, of which the oil and gas business are included.
They got nothing special.

I would also disagree with your assertion that “it never seems to trickle down that to the rest of us”. You must be willfully blind. Ever been to Alberta? Do you see the vibrant propserity by its people. How about NE BC. Fort st John residents would certainly dispute that O&G dosen’t trickle down to them. Ask Christy Clark where she would get the lost royalty and tax revenue if the oil patch didn’t exist. Open your eyes and look at the facts.

If we were truly doing so well why did we even need ‘social programs’ in the first place? And as we do better why do we always seem to need more of them?

There may indeed be “….a lot of money being made”, but the bigger question might well be, “just WHAT will that money still actually BUY?”

For what’s earned as Incomes from ‘production’ are Costs, and what’s taken back through ‘consumption’ are Prices, and collectively, if the latter are perpetually greater than the former, someone’s going short somewhere. And they are, or overall debt levels wouldn’t continuously be EXPONENTIALLY rising. For debt that rises that way indicates that there is a cumulative ‘insufficiency’ of PURCHASING POWER being recorded over time.

And going short in such a way that a ‘re-distribution’ of money, i.e., the old socialist prescription of taxing those who seemingly have too much to give to those who actually have too little, is certainly NOT going to be of much, if any, benefit.

For no matter how you try to ‘re-distribute’ an INSUFFICIENCY, long term it never can a sufficiency make. And what we have is a ‘insufficiency’, not of actual wealth, in which Canada copiously abounds, but of ‘purchasing power’ ~ money incomes that no longer bear a correct nexus with the prices of all goods and services we are more than capable of actually providing ourselves. And potentially, to a far greater degree, for all, than we currently do.

58% did the right thing. Harper only believed in democracy before he was in power, so in all likelihood he will ignore this vote as none binding. It will be up to the courts to stop this Gateway travesty from going ahead.

dow7500… My eyes and ears are wide open, and that’s probably why I notice more problems with the selling off of our resources than you do. You seem to feel everything is just peachy, and I’m suggesting were all (as a country) getting shafted on the deal(s).

But you keep going your merry way, singing the Harper/Clark corporate anthems. Whatever makes you comfortable.

btw.. I’m not an NDP supporting drum beater either. I’m just trying to find some happy medium.

“But if we are doing so well, why are all the social programs you speak of, constantly getting their funding cut or axed?”

Harper must show a balanced budget for the next federal election in 2015. Everything is being slashed now to achieve that. After the election if he wins it is back to the old deficit ways again. Then they will try to buy the affection of the voters with lavish spending just before the next election.

Predictability. Cycles. Amnesia. If it worked before it will work again.

This business is not about Canadians . If it were about Canada and or Canadians we would NOT have the lowest royalties in the world and Alberta would not be running a huge deficit . We have either the stupidest population in the world or the slimmyest politicians in the world or both . Electing undereducated people to office has served the corperatalkcracy very well . Shipping our resources and money abroad doesn’t feed the hungry or educate our population . Canada must be the laughing stock of the worlds 1% . I shake my head daily .

Take a look at Norway’s almost one trillion dollor oil legacy. Being a lot smaller than Canada I am sure helped develop the legacy, but Canada could do something similar with its oil, gas and other resources.

“Norway’s oil fund — which collects taxes from oil profits and invests the money, mostly in stocks — exceeded 5.11 trillion crowns ($905 billion) in value this week, making it worth a million crowns per person, or about $177,000 per Norwegian.”

“That’s right. Norway, the “socialist paradise,” is effectively running a surplus of nearly a trillion dollars, thanks to oil revenue.”

“About the same time this happened, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation released calculations showing that the taxpayers of Alberta are on the hook for $7.7 billion in debt, or about $1,925 per person. It expects the debt to spike to $17 billion by the end of the 2015-2016 fiscal year. The CTF is so alarmed by the province’s descent into deficits that it has launched a debt clock specifically for Alberta.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/01/11/oil-fund-norway-millionaires_n_4576887.html

The real difference between Norway and Canada / Alberta is that we have too many politically Conservative idiots constantly voting in the wrong government!

dow 7500 I have been to Alberta and I don’t think everyone is doing as good as you portray. The province is full of TFW and they don’t appear to have enough money to repair their roads anymore.

“Corporate tax cuts were fo ALL corps, of which the oil and gas business are included. They got nothing special.”

Corporations are special. They get tax cuts and the rest of the population does not while the corporate tax cuts result in cutting government services.

The notion is that corporations will create jobs. Problem is, there are fewer of them as corporations use the cuts as well as the special grants to add to their modernization projects which cut jobs. Not only that, but the jobs which are cut are the ones which are not intensively knowledge jobs as opposed to muscle job.

We do not train sufficiently for those knowledge and skill jobs, so we end up having to import more and more of those skilled jobs.

How about keeping the corporate taxes the way they are and providing focused grants so that corporations are taught how to play nice together with the ret of society – set up industry led training facilities across the country as they have in some European countries. Then those people who are suggesting companies do not train for succession can not only get what they want, but we can see our tax dollars being put to some use that WE choose, not as corporations choose.

Finally, with government services cut, our municipalities have to keep on increasing taxes to start taking care of welfare problems, then welfare directly, then non-market housing needs, etc. etc.

We are not the only city that has tax increases and user fee increases. That is happening right across the country and no one in senior governments is giving us the tools to deal with it.

Norway is not the only country that is living off oil. But, for the time being, it is doing quite well.

The Arab states with oil were the first ones. Most, if not all, are monarchies. They pumped the money back into developing their desert bound countries. I do not know how much they are developing their goods and service producing capacities for the time when oil will run out. Then again, maybe fracking will allow them to continue to access oil and gas, albeit at a greater development cost.

Alberta was doing quite well at one time as well. Then they overspent their legacy oil money. With the oil sands coming on stream they were able to regain some of that. Now it seems they are back in hawk.

Norway is a smaller country, much more concentrated population, and they had spent a lot of money they gained through knowledge industries to bring the country up to a relatively high standard of living prior to oil. Places like Alberta had a lot of catching up to do to get to the level of service Norway enjoyed before oil.

Gus, corporate tax cuts are a debate in themselves. I wanted to point out they were not just for the O&G sector.

I tend to agree that it is a crime that the Province of Alberta has managed their finances so poorly. From Debt free and the highest growth in the country, to this?

Oldman, I never meant to imply that everyone in Alberta was doing “well”. But the majority have have felt the positive effects of O&G revenue.

Ecuseme you are confusing regional variable climate with global. You ignored the record cold Siberia had recently, cherry picking

http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/page/2/

Won’t work, Gus.

“Corporate taxes” can only come out of the same pocket all other taxes come out of ~ the citizens’.

Hopefully the citizens of some other country receiving our exports, where those taxes form part of the price of them, and not the citizens of this one, but even that’s not the panacea it’s made out to be.

For we’re in that ‘global marketplace’ now, and to hold market share and maintain an overall so-called ‘favorable’ balance of trade internationally, our products are constantly under ‘price’ attack from other countries who are trying to capture the same global markets for their stuff we are for ours.

And even if we DO manage to capture a larger share of some international market than our foreign competitors do, what happens?

If an influx of foreign ‘money’ for crude oil, or LNG, say, takes a big increase, it increases the value of the Canadian dollar internationally. For those countries have to BUY Canadian dollars to buy Canadian products. That’s a separate trade from the selling of the product itself.

An increase in the value of our buck should be a good thing, save for the little, or not so little, detriment that it makes other Canadian exports more expensive to buy in foreign markets, or tourism to Canada from abroad too expensive for many who would otherwise have come to come.

In both instances ’employment’ levels here take a hit. And so while there may be a boost in employment in the oil and LNG industries while those high prices can be obtained abroad for those products, there’ll be offsetting losses in employment in other industries, like forest products, as we price ourselves out of their traditional markets.

And then there’s the continuous advances of technology, which are necessary if we’re to have the increased productivity all the business oriented think-tanks tell us is so vital. They all displace workers ~ many of whom we can certainly re-train to do other things ~ BUT the ‘machines’ that did the displacing ALL have COSTS themselves.

And THOSE costs have to be collected from the public, citizens somewhere, in PRICES. Only we didn’t pay an ‘income’ to a ‘machine’. When it ‘consumes’ it’s consumption doesn’t liquidate a cost through price, it only transfers it forward. While the new job the displaced worker has now secured has a SEPARATE set of costs attached to his income from it.

If that public, or even part of it, is here, there is now a growing disparity between total costs flowing through into prices and total incomes, which are, in EACH SEPARATE CYCLE OF PRODUCTION, (one after the other, because ‘production and ‘consumption’, of necessity, are continuous dynamic processes) continually LESS than the total costs they’re being called upon to fully liquidate.

When all costs can’t be recovered in prices, the banks, whose creations of financial credit enabled those costs in the first place, cannot be fully repaid. When they can’t be fully repaid the credit they have ALREADY created, there is no incentive for them to create more. They will not throw ‘good money after bad’ as the saying goes. At that point the government steps in and does what private industry can not do. It increases deficit spending, and by so doing allows the floating debts of the private sector to become the fixed debts of the public one. Increased taxes pay the interest, the public debt being somewhat different than a private debt in that it can be perpetually ‘rolled over’, since a tax is really no more than a forced, involuntary price ~ always collectable from the public, so long as they have the money to pay it.

The difference between Norway and Canada is that they elect highly educated people to office . Iron Erna is a real conservative who actually conserves . What we’ve got going is consellitives . Erna puts Norway first because it’s smart .

I don’t want the government of British Columbia to buy anything with the O&G revenues. I would love to see a debt free BC. The previous governing parties of BC have spent us into so much debt. I would like to be out from underneath it.

I don’t want the government of British Columbia to buy anything with the O&G revenues. I would love to see a debt free BC. The previous governing parties of BC have spent us into so much debt. I would like to be out from underneath it.

Socredible .. as I see it the economic systems, as with the social and environmental systems, are always in a state of flux. Change one thing, and it will affect others, with everything trying to find a new level of equilibrium.

Some have one theory of what will happen if one pushes here and pulls there, and others ill have other theories not only of what will happen, but also theories of what to push and what to pull.

The balance and the changes which will happen as a result of a prime change cannot be predicted with 100% reliability, and in some cases with 10% and less reliability.

People will tweak what they meant with their predictions when they do not come out as was foreseen. People do not like to be wrong. There are few who will admit to mistaken predictions.

One can postulate as much as they want. The only truth is that we do not know, in a complex integrated system, what will happen when we adjust something. We might have a good chance of predicting the immediate outcome in some cases. However, we do not have a good handle of what the chain reactions are going to be after the initial action.

Anyone who tries to promote they have the answer is no better than a snake oil salesman.

The fallacy of predictive economic models is written up in the link to Scientific American

The article concludes with:
“That financial models are plagued by calibration problems is no surprise to Wilmott–he notes that it has become routine for modelers in finance to simply keep recalibrating their models over and over again as the models continue to turn out bad predictions. “When you have to keep recalibrating a model, something is wrong with it,” he says. “If you had to readjust the constant in Newton’s law of gravity every time you got out of bed in the morning in order for it to agree with your scale, it wouldn’t be much of a law But in finance they just keep on recalibrating and pretending that the models work.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/finance-why-economic-models-are-always-wrong

Same goes with climate models.

Well, I wouldn’t disagree with any of that, Gus. However we do know, or at least we think we do, certain things regarding ‘economics’ and also certain things in respect to ‘accounting’, as it presently works.

For instance, and I don’t think many thinking people would disagree, that the primary role of any sane economic system should be to produce or provide and deliver goods and services to all the people who are a part of that economic system for their continued consumption, and do so in the most efficient manner possible.

Because we are all, of necessity, consumers, and when we stop being such, we’re dead.

And ‘in the most efficient manner possible’, because anything which conserves our own personal stock of ‘human’ energy in its efforts to actually gain the sources of that energy, allows the surplus energy we then possess to be applied in other ways.

Some of which might be ‘invested’ to further increase the surplus available to us. And does, and so on. We have no idea just how far this process could lead, since scientific discovery and invention seem to be infinite, and the future possibilities springing therefrom are just as largely beyond our present comprehension as some of the things we have now would’ve been to our parents and grandparents.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that so far as any of this goes we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s likely to be discovered in the future ~ including in the way of new sources of natural resources, and certainly in better utilisation of the ones we have. That far from facing a world of impending scarcities and mandated rationing and centralised controls, the reality is that we’re already in a world where increasing ‘surpluses’, (and more specifically, how to sell them ALL at a price that covers the ‘financial’ costs), are likely to be more the problem.

And this is only so because we haven’t learned yet how to make the current rules and conventions governing ‘accounting’ as we presently practice it conform to this virtually certain fact.

What we do know is, at present, we seem to go out of our way in so many ways to try to make the physical FACTS concerning production and consumption fit the FIGURES the accountant uses with those ‘$’ signs in front of them. The ones that are supposed to only accurately ‘reflect’ those facts numerically.

And while this can work admirably in computing the financial costs of the ‘individual’ efforts of all producers as to whether what they’re producing is what’s needed or wanted in the satiation of some human consumptive need or desire, it is a system which also contains a correctable ‘flaw’ in it as it relates to the economy as a whole and the ‘collective’ efforts of ALL producers taken together.

We currently, and increasingly, as ‘capital costs’ rise relative to current ‘labor costs’ as the components of prices, charge into those prices sums representing capital depreciation. This is entirely right and proper from the standpoint of cost accountancy. For ultimately both the product, and the plant that made it, have to be paid for from the only source it can be paid for ~ the consumer.

But while we’re doing this we have at present NO concurrent way to FULLY credit the consumers, all of us, with sums representing ongoing Capital APPRECIATION. Which is always greater, barring some actual disaster that reduces productive capacity.

If it were not always greater, ‘progress’ would be an impossibility. We’d be wearing out the overall ‘plant’ of civilisation at a faster rate than we’re replacing and adding to it ~ and we’re certainly not doing that, (even though much perfectly good ‘plant’ is pre-maturely scrapped, just to try to make the ‘figures’ work better as ‘figures’ ~ and WE pay the cost of all that, too, as consumers).

That we do get partially credited, through some improvements in process, is undeniable. But that in no ways covers the whole difference.

In short, we’ve solved the ‘production’ problem long ago. We don’t need 100% of the workforce even working, let alone working longer or harder, to provide 100% of what we collectively consume. Our problem today is a ‘distribution’ problem. And the agency of ‘distribution’ is money ~ and it is to the way that system is presently organised that we have to look if we want to stave off increasing ‘financial’ poverty in the midst of an ever greater ‘physical’ plenty.

I agree, seamut.

In both cases of looking forward we take a risk in not being prepared for unexpected consequences. We can try to prepare for a reasonable range of unexpected consequences. That is why some will carry a more robust first aid kit in a vehicle if travelling on remote roads, for instance. We come as prepared as we can be.

There are those, of course, who are deniers. They are great drivers and they can avoid those risks. Others are extremists and simply will not travel on such roads.

So it is with everything that is predictive. We have believers and we have deniers and we have extremists on both ends of the spectrum.

;-)

“In short, we’ve solved the ‘production’ problem long ago.”

I agree totally.

“Our problem today is a ‘distribution’ problem”.

Again, I agree.

The mindset that we have to overcome is that society should not have to pay for basic sustenance of those who do not work because they can’t or do not wish to.

There are systems in place in other societies, but they would be labelled socialist or communist on this site and during other public discourse.

We do not maintain buildings, roads, parks … and we do not maintain people’s reasonable living standards …

The country of Norway has one governing body that controls whole the country. Very easy to come to an agreement. Canada has provinces that have the means of saying screw you to thy neighbour province, we don’t like you. Whats mine is mine. That doesn’t happen here. We have Christy saying at first , share the wealth or the pipeline wont be built. Like it is up to her .That’s funny ,,, Harper has last call , dangle the golden carrot ,,, its a done deal, get on with life or give up anything in life you use that IS PART OF or contains anything made from OIL , See you up in the cave :} Cheers

That doesn’t happen here , you know , I meant there :}

PS , five million people sitting on 900 billion, I would be afraid of a take -over ,lots of crazy people around :}