Compare & Contrast Newfoundland and Alberta's oil policy Social Essay

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OIL POLICIES OF NEWFOUNDLAND & ALBERTA:
COMPARED & CONTRASTED
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Background
Historically, fossil resources are shown to create unprecedented economic booms (accompanied by cyclical busts) and to impact local and national environment and social life in numerous enduring ways. The revenues fossil resources, particularly oil and gas, generally yield high returns in resource-rich regions and, as such, reshape local and national economies and politics in equally significant ways. The policies governments adopt to manage natural resources in general, fossil resources in particular, are, moreover, extremely diverse and no less fluctuating at best. More specifically, oil resources, once discovered and produced, usually raise a wide range of complicated policy matters cutting across different political, economic, social and environmental lines. The revenues generated from oil production and distribution activities, for example, generally reshape skew economic activities in a given area and, ultimately, political interests – at considerable cascading effects for social and environmental issues.
In Canada, oil has played a central role in (re)shaping country’s public policies in numerous ways. For one, discovery of offshore oil in eastern provinces, particularly Newfoundland, has not only reshaped provincial economic landscape, generally for better, but, more important, highlighted underling, simmering push and pulls factors between Canada’s federal and provincial governments (Blake 2015). Moreover, oil resources, as revenue generators and public policy drivers, raised – and continue to raise – numerous questions not only about federal-provincial political jockeying but, probably, more important, about Canada’s distribution of revenues fairly and equitably among different provinces of varying degrees of development, demographic distribution, revenue resources, aboriginal concentration and, in more recent years, carbon footprint.
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To put matters into perspective, a closer examination is required of how oil policies impact and are informed by different federal and provincial political, economic, social, demographic and environmental inputs. Two provinces are, for current purposes, of central interest: Newfoundland and Alberta. The differentials between Newfoundland and Alberta, emphasized largely by different shares of oil resources, are discussed to identify how oil policies, informed by different provincial priorities and federal response, have evolved over years in ways consistent to provincial realities as well as federal involvement.
Newfoundland and Alberta: Oil Policy in Context
The historic developments of Newfoundland and Alberta, as part of Canada’s federal system, inform evolution of oil policies in each province independently and in response to federal government. If anything, development needs have defined not only each province’s public policies, including oil policy, but also each province’s evolving response to federal government – a particularly significant policy area of far-reaching implications beyond oil policies. Specifically, Newfoundland, historically less developed and “poor,” has negotiated federal objections and direct involvement to use province’s offshore oil reserves, particularly during 1970s (Blake; Plourde 2010), in more strenuous, politically and economically speaking, ways compared to Alberta. This stertorous political – and, for that matter, economic – effort is perhaps best captured as follows:
The federal system had not worked particularly well for Newfoundland and Labrador as illustrated by the financial and economic disparity between it and the rest of Canada. Little had changed in the thirty-five years since it joined Canada. It was the poorest province in 1949 and remained so – in 1980, earned income per capita was $4,228
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compared to the Canadian average of $7,798, and its rate of unemployment was 15.4 per cent, which was double the Canadian average. Its dependence on federal transfers could only be reversed if it were to ge...