Many in the Alberta oil patch are blaming a slowdown on Premier Ed Stelmach’s new royalty regime
Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program has become a unifying force in Alberta, a hate so pronounced you can hang a provincial identity from it. So what happens when Albertans begin comparing their present circumstances to those bad days in the early 1980s, but blame their own government rather than international economic turmoil? The Calgary Herald’s Jason Fekete travels to the oil and gas hub of Drayton Valley to find out. “This one compares with 1981,” Fekete hears. “We were busy right up until D-Day (implementation of the NEP), and then it just went ‘Bang, you’re done.’ And this one is very similar.”