oilpatch

‘People are sucked into the drama of all the things that are negative. They can’t see so much abundance around them, and how much we already have’

Ex-Colleague Coyne has an excellent column on the emerging political split between the resource-extracting parts of the country and the sentimental nationalists who think every drop of bitumen and chip of timber sent abroad makes baby Jesus cry. I noticed one snippet, though, which goes to show how even the most trend-aware and detail-oriented columnist (that’s what he is!) can be held prisoner by persistent images of the past:
Whatever its merits or demerits as policy, [the mix of economic nationalism and environmentalism found among the NDP leadership candidates] amounts to ceding the resource-producing areas of the country to the Conservatives. Once, that might have been thought to mean Alberta. Today it means most of the West—the richest, fastest-growing parts of the country. Increasingly, it will mean Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, too.
Will mean? Newfoundland’s economy is probably already more resource-dependent, and particularly oil-dependent, than Alberta’s economy has been at any point in its history. For fiscal 2011-12, non-renewable resources provided 27% of the Alberta government’s own-source revenues. In Newfoundland the corresponding figure is 46%. Here’s how the shares of total industrial GDP earned by mining, oil, and gas stack up over the last ten years in the two provinces: