Diane: Yes. The biggest rip-off, no surprise there, occurred in the oil and gas sector. Under the FTA and NAFTA the U.S. basically determined the quantity and the price at which it would buy Alberta’s oil and gas. In the 1990s, Norway, for the sale of a comparable amount of oil and gas collected something like 25 billion dollars more a year. 25 billion dollars in the 1990s was real money, even in Canadian dollars. With all that money Canada could have easily funded the National Health System instead of turning it over to the private sector, to those same American and Canadian profiteers who had suffocated the public system by denying the government the funds it needed to operate it efficiently.

Johnny: Amazing, absolutely amazing.

Diane: I am not against free trade. Free trade is good for all partners, if the partners own the goods, services or resource they are trading. For Canada this was not the case.

Johnny: I’m glad we cleared that up.

Diane: Johnny, if you will permit me to ask you a question.

Johnny: By all means. Go ahead.

Diane: What was the richest province in Canada at the height of Canada’s oil and gas boom? The period when Canada was literally pissing away its oil and gas reserves.

Johnny: That’s a no brainer. The province of Alberta.

Diane: Correct. Now, did you know this? While the rich and powerful were wallowing in petro-dollars, the province’s largest cities had to depend on seniors, which they threatened with fines and jail time, to clear snow off the sidewalks for free.

Johnny: You are making that up?

Diane: It’s true. In researching Freddy the Freeloading Country I came across an article in a Canadian newspaper about a senior citizen called Olga Friesen who took the government to court for forcing her, in her declining years, to clean the snow off the sidewalk – for free.

Johnny: That’s insane!

Diane: You think that’s insane! Here is a piece of insanity on a national scale. I did not use the word “pissing away” lightly and it was not because I have been watching to much prime-time pornography. I really wanted to get your audience’s attention and get them to appreciate how Canada squandered such a precious commodity as its oil and gas reserves.

Johnny: I was wondering why an eloquent speaker like yourself would use vulgarity in polite conversation.

Diane: What Klein, the Premier of Alberta at the time and his friends did was vulgar, vulgar in the extreme. I know some of you who are familiar with Canada’s history will say, “You’re not telling me anything new here!” Canada devastated its fisheries; it devastated the great Boreal snow forest, its coastal rain forest, all its forest; they pored so much fertilizer on farmland that it made drinking water from its lakes and rivers a death defying act, and the list goes on. The production of oil from wells gives off little green house gases and is relatively cheap to produce. Alberta, under the Klein dynasty, literally “pissed off” this easy to produce natural resource thinking they could replace it by oil from mining. Mining oil is a lot more expensive and creates a lot more green-house gases, a hell of a lot more. Keep in mind that this was at the outset of global warming. To get the tar out of the sands, the substance from which oil and oil derivatives are obtained, the sands must be heated and this takes a lot of energy and a lot of water. The process creates a tremendous amount of air pollution of the green house variety while wasting approximately a barrel of fresh water for every barrel of oil produced.

Johnny: It’s incredible that in the face of a global crisis, that could lead to the extinction of the human race because of green-houses gases, the government and the oil and gas industry were planning on mining oil and in spite of the enormous amount of green house gases that would generate, to replace the oil from depleted wells!

Diane: If the mining of the Athabaska Tar Sands of Alberta had been allowed to reach full production, Canada would have become the number one, numero uno producer of green house gases on the planet. How is that for insanity?

Johnny: At least the world was not that insane and stopped the development of the Athabaska Tar sands before Alberta and Canada fried the planet.

Diane: Yes, but the economy never recovered. So much for the vision of short term profiteers and their government supporters!

Johnny: The Canadian economy was somewhat of a basket case when the fracture occurred wasn’t it?

Diane: With depleted natural resources, a manufacturing sector that manufactured only when its foreign head office said it could, a lost cultural identity,  there was nothing much for Canada to fall back on to save itself.

Johnny: Speaking of culture. By the way, I did not mean by my earlier comment that you are not a cultured person when I said “I’d never known you to place much value on culture”. Quite the contrary, I simply meant no economic value.

Diane: No need to apologize.

Johnny: I still can’t see how a country’s adoption of this or that economic model could cause it to lose its culture?