For all the political strife over cost overruns of the two projects as they were built, and their initial struggles, the added provincial royalties in the 21st century made up for that in spades. And the further investment in northwest Saskatchewan’s heavy oil patch has far outstripped the money spent on the Bi-Provincial Upgrader, even when you adjust for inflation.
That, unequivocally, proves the investment in the upgraders was sound, and visionary. It just took a while to get there.
And in the meantime, tens of thousands of people have fed their families and paid their bills as a direct result of those upgraders. I was one of them. Literally hundreds of thousands of Saskatchewan people have had their health care, or schools, or roads paid for directly from the royalties from the development of heavy oil.
Would heavy oil have been developed without the upgraders? Perhaps, but nowhere near the extent that they were, and are, to this day. Would Husky have spent up to $350 million each on their 10,000 barrel per day Lloyd thermal projects without the Lloydminster Upgrader? Doubtful.
Good series. Thanks.
We as taxpayers in Canada need to generate a ‘Class Action Lawsuit’ for malicious slander that Trudeau has put upon its citizens with absolutely no proof…just the Liberal Government paying out on a fantasy supposition in his claims of genocide as his justification of payments.
Everyone in the school system back in the day got whacked with corporal punishment…it just wasn’t confined to the Native Community.
Yup re the corporal punishment.
Either whacked upside the head in shop class or the strap from the nuns in various flavours of thickness.
The studs were to scare you straight.
God bless them, I learned a painful but we’ll deserved lesson.
Spare the rod, nope.
Remind the old commie Dippers that they were wrong about everything.
That’s something we don’t do enough of; reminding them of how all of their predictions of doom and gloom were wrong.
Remember how getting rid of the Canadian Wheat Board was going to destroy western farmers?
Casual conversation with an NDPer around the coffee table; “Hey, remember how wrong you were about everything? What has been learned?”
Do not shut the upgraders down, continue to burn coal. Keep the lights on.
No more begging, pleading, suing from The West. Let the Feds take the province to court for a change.
In hindsight Devine was a good Premier.
He had some spendy MLAs but in the grand scheme of things…meh.
Back in the day, the feds and Ontario gov’t used to use planes with magnetosondes to find iron deposits, so mining operations could happen more easily.
That was then. This is now.
Now they try to shut things down, instead of build.
They are the enemy of all humans, even the stupid leftists who support them.
They want to leave it in the ground for the future, for their Masters benefit.
I enjoyed this series. Thanks for posting.
“Would heavy oil have been developed without the upgraders?”
That is not the salient question. The salient question is, ‘would someone have built upgraders just somewhere else’? I have no reason to believe they couldn’t have been built by a private entity somewhere else. In any event, funneling royalties into the maw of government is not a plus.
“Somewhere else” would be not Saskatchewan.
Which is fine. The oil gets shipped over there and then exported. Taxpayers get to not be used and abused for the latest dumb scheme to walk into the premier’s head. These kinds of government projects should be illegal regardless of profitability.
Who cares as long as it gets built.
I wouldn’t mind the .gov people lining their pockets if a few new heavy oil refinerys could get built.
Heck any refinery.
I, the taxpayer and free markets enthusiast, care. Government has a bad record of running these things. The Lougheed years are littered with government-built factories gone to ruin.