RE:Lost in the Wilderness - Alberta's Oil & GasI will partially agree with you. We can't seem to get our Oil and Gas resource to tide water. But Ralph Klein was a big proponent of the single customer strategy. Ralph had zero foresight and focussed only on the US. He lobbied against any "national energy strategy", saw no need to expand his customer base in Canada, and certainly never gave a second thought to oversees exports. Of course given the environment at the time it is easy to understand his tendencies. But Alberta has suffered from a gross lack of forward looking leadership since the Lougheed days and the lack of vision is now coming back to bite us where the sun doesn't shine. Our policy has been to approve every project that is proposed and assume that there will always be a strong US appetite for our hydrocarbons.
On the Federal side we desperately need a strong government with a national vision. We certainly don't need Pierre Trudeau industry killing policy but we need a national energy strategy. Unfortunately the current government is much too political and idealistic to make the hard decisions and much too weak to enforce policy for the good of nation at large. We are still the same country that built the transcanada pipeline, the transcanada highway, the sea to sea railway etc. Our forefathers must be rolling over in their graves when they see the stagnation in nation building policy and the wimpy current day politicians who refuse to deal with difficult problems.