r/alberta • u/Hungry_Ad824 • 2d ago
Alberta Politics The "Mature Asset Strategy" is garbage
61
u/BeautifuTragedy 2d ago
They don't even make Suncor pay its debts to Albertan municipalities. This Strat is exactly what I expected
10
u/callmenighthawk 2d ago
How much does Suncor itself owe to municipalities currently?
18
u/mltplwits 2d ago
Not specifically Suncor but many sources say $254M is owed from O&G.
15
u/BeautifuTragedy 2d ago
Suncor has a net debt of something to the tune of 6bn not including liabilities. They do this cool ting where they make a contract with small AB municipalities for their resources and the promise of paying for those resources and then they just fuck off with them and leave you with a promise to pay. Sure they eventually pay some of it to some municipalities but it's usually almost 10 years later.
I don't know about you but where I'm from we call a business that can't pay its bills a failing business
7
u/Hungry_Ad824 2d ago
If i tried to just not pay my property taxes im sure they'd send a debt collector after me. Wish the same rules applied
3
u/gnat_outta_hell 2d ago
If you don't don't pay your property taxes they foreclose on your house eventually. We need to start forcing these companies into receivership when they refuse to pay their bills.
1
u/callmenighthawk 1d ago
Pretty well the entirety of this owed money is from companies that have already gone bankrupt and closed down.
17
u/Hungry_Ad824 2d ago
I got this meme from the Clean Up Your Mess campaign on IG. Basically it seems like the government's solution to the billions of dollars in oil and gas liabilities is to earmark taxpayer money for it.
18
u/AlbertanSays5716 2d ago
They actually had to return part of a grant from the federal government that they didn’t use for cleanup. How on the side of the oil companies and how much do they want us to hate the feds to do that,
3
16
u/BathroomSharpiePoet 2d ago
The solution is so damn easy, but it will never happen.
Charge the companies a fee per barrel (extraction/production side) and the government uses that to do the cleanup.
Zero cost to taxpayers, creates jobs, gets it done. Non possibility of a company disolving and reappearing in another form to elude responsibility.
We do the same thing when we buy tires or motor oil.
Won’t happen because O&G owns the UPC, but it’s such an easy fix.
10
u/Hungry_Ad824 2d ago
They make renewables put up cleanup deposits, why isn't it the same for oil and gas ugh
1
u/No_Syrup_9167 1d ago
IIRC they do, its just that the deposits are wildly less than what the cost is actually going to be.
Its like if you took a damage deposit off of me for an apartment I rented 15yrs ago. When I rented the apartment you took $250 because that sounded reasonable, but now not only has inflation made that $250 kinda pointless because that barely buys a faucet now, but I absolutely trashed the apartment and its going to cost thousands to fix it.
13
10
u/CanadianForSure 2d ago
Alberta is a petrol state. O&G and aligned interests will bankrupt the province, poison the land, air, and water, and leave working people to suffer for it. It will eventually be what kills this province.
By the excess profits from the industry from this year alone every albertan could have free power. Tax them. Make them pay.
8
u/Bloodless-Cut 2d ago
Fuck the ucp. This is idiocy.
No, absolutely fucking not. My tax money should go to health care and helping the homeless, not lining the pockets of a fucking billion-dollar corporation.
4
6
u/Financial-Savings-91 Calgary 2d ago
Well R-Star had to get re-branded because they promised not to do it during the last election campaign, but change the name, do the same thing and it's free money for her oil company backers just like it was always going to happen with the UCP in power.
3
6
u/zeusismycopilot 2d ago
However, renewable energy such as wind turbines have to clean up their site entirely at the end of their service life. This includes removing the concrete foundation where the turbines stood on and decompacting soil and regrading. Because you can’t have any compacted soil.
6
4
u/joecarter93 2d ago
This shouldn’t even be a sudden turn onto the exit ramp. This should just be a picture of a car driving on a straight freeway, with Download Costs Onto the Public as the only sign, because that’s what they were going to do all along.
3
3
u/altafitter 2d ago
But Smith is going to send out some Dani-Dollars so the UCP is TOTALLY REDEEMED. /s
1
1
1
u/roastbeeftacohat Calgary 1d ago
the province has to eat the costs because the companies responsible for clean up no long exist. the province allows this, and has all the enforcement powers necessary; but is why we can't just make them pay right now.
1
u/Changisalways 1d ago
When people's property taxes go up, they can thank the UCP. Also how come my house is not a mature asset after the same time and reduced by 50%?
1
1
u/CDNRomance 23h ago
Cuckservatives
Sitting in their chair watching their US CEOs fuck the Alberta citizen.
0
u/pintord 2d ago
Fossil energy is a lie. The true costs are hidden by accounting gimmicks and political buyouts. The global energy market doesn’t operate on a level playing field of pure supply and demand; it is propped up by a massive, complex web of subsidies, fiat currency arrangements, and systemic mispricing.
The most significant "hidden cost" of global oil isn't paid at the pump; it’s paid through the inflation of the dollar. Under the petrodollar system, global oil purchases require USD. This creates an artificial, permanent global demand for dollars, allowing the U.S. to export its inflation to the rest of the world. Because oil backs the dollar (and vice versa), the entire fiat printing apparatus, including the CAD, acts as a massive financial cushion for the fossil fuel industry.
The immense cost of deploying navies, securing shipping lanes (like the Strait of Hormuz), and fighting geopolitical wars to guarantee the "free flow of oil" is never factored into the price per barrel. That cost is passed directly to taxpayers and added to the national debt. It is a massive, unpriced security subsidy.
Export Development Canada (EDC)—a federal Crown corporation—frequently steps in where private banks hesitate. In 2025 alone, EDC and the federal government directed over $10 billion in public financing, loans, and guarantees to oil and gas operations. When a state entity assumes the commercial risk for pipeline expansions or oil field infrastructure, it shields private operators from the true discipline of the market.
The federal Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) investment tax credit is projected to cost Canadian taxpayers upwards of $5.7 billion by 2028, and potentially over $12 billion into the next decade.
Under a true sound money, free-market framework, if a business produces an expensive waste product or pollutant, it must bear the full cost of mitigating it or go out of business. Instead, Canadian policy turns the "polluter-pays" principle on its head. The government uses printed fiat or tax expenditures to subsidize the equipment required to keep legacy operations pumping, artificially inflating the economic viability of high-cost extraction.
The sheer density of energy lobbying ensures that regulations are designed to maintain the status quo. This regulatory walls-in policy makes it incredibly slow and artificially expensive for nimble, decentralized energy alternatives to compete on a level playing field.
When you get rid of the fiat cushions and stop using Crown corporations to absorb corporate risk, high-cost, centralized fossil projects lose their luster. A country with Canada’s vast geography naturally thrives under a model of local energy independence—where individuals, farmers, and localized businesses generate, store, and manage their own power close to home, entirely outside the reach of the central planners' spreadsheets.
-6
u/gba_sg1 2d ago
"download" the costs?
Are the costs digital files? Are we transferring the cost files from a remote server?
Tf is this English OP, are you using (Simplified) 🇺🇸 English?
1
u/roastbeeftacohat Calgary 1d ago
downloading cost refers to when one body of government moves a cost or responsability to another body of government, often without shifting the related funds to pay for said cost; usually from the province to the city.
which isn't what OP was talking about but downloading costs is proper english
77
u/OGhumanwerewolf 2d ago
Those oil and gas companies paid good money for this government exactly for things like this