Hello Gord.

20 Dec 05 07:27, you wrote to All:

 GH> Not necessarily my view.  I agree on one thing though Joe Clark was
 GH> honest and my MP for years.

I liked Joe Clark as well. Harper is a Mulroney clone. Mulroney tripled the
deficit and more than doubled the national debt, by introducing huge
corporate tax cuts and increasing government spending at the same time. He
scrapped the NEP, and for all the negative hoopla spread around in Alberta
about the NEP, if one looked closely at it, it would have saved a lot of
Canadian oil companies that went belly-up when the oil boom went bust in
the early 90's. Instead our oil companies got snatched up one by one by
foreign interests, mainly from the USA and Hong Kong. Now as a result, we
no longer own our own country's natural resources.

My dad worked for Dome Petroleum when it was wholly Canadian-owned, and was
the largest oil company in Canada. It thrived on the NEP, and in the 80's
it was the NEP that drove much of the exploration in the Bowfort Sea and
the tar sands, when the price of oil was too low for private companies to
want to invest in those projects on their own. Now we're reaping the
benefits of those investments made under the NEP, yet the NEP continues to
be demonized in Alberta, and a large chunk of those end benefits are
leaving this country to large multinational corporations.

As a small example of this; who now owns what was left of Dome Petroleum?
Amoco does. Husky and Mohawk? Owned by Hong Kong interests now. Canadian
ownership in the oil patch is now much lower than it has ever been in the
past. We have the Conservatives to thank for that.


--- GoldED/W32 3.0.1