Controlling Interest: The Canadian Gas and Oil Stakes

Kenneth M. Glazier was Chief Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Alberta.

Once in a while a book is written that makes you sit up and think and that even changes your mind. This is one of them. David Crane, Economics Editor of the Toronto Star, brings an impressive background as a reporter in Ottawa for the Globe and Mail and as the author of the Dictionary of Canadian Economics. He deals with a theme which ought to be of concern to every Canadian: who owns and controls our natural resources, particularly oil and gas? Marshalling facts and figures, he examines the role that the multi-national companies, mostly American, have played in the economic development of Canada. Over the years Canadians have been told that everything has been done in the interests of Canada. Not so. The statistics reveal what a large share of the profits went back to New York or Houston and how the U.S. head office not only controlled the profits but also directed the policies. It was to correct this procedure that the Foreign Investment Review Agencies (FIRA) and the National Energy Policy (NEP) were established, to make certain that Canada, like every other country in the world, would control its own resources and that more money would be sent to Ottawa as taxes rather than to Oklahoma as profit. The objective was that by 1990 at least 50 percent of the oil and gas production operations in Canada would be Canadian-owned. A reasonable expectation — and yet the outbursts of attacks on FIRA and the NEP made one wonder how much longer Canadians would accept this servile state and what D. Crane calls “poor stewardship” of our resources. Even in the year since the book was published, there has been an encouraging change for more Canadian ownership, along with the realization that, while some modifications have been made, both FIRA and NEP are here to stay. This book ought to be required reading for all politicians on the provincial and federal scene and for the executives in all oil and gas companies. Many of the facts will disturb them, but all will benefit — except those whose motto is “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”