All about chicken guts and tea leaves

Gary Park

For Petroleum News

It wasn’t the kind of reinforcement needed for a government concerned about the misinformation it believes is being spread by opponents of oil sands development, or, for that matter, the industry’s own pledge earlier in January to engage in more open communication.

At a time when the sector is in a fight for its survival, the Alberta government sent a top-level cabinet minister to deliver the keynote speech at a Canadian Oil Sands Summit in Calgary on Jan. 14.

What Alberta Treasury Board President Lloyd Snelgrove left behind was a baffled and bewildered audience.

His 20-minute address was described by some as bizarre and rambling, failing to touch on the vital issues affecting the oil sands and offering little that was conclusive.

Snelgrove made only an indirect reference to his government’s royalty increases and injected some boosterish references to the government’s own role in tackling the immense challenges facing the industry.

And this from the man who is charged with directing the government’s recently unveiled strategic energy plan, including a supposed 50-year vision for sustainable development of the oil sands, including a set of measurable goals, strategies, objectives and action plans to be acted on over the next 20 years.

He said the Oil Sands Sustainable Development Secretariat, created in mid-2007 to deal with the impact of then-explosive growth in the oil sands and the related industrial heartland region of Alberta, is doing just fine.

“While there are certain challenges and issues ahead of us (the secretariat), is working very well,” Snelgrove declared.

Moving on from there, he offered what seemed to be a vague defense of Alberta’s new royalty framework, arguing that, like industry, the government must be accountable to its shareholders — the people of Alberta.

For an industry still seething over the royalty changes, he served up a sop, telling companies that Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach will listen to their worries.

“There are no issues that can’t be brought to the table and dealt with,” he said to an industry that overwhelmingly believes the government does not understand the damage it has done to Alberta’s economic engine.

“Are we going to be happy all the time?” Snelgrove asked, adding: “I doubt it.”

But he assured the delegates that — even if he was not their leading advocate in government circles — Energy Minister Mel Knight would keep the concerns of the industry on the table. “Mel is a very, very strong proponent for our industry,” he said.

Snelgrove’s final words of comfort were the ultimate head-scratcher as he laid out how the government is handling the worst economic crisis in 80 years and the precipitous fall in commodity prices.

“As you know, we have some of the most high-priced people in the world in the legislative assembly basement sorting out the chicken guts and drying out the tea leaves and we will be basing our projections based on those outcomes, the same as we did last year,” he said.