It is hard to remember now, but there was a time when it was the Conservatives who wanted to make oil more expensive and the Liberals who campaigned against it.
It was 40 years ago this year that the Liberals brought down Joe Clark’s minority government over a budget that would have increased the tax on gasoline by 17 cents a gallon — about 4 cents a litre, or roughly the same as this spring’s first tranche of the carbon tax — while allowing the federally regulated price of oil to rise.
Prices were already soaring in the wake of the Iranian revolution (the second major spike in the price of oil after the Arab oil embargo of 1973); the Liberals protested, in the words of the fatal motion, that the budget placed “an unfair and unnecessary burden … on middle- and lower-income Canadians.” They fought and won the 1980 election as the party of cheap oil.
Indeed, the National Energy Program, introduced in that fall’s budget, deliberately suppressed the domestic price of oil below the world price, as well as imposed new taxes and other measures aimed at confiscating surging oil revenues for the federal government, to be distributed to its
At the time it all made perfect political, if neither economic nor environmental, sense. Since the 1930s, the Liberals had won a string of elections — 10 of 14! — on the strength of their domination of the large and populous provinces of central Canada: Ontario and Quebec. Both were heavy users of oil, as the locus not only of much of the country’s population but of its heavy industry; neither produced it.
Oil production, on the other hand, was largely confined to one province, Alberta, which had neither the population, with just seven per cent of the seats in the House of Commons, nor the voting record (it had never returned more than a handful of Liberals in any election since Laurier’s time) to much interest the Grits.
It was no contest.
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See Also:
(1) Old John Tory vs. new John Tory
(2) Canadians are primed for some Trump-style populism
(3) Local reaction to Doug Ford’s comments on TDSB spending
(4) Doug Ford brushes off boos at Special Olympics event
