Oilsands must be balanced with other sectors, Mulcair says in visit to Edmonton

EDMONTON - The Canadian economy needs a better balance among manufacturing, the service sector and primary industries like oilsands mining, federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said Saturday.

“What we are talking about is re-establishing the balanced economy that Canada had painstakingly built up since the Second World War,” Mulcair told reporters in Edmonton while attending the Alberta NDP’s annual convention.

“We don’t think one has to be sacrificed for the other.”

His remarks were similar, though toned down from the controversial “Dutch disease” stance he took earlier this year, when he argued that the oil industry’s success has pushed up the value of the dollar to the point that it was hurting the manufacturing sector in other parts of the country.

Those comments angered many in the west, as has his party’s opposition to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would carry 525,000 barrels of bitumen to the West coast for shipment to Asia. Federal hearings into the proposed the pipeline are underway in Edmonton this weekend, putting Mulcair in the midst of the debate critical to Alberta’s oil industry.

Though he did not mention Dutch disease again on Saturday, Mulcair stuck by his contention that Ontario’s manufacturing sector is being “hollowed out,” noting that 500,000 jobs have been lost in recent years as exporters lose their competitive advantage.

While opposed to Northern Gateway, Mulcair said it was important to find new markets for Alberta oil, possibly in Eastern Canada, and to keep jobs in refining and upgrading at home rather than shipping those jobs to Asia or the U.S.

“We have to be sure other markets can be found and you have a way to get the product to other markets,” he said.

“We also have to make sure we are adding value here.”

Both the proposed Keystone pipeline to the U.S. Gulf coast and the Gateway pipeline to Kitimat are unacceptable because they will ship raw bitumen to foreign refineries, Mulcair said.

That takes the country back to the days of being a “hewer of wood and drawer of water” and “the (federal) Conservatives would like to keep us there,” he said.

He said there are also serious environmental concerns for the “pristine” West Coast.

Linda Duncan, the New Democrat MP for Edmonton-Strathcona, also defended her party’s energy policy. She said it has similarities to the policies of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, who also warned against shipping value-added jobs out of the province.

Lougheed’s principles “echo the position of our party,” said Duncan, who noted the former premier also called for an orderly pace of development in the oilsands.

She further noted that Shell and Total last week asked the European Union to consider raising the price of carbon, to make it more economic to take measures such as carbon sequestration to reduce greenhouse gases.

The provincial NDP is also opposed to pipelines that ship bitumen to foreign countries, leader Brian Mason said.

He noted that when the first Keystone pipeline into the U.S. was approved, plans for “Upgrader Alley” northeast of Edmonton, with 40,000 refining and upgrading jobs, were shelved.

“There was a direct connection.”