I can't say I know a lot about New Brunswick politics. But it is my understanding the big issue in the recent provincial election was fracking. The incumbent Conservative government was betting the province's economic future on allowing fracking, and the upstart Liberals wanted to kill it.
It sounds like the Conservatives were on their way out anyhow, and some commentators seem to think supporting fracking actually helped them retain seats in a province known for huge swings in seat counts when they change government. (Remember when they had zero official opposition?)
Whatever the underlying politics were, the end result is the new, very young Liberal premier is likely going to follow the lead of its neighbour to the east and ban fracking.
So in other words, they are choosing to be poor.
That's mighty rich, pun intended, coming from Nova Scotia. The home of the Sydney tar ponds is freaked out about the environmental risks of fracking, a safe process that is probably 1,000 times less hazardous than their tar ponds. Strike that. There's no comparison at all, because fracking is not even in the same ball game.
Some people think fracking is new and scary. It's not. In my research on the 60th anniversary of the Weyburn oilfield, one of the largest in Canada, I found this little nugget from one of the engineers who worked on it in the earliest days. Don Redman (1918-2013) said, "It turned out that three or four years later, Mobil Oil was able to obtain budgets for drilling in the Weyburn area, after Central Del Rio had discovered the Weyburn oilfield and came in and drilled their wells at that time. Central Del Rio again, drilled a well in the Weyburn oilfield that turned out to be a small producer in a tight reservoir that made both oil and water, very similar to the discovery well drilled by California Standard in the Manitoba area. Again, we drilled several of these wells, drilled them this time with rotary rigs, acidized and fracked the well, spent considerable time on trying to complete the wells with minimum water production and were unsuccessful. But (we) kept noticing that the wells appeared to be making more oil than you would expect from a tight, thin reservoir like we were getting in the wells."
Did you catch that? Those wells were fracked in the late 1950s. And yet the world did not end.
In a region that's overfished its cod and done nasty things with coal, it's complete and utter bovine feces that they have the gall to expect us, those who frac, to give a frac about those who won't, and expect us to pay their bills.
Make no mistake. The puns might be harsh, but the reality is those provinces in this country that frac - Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia - have been paying the bills, and those who could, but won't - Quebec, and now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick - are not.
Imagine how much stronger Canada would be as a whole if those easterners would actually get off their collective arses and develop the resources they have? They want strong social programs? Here's how you pay for them. Here's how you give your university students ridiculously low tuitions, ahem, Quebec.
Fracking works. It's safe. It's been done for decades. And it pays the bills. Stop being satisfied with being equalization beggars, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It's time to give a frac.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
