Canada

I mean there was a fuck up at a national level as well. Canada gutted its publicly owned oil assets and handed the whole show over to private capital. This is a textbook case of neoliberalism doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Back in the 70s and early 80s, there was actually a wave of state intervention. The feds were terrified of American control of our resources, so in 1975 Trudeau created Petro-Canada as a federal Crown corporation. Out west, provinces followed suit with Saskatchewan starting SaskOil in 1973.

But then Mulroney’s PC swept into power in 1984. Mulroney immediately began gutting the nationalist energy policies at the federal level. The process of killing Petro-Canada as a public entity began in 1990 when they sold the first shares to the public. This was an ideologically driven decision.

Alberta absolutely loved the whole privatization wave and by the time Ralph Klein was Premier in the 90s, the province was already deep into deregulation. Alberta had successfully argued that Ottawa should get out of the business entirely and leave it to the free market i.e., the multinationals, and the feds finally sold their last shares in Petro-Canada in 2004.

The federal Liberals under Chretien and Martin finished the job Mulroney started because they had fully adopted Third Way politics . They didn't want to own oil companies and they wanted tax revenue. Meanwhile, Alberta uses the memory of the hated National Energy Program from 1980 as a cudgel to this day. Any time Ottawa tries to regulate emissions or climate change, Alberta screams separation and Ottawa is killing us.

And now the profits are privatized to shareholders and CEOs, while the environmental destruction is socialized onto the public and the planet. Alberta continues to act like a victim of federal overreach while simultaneously demanding that Ottawa build pipelines and bail out the industry whenever prices crash. It's capitalism all the way down. The public built the infrastructure and took the risk and the private sector took the winnings.