Alberta Economy & Oil (Split Discussion)

[17to85]

But it's not their oil fund paying for all those thinga. It's being a socialist country.

[iso_55]

51 minutes ago, tracker said:

Norway at last count had something like $150 billion (US) in diversified investments all around the world, free healthcare, including prescription drugs, free physiotherapy, free eye care, free child care, free psychological care, free elder-care, free post-secondary education (for those who qualify academically) and is consistently in the top three in the world in standards of living and resident satisfaction. And Alberta.....? Well, a really nice penthouse for the previous premier.

And you are taxed from the day you are born to the day you die. Norway is also all in on oil revenues. They don't have special interest groups railing against oil pipelines. So, you can't compare Alberta or Canada & Norway.

[Mark F]

2 hours ago, tracker said:

Norway at last count had something like $150 billion (US) in diversified investments all around the world, free healthcare, including prescription drugs, free physiotherapy, free eye care, free child care, free psychological care, free elder-care, free post-secondary education (for those who qualify academically) and is consistently in the top three in the world in standards of living and resident satisfaction. And Alberta.....? Well, a really nice penthouse for the previous premier.

actually you're off by a fair bit

"Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion Cdn pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas. The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. "

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/norway-s-sovereign-wealth-holds-lessons-for-canada-1.3002803

LOL. five million or so people. Bet they're all bitching and complaining about what a lousy job their socialist government did for them.

or maybe they're not:

"To the surprise of absolutely no one, Norway has been declared the world's happiest country.

The United Nations Human Development Index 2011 measures happiness in different countries based on factors such as income, education, health, life expectancy, economy, gender equality and sustainability."

 

 

Edited August 30, 2016 by Mark F
language

[Mark F]

1 hour ago, tracker said:

When the enumerator came around to count the number of eligible voters in our home, as soon as she had that information, she produced a registration book for the ruling provincial party and tried to both sign us up as PC members and enlist us as election workers for the pending election.

amazing. That is American style political b.s.

let's hope that was one idiot, and a very uncommon occurence.

Edited August 29, 2016 by Mark F

[Tracker]

1 hour ago, Mark F said:

actually you're off by a fair bit

"Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion Cdn pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas. The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. "

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/norway-s-sovereign-wealth-holds-lessons-for-canada-1.3002803

LOL. five million or so people. Bet they're all bitching and complaining about what a shitty job their socialist government did for them.

or maybe they're not:

"To the surprise of absolutely no one, Norway has been declared the world's happiest country.

The United Nations Human Development Index 2011 measures happiness in different countries based on factors such as income, education, health, life expectancy, economy, gender equality and sustainability."

 

 

My information is obviously dated - I heard that statistic about 10 years ago, so it would appear that the investment managers have done quite well.

[Mark F]

Interesting according to wikipedia, the largest individual employer in alberta is the Health services branch of gummint. second largest, safeway. wierd.

[B-F-F-C]

1 hour ago, Mark F said:

Interesting according to wikipedia, the largest individual employer in alberta is the Health services branch of gummint. second largest, safeway. wierd.

Wikipedia? Yes, AHS is the largest employer within the govy   My wife is one of them.  Safeway, now that doesn't make sense at all but maybe since they were purchased by Sobeys.  But it still doesn't add up.   

 

[B-F-F-C]

1 hour ago, tracker said:

My information is obviously dated - I heard that statistic about 10 years ago, so it would appear that the investment managers have done quite well.

Tracker...where do you plug in your electric car?

 

[Mark F]

41 minutes ago, B-F-F-C said:

Tracker...where do you plug in your electric car?

 

well that's another subject.....

[wbbfan]

On 8/28/2016 at 7:08 PM, tracker said:

Calgary has a big downtown, including a very good blues bar, but it has a lot of empty offices and businesses now. Hard hit by cheap oil.  Drove by a U-haul place yesterday and they had a big sign out that they were offering bargain U-Haul rates on moving trucks going to Alberta.

Love cow town. Really gets expensive to live there though. For that money id rather live in bc again. 

Edmonton seems like winnipeg x1.5 to me.  I was once at the down town bus depot and could have sworn i was in wpg back at the old bus depot before it moved to the airport. 

12 hours ago, 17to85 said:

Alberta is actually fairly diverse, much moreso than a place like Manitoba. The problem is oil was huge. Like humongous big. It dominated and paid more money than most other industries could match. The Alberta economy before this crash was really overheated. An out of control boom. **** the royalty rate that's a poor argument. We paid low taxes and used oil to fund government instead of taxing people up the ass like norway does.

Idk how you see that. Wpg has a massive Filipino community, an African community that has very quickly grown to good size. The largest urban reserve in canada. Large, and old russian/ukranian community. Filipinos have spread pretty heavily through out the larger none wpg cities and into the small towns around mb. Where we also have the largest portion of hudderites and mennonites in the world. Plus a ton of mexican and french people. As a youth sitting in coffee shops on the weekends with my parents it was common place to be surrounded by a din of 3+ languages at a time. In the south end of the city the none filipino asian community is pretty large too. 

Having lived all over western canada Id say we are actually pretty diverse. Compared to the above low lands bc area, and many parts of alberta especially. In mid and up bc you find a mix of asian, and natives with a ton of dutch people. 

[17to85]

Economic diversity, which was the topic of conversation.....

[iso_55]

3 minutes ago, 17to85 said:

Economic diversity, which was the topic of conversation.....

[PCB]

14 hours ago, 17to85 said:

But it's not their oil fund paying for all those thinga. It's being a socialist country.

No it's not. Norway's economy is grounded on a free market system.

[17to85]

Free market system with huge social safety net due to high taxes. Sounds socialist to me. Hell isn't the Norwegian oil company state owned?

[wbbfan]

14 hours ago, 17to85 said:

Economic diversity, which was the topic of conversation.....

with the much larger film industry in wpg, much much larger amounts of farming, trucking and manufacturing, id say we still more economic diversity. We just have far worse, more turbulent industries where as oil, even when its bad is still pretty good. (especially compared to farming and manufacturing.) 

[Atomic]

21 hours ago, Mark F said:

actually you're off by a fair bit

"Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion Cdn pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas. The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. "

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/norway-s-sovereign-wealth-holds-lessons-for-canada-1.3002803

LOL. five million or so people. Bet they're all bitching and complaining about what a lousy job their socialist government did for them.

or maybe they're not:

"To the surprise of absolutely no one, Norway has been declared the world's happiest country.

The United Nations Human Development Index 2011 measures happiness in different countries based on factors such as income, education, health, life expectancy, economy, gender equality and sustainability."

 

 

True but they are also basically mono-cultural and concentrated in a small area.

Try achieving the same level of happiness over a massive landscape like Canada with a thousand different cultures.  Socialism or otherwise.

[Mark F]

yeah that is a very good point atomic. tough to compare canada to any country really. physically Siberia to some esxtent.

[17to85]

3 hours ago, wbbfan said:

with the much larger film industry in wpg, much much larger amounts of farming, trucking and manufacturing, id say we still more economic diversity. We just have far worse, more turbulent industries where as oil, even when its bad is still pretty good. (especially compared to farming and manufacturing.) 

Source please. You will have a hard time convincing me manitoba has more farming than Alberta. I question some of your other examples as well. Manitoba is a pissant economy. Government is the only real industry in that province

[iso_55]

3 hours ago, Atomic said:

True but they are also basically mono-cultural and concentrated in a small area.

Try achieving the same level of happiness over a massive landscape like Canada with a thousand different cultures.  Socialism or otherwise.

I was thinking the same thing. Norway is small with a small population so it's easier to administer social programs & pay for them than Canada.

[Noeller]

15 hours ago, 17to85 said:

Source please. You will have a hard time convincing me manitoba has more farming than Alberta. I question some of your other examples as well. Manitoba is a pissant economy. Government is the only real industry in that province

More farming in AB by far.....it might even be 2:1.....

[Rich]

This is from the 2006 census, but farm area shouldn't change drastically over the years.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25j-eng.htm

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25h-eng.htm

Alberta has 21M hectares of farm land, Manitoba has 7.7M hectare of farm land.

Saskatchewan has 26M.

I would guess that part of the reason that Manitoba has much less is because of the large area that is taken up by lakes.

[Noeller]

13 minutes ago, Rich said:

This is from the 2006 census, but farm area shouldn't change drastically over the years.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25j-eng.htm

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/agrc25h-eng.htm

Alberta has 21M hectares of farm land, Manitoba has 7.7M hectare of farm land.

Saskatchewan has 26M.

I would guess that part of the reason that Manitoba has much less is because of the large area that is taken up by lakes.

The water and (guessing here) the land north of, say, Dauphin (for arguments sake) isn't as conducive to growing as it is in Alberta, where there is great farmland all over the province. North of Winnipeg is good cattle country, for sure, but it's not a LOT of great crop land. Manitoba's crop land is mostly south of the #1......mostly..........

[StevetheClub]

4 hours ago, Noeller said:

The water and (guessing here) the land north of, say, Dauphin (for arguments sake) isn't as conducive to growing as it is in Alberta, where there is great farmland all over the province. North of Winnipeg is good cattle country, for sure, but it's not a LOT of great crop land. Manitoba's crop land is mostly south of the #1......mostly..........

For sure. I live in Northern Alberta (about 3 hours S of the NWT border) and there is significant farming pretty much to the NWT border. 

Edited August 31, 2016 by StevetheClub

[iso_55]

1 hour ago, Noeller said:

The water and (guessing here) the land north of, say, Dauphin (for arguments sake) isn't as conducive to growing as it is in Alberta, where there is great farmland all over the province. North of Winnipeg is good cattle country, for sure, but it's not a LOT of great crop land. Manitoba's crop land is mostly south of the #1......mostly..........

You're farming rocks in the Interlake.

[basslicker]

On ‎2016‎-‎08‎-‎28 at 6:39 PM, tracker said:

We got out just in time. The house we sold in 2013 is worth about $20,000 less now. Nice to be home.

We bought in Calgary last year, but in a neighbourhood less affected by market fluctuations.  We won't make much but we won't lose either.