I hate to be a downer on the Alberta economy. Again. But there are new statistics available showing just how disastrous federal Liberal and provincial NDP policies have been for our oil industry (and, thus, for our entire economy.)

In just the past two years, according to the C.D. Howe Institute (using numbers from Natural Resources Canada), “green” policies and government-caused regulatory delays have cost Canada $100 billion in lost investment.

Distroscale

Yes, that’s billion, with a “b.”

That’s a huge number of jobs never created and small businesses not started or expanded. Conversely, it’s a huge number of Albertans who’ve lost their jobs and homes, and small businesses that have closed up shop.

It’s all the suppliers who haven’t supplied and welders who haven’t welded. It’s the houses not built, the pickup trucks and cars not bought, the restaurant meals not consumed, the office space not leased.

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If you want to know why there are nearly 2,000 unsold new homes in Edmonton and 900 empty new homes in Calgary, there’s your answer.

And as the authors of the C.D. Howe study point out, this is “a crisis of our own making.”

It’s not world oil prices that caused this devastation. It is the policy decisions of our own politicians: the Fantasy Island thinkers such as Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan who believe we can have a prosperous today if we shut down the oil industry and convert to wind, solar and bug burps.

Even Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, with her cheek-by-jowl allegiance with Trudeau, her carbon tax, her coal shutdown and her belief in the magical “social licence” theory, has helped scare away investors.

And if you think this loss is not politically or ideologically motivated – that it is somehow a worldwide phenomenon caused by low prices and supply gluts – consider this: Over the past two years, as investment in Canada’s energy sector has slipped by $50 billion A YEAR, energy investment in the States has soared by 50 per cent.

What’s worse, nearly all the loss in investment has come at the expense of new or expanded projects.

From 2015, when the NDP and Libs took over, until the end of 2018, total planned investment in major resource projects fell from $711 billion to $585 billion. That’s 18 per cent, which is bad enough.

But most of that investment is in long-announced projects that were well under way when the price shock hit five years ago. According to the Howe study (which was co-authored by Grant Sprague, Alberta’s former deputy minister of energy, who knows a thing or two about the intersection of politics and investment), surprisingly few already-begun projects were shelved when oil prices went in the tank.

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What suffered most were announcements of new or expanding projects.

The pace of new project announcements was $146 billion a year in 2015. In 2018, that fell to just $35 billion. That’s a nosedive of 76 per cent during the tenures of the Trudeau and Notley governments.

That means that in the short- to mid-term, Alberta will be starving for economic activity as some of the older projects – the ones announced pre-2015 – are completed and not replaced by new ones.

Every time I write about bad economic news, two or three NDP readers will email me accusing me of hoping for bad news – cheering for it just so voters will get rid of their party.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I used to love to write about our province’s strong economy, the way it created tens of thousands of new, high-paying jobs each year.

There’s just no way to sugar-coat the damage done by our current governments.