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Rachel Notley, soon to be installed as Alberta’s new premier, has a plan for her province. It’s a plan, she says, that will keep good, “mortgage-paying” jobs in Alberta. It’s a popular plan, according to the polls. The only problem is, it’s a bad plan.

The plan, of course, is to stop “shipping high-wage jobs” to Texas and refine and upgrade more of Alberta’s petroleum at home. The operative word here is “more”: Alberta already refines some petroleum for local or Canadian consumption – enough to meet about 60 per cent of the province’s own oil needs. That’s all well and good. Presumably, the industry does this because and so far as it makes sense to do so: that is, so far as the benefits exceed the costs.

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But we worry whenever we hear politicians saying that, since something is good, more of it will be better. Alberta’s oil moves as part of a complex global marketplace. Some of what Alberta produces is refined at home, and some of what it refines it consumes. Some of its needs, however, are met instead by importing refined products from elsewhere, and much of its raw bitumen is exported for refinement and sale abroad.