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Because Mr. Mulcair implied the resource sector was unfairly buoyed by poor environmental stewardship, which is a complete and total misrepresentation. He also eluded to the fact "Dutch desease" was the entire reason for the poor performace in Eastern Canadas manufacturing sector which is a overly simplistic and down right ignorant.

At the end of the day Mulcair is taking up the old school practice of pitting one part of the country against the other in order to garner favour and votes in the east.

   

There are apparently studies coming out that say we have no Dutch disease.

What I don't understand tho is at one time it was all about value added. Here in BC we worried about selling logs or even just dimensional lumber instead of adding more value to the product. That always made sense to me. Resources eventually run out or become less in demand or what have you. And we're not building our manufacturing sector, we're gutting it. Don't see Canada leading on much else, either. I think we will rue this strategy at some point in the future. What we need is a country pulling together instead of always trying to pull apart. I don't think the Reformacons or the Dippers are helping in this regard.

   

Because he's playing divisive politics pitting the West against the East.

He knows he has zero support most of the West so to piss off them to please the tree-huggers in Ontario will garner him more support.

   

I'm not sure if I know what your refering to here:

Do you have an example?

   

If it was a shot at the left, there's also much truth to that.

While the "left" was in power, production increased ~150% while during the current reign of the "right" it's increased 36%

   

Chretien was a big supporter of developing our resources and even more so developing an Asian market for them. It was his government that kicked off all the talk about building pipelines to the west coast and shipping our product to Asia which seems to be largely unbeknown (or purposely ignored) by many on the left.

   

Of at one time being all about value added? Just the entire conversation in BC. Presumably it applied to the rest of the country as well. How long did we talk about not wanting to be just hewers of wood and drawers of water? Now we seem to be going back to that, only drillers of oil.

   

K, I'm in Alberta so I’m a little out of the loop as to the discussion in BC a few years back. What were they planning on doing? Building stuff as in manufacturing or was it about self sustainability? “Value added” is a pretty general term.

   

I thought the fact that we aren't paying to clean things up is inflating oil profits and affecting the dollar. This isn't true?


Are you sure he alluded to it being the entire reason?

And there are recent reports confirming that the dutch disease did have an effect on 25 out of 80 manufacturing sites.


From his original interview on Power and Politics, I never got that impression at all. He never said that the oilsands needed to be halted or any stoppage in production, so I'm not sure what the west is actually in a tiff about.

   

Value added as far as I understand is you take a raw resource and do something with it. So even in Alberta, upgrading the bitumen is value added, but not much. Fully refining would be adding as much value as possible to the actual product. But the real trick would be to use that oil to make plastic, say, and then manufacture things out of that plastic. Far more labor and profit involved - enriches the whole country instead of just the natural resources sector. I always understood that was the golden grail of resource use, but we seem to have let go of that vision. Too bad, because it creates two Canadas - them with the oil and them without. And, as I said, relying only on resources, while other countries use those resources to make shit and sell it back to us is a mugs game.

If we supposedly would benefit from doubling immigration, for God's sake at least use it to create manufacturing jobs instead of cab drivers and a few techies at the top.

   

Well admittedly I think doing more upgrading bitumen right here in Alberta would be a good idea. As for full on refining it's not overly practical. Instead of building one pipeline to ship one product we would have to build 12 to ship all the bi-products and then truck or rail the rest that can't be shipped via pipelines. But upgrading, absolutely.

   

Yeah, I only used Alberta to make it close to home for you. For Canada, I don't think it's a good idea to only rely on raw reources, ship them out and then buy stuff made from/with them. You're gonna lose in the long run, because the value added means you're buying back your own resources at a premium. As both Harper and Mulcair have said, we need a national energy/industrial strategy that tries to use the money we get from resources to build something more.

   

So what exactly aren't we cleaning up? Enlighten me.





Sounds like he's laying most of the blame at the feet of Alberta's oilsands to me. Never mind every developed nations manufacturing sectors are suffering equally or if not to a greater degree, it's all Alberta's fault.




So, when he makes false and exaggerated claims about Alberta’s environmental policies and states that that those policies are responsible in large part for the economic woes facing the manufacturing sector we’re suppose to take that as a “group hug” type of moment or some type of unifying remark? If you want to play dumb go right ahead.

   

The IRPP study concludes that Canada is suffering a "mild case" of Dutch disease, with only about one-quarter of manufacturing output suffering due to the high dollar.

But the IRPP study says the issue is "more nuanced than conventional wisdom would suggest."
The authors — economists Mohammad Shakeri, Richard S. Gray and Jeremy Leonard — studied the impact of energy prices and the high dollar on 80 different manufacturing industries. They found only 25 were negatively affected, with the most pronounced impact on small, labour-intensive industries such as textiles and apparel.
Larger groups, such as food products, metals and machinery experienced only minor impacts, which have generally been offset by strong growth in demand. The auto industry, they concluded, was not affected at all.
"On balance, the evidence indicates that Canada suffers from a mild case of the Dutch disease, which warrants a commensurate policy response," they conclude.
The authors maintain federal attempts to directly counteract the rising dollar would be futile since natural resources are under provincial jurisdiction. However, they say Ottawa could use increased tax revenue from the energy boom to invest in measures aimed at bolstering the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector.

   

I know what you were getting at. I actually had a longer response to that last reply that went into a commentary on the manufacturing sector in Canada but it was so damn depressing I decided to delete it .

To summarize what I deleted: The value added thing is good idea but I just can’t see us being competitive in the future with countries like China and India when it comes to manufacturing to any great degree. Plain and simple it’s just cheaper to ship raw product over to Asia and have their $5 a month workers make the stuff for us. Kind of a dismal out look I know but I think that’s what were going to be faced with in the future.

   

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