State ownership of our resources? Only for foreigners

It certainly looks like prime minister Stephen Harper has pulled out a plum with the announced $36-billion investment by Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned energy company that bought Alberta-based Progress Energy Inc. last year.

We really won't know the full outcome for 30 years, the time frame of the deal Harper sealed with a public handshake Sunday with his counterpart, prime minister Mohd Najib.

But we do know a liquified natural gas pipeline to the B.C. coast is high on their list. The price tag on that? A reported $19 billion.

By now, foreign government ownership stakes in Canada's energy industry match, outstrip (or are part of) all but the largest of the international conglomerates that mine, refine and ship our energy resources.

But we generally don't approve of government-run energy firms. At least, when it's our government investing.

Alberta's oil sands, conventional crude, natural gas and coal make up the largest non-government-controlled energy reserves in the world. No other country on Earth has resources even remotely close to ours, without the states where these resources are found nationalizing their development.

Let's see: a quick top-of-memory list of foreign state-owned companies in our oil patch includes Norway, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands, China. That's just the short list.

Why are foreign state-owned energy firms invited — courted, even — to buy in to our provincial resources with promises of long-term profits for their citizens, when our own citizens apparently do not get such access?

It was not always thus. I was in university during the Arab oil embargo crisis of 1973. The sudden spike in oil prices and the prospect of supply shortages had governments around the world worried.

Canada recognized we had a lot of reserves, but it was thought the easiest pools of oil and gas had already been discovered and claimed. The next generation of development would not be done solely by Calgary mavericks setting up exploration companies on a shoestring and then selling out to the big guys as soon as they hit a gusher.

Deep, tight reserves and oil chemically tied up to clay and sand needed the kinds of capital that only governments can rally.

Pierre Trudeau had a minority government then, with the NDP holding the balance of power, and Canadian people were genuinely worried over the cost of filling up their God-almighty V-8 cars with leaded gas every couple hundred kilometres.

So, with $1.5 billion startup, Petro-Canada was begun, and it eventually swallowed the stakes the feds held in Panarctic Oil, Syncrude, Atlatic Richfield, Pacific Petroleums, Petrofina and all the service stations owned by BP Canada.

Out West, they hated Petro-Canada, though company ran until 2009, when it was all sold to Suncor. And now we like them.

Alberta had its own energy company once, too. In 1973, 60,000 applications were selected to buy shares in the province's newly-formed Alberta Energy Corporation.

I was a student member of the Legislative Press Gallery back then, and the talk among the reporters upstairs during Question Period was whether it was ethical for an ink-stained wretch to get in on the action. I remember just wishing I had $100 that wasn't already allocated to rent or food, never mind buying shares at $10 a pop.

But only seven years' worth of dividends and growth later, when Alberta Energy got its three-for-one stock split, I remember regretting my need for food.

In 1993, Ralph Klein divested the province from Alberta Energy, and in 2002 a new company called Encana took the whole thing over.

Strange, eh? A state energy company started by Peter Lougheed goes public as soon as it gets really successful, which then will probably be taken over by a Communist Chinese state-owned Petro China.

Stephen Harper says (most of the time) that he's against the state-owned companies of foreign governments holding too significant a share in our strategic resources. Except when he's not.

But it sort of looks like that horse left the barn a long time ago. And then we sold the barn.

For governments and their people, the upside in direct ownership of energy resource development is huge. Energy supply stability, and the profits to be made supplying it are vital to a nation's security, and to world peace.

But for reasons Canadians probably can't even explain to themselves rationally, we don't believe in it for ourselves.