Elsewhere in this week's issue of the Nouvelle appears a short story on cash and oil flow coming out of energy giant Cenovus, specifically the Foster Creek project, which Cenovus operates for itself and partner ConocoPhillips.
Foster Creek, a steam assisted gravity drainage arrangement located north of Cold Lake but with obvious ties to Bonnyville and the rest of the region (the rink name at C2 was no accident), looks to have a very promising future. That is to say it's going to make a whack of money for Cenovus shareholders and the Alberta government as time goes on.
We're not too concerned with what those shareholders do with their cash — as long as they pay their taxes and hopefully remember to reinvest where they made their money — but we're very concerned with what the province does with the future stream of royalty money. This is of particular concern because we seem once again to be hearing grumbling in the cities about what's going on in the country.
For whatever reason occasionally suits them, urban Albertans sometimes want to argue their rural/hinterland cousins get a disproportionate share of government spending and electoral clout. Ridings with a relatively small population of Bonnyville-Cold Lake perhaps don't help that belief, but there are some fairly compelling reasons this region should be on the Stelmach government's radar.
And some of those reasons — royalty dollars — are now flowing at a much higher rate these days into the government's coffers.
The move of the Foster Creek project into a category that will see it pay far more in royalty money to the government in 2010 is a reminder of what rural areas and the northeast oilpatch bring into the economic mix. They bring tax money, royalty payments and jobs often forgotten by folks in the big cities. Those cash sources fund everything from universities, referral hospitals and thousands of urban bureaucrat jobs to retail profits and the hotel sector that's utilized when rural folks have to go to the city for a specialized service.
While it makes sense economically to put some services only in large urban centres — they have to go somewhere, and into the highest population concentration serves the general public good — public spending in rural areas often is nothing more than feeding the goose laying the golden eggs.
That's something we hope Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky keeps in mind this week when he comes for a first-hand look at what we need — doctors and healthcare spending — to keep the region healthy and producing for the sometimes unaware golden egg consumers in the cities.
