Alberta’s Oil Sands: “No Missing Billions”

An Alberta government report has dismissed the notion that the Canadian state had failed to collect billions of dollars in royalties in previous years.

Former Auditor General Peter Valentine, who authored the report also said the system for collecting economic rent from the oil and gas industry was “generally well-designed, if not always well-executed.”

Last year, reports by Alberta’ Premier Stelmach’s royalty review committee and the province’s current auditor general, Fred Dunn, said the system failed to keep pace with rising commodity prices so billions of dollars were potentially left uncollected.

But Valentine said Alberta has the appropriate controls and processes to support the goal of optimizing revenues. “I could find no substance to support the claims made over the last year that over a billion dollars of royalties were not collected,” he wrote in his report, entitled “Building Confidence.”

It should have been called “Building Confidence: Burning the Climate”