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Video Stories - Pat Carney - Transcript

I took over as Minister of Energy Mines and Resources at a crucial time for the National Energy Board. It was a time when energy was a very emotional issue in Canada, there was a great split between East and West because of the Liberal policy of, basically, taxing the producers in the West and subsidizing the consumers who were mainly of course in Ontario and Quebec and the Eastern provinces. And so when the Mulroney government was elected to power our first task was to try and restore economic growth in the industry and also to try and heal the unity issues by energy policy, and my two tasks, along with my Western and Eastern colleagues at the provinces were to dismantle the NEP and to deregulate natural gas. Now of course these are the two issues that concerned the National Energy Board at that time, and the natural gas issue was particularly interesting because it had never been done in the world before. The idea that we would deregulate an industry so that the buyers directly marketed from the sellers of natural gas with minimum regulatory oversight and that portion was completely new so everyone was very nervous, the producers didn't know how their revenues would be protected, the consuming provinces were very nervous that, you know their customers would be affected, there was a lot of concern that the export market in the US would deplete the supplies available to domestic customers, that's a key job of the Board, and even in 1972, long before I was Minister, the Board was forecasting that at the rate of domestic growth that the surplus was disappearing.

So there was this incredible mix of emotion and innovation and new policies but we were very well prepared for it. I had come from a background of 11 years in economic consulting in the pipeline business and my company worked on all of the pipelines, the Foothills, the McKenzie, even the Q&M, and I had spent two years as Energy Critic in the Shadow Cabinet meeting with the industry and study groups and formulating the new policies so when we came into power we were able to hit the ground running, and Jeff Edge was very important because he really understood the US market, and then of course Roland Priddle, who succeeded him as Chair, I appointed him as Chair, worked with me as my Assistant Deputy Minister in this area with Nancy Hughes Anthony, and he really understood the implications and the impact that this was going to be.

So, the test of the, the proof of the pudding is that those policies are still in place, that the deregulation of gas is still in place and they're still market pricing for oil. And the other big change for the Board that I can see today, is it's much more female friendly. As I said I was the first woman Minister, there's been several since then and there's many more, the Vice-Chair and many more Board members are women, there's more women engineers. The second point in that public spirit is the Board has become a lot more open to the public and more responsive to shareholders concerns and environmental concerns and much more, I'd say, user friendly. It's a different Board than it was when I was Minister.

Thank you.

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Date Modified:

2011-10-26