For one thing, we don't have a lot of refining capacity, and it takes 10 years (IIRC) or so to get a new refinery online, with all the planning and environmental studies and greasing of palms that needs to be done before you can even break ground (never mind the protesters you have to bury in the tar sands)... and then the years it takes to actually build the thing. So all that time you still have to keep buying the refined product from elsewhere, while sinking billions into the new refinery... with no guarantee prices will remain high enough to make it pay off within a reasonable time frame - it's hard to make a business case for it.

Plus, consider the US market for refined products is ten times ours, so it makes more sense FOR THEM to buy the crude, refine it, and then sell a little bit back to us while keeping most of it domestic.

This leads to one of the big sticking points on Northern Gateway: China wants to buy the oil, but they only want to buy the crude; they don't want to buy refined product... so if you set things up to refine locally and then ship the results, you end up without a market, and the refinery shuts down (of course, all this ignores the fact that if you're only moving crude, you only need a single pipeline, while moving a dozen different products requires multiple pipes, making that whole idea inherently really stupid).

Same thing we went through with lumber markets: customers want the raw logs, not the cut lumber, which killed a lot of mills here... they wanted governments to ban the export of raw logs thinking that would generate business for the mills, but didn't count on the fact that the customers would just go to someone else who WOULD sell them the logs, meaning the mills AND the loggers lost business.

Because Canada doesn't manufacture anything, and we sell our resources for next to nothing to places like the States and Harper has sold our resource businesses to other countries for next to nothing (like China, and recently our wheat industry to Saudi Arabia)

so all our resources are in the hands of foreign corporations, all that money leaves the country and we get some low to mid level jobs as compensation,

when commodity prices drop (as they are now) those companies don't make as huge a profit so they cut jobs and pay less corporate taxes (which is @ a low rate anyway) = less money for Canada

Add to that Canada's solution is to cut interest rates to 0% then you have even less people wanting to invest their $ into Canada and you have the scenario we're in now

this whole belief that Harper is good on the economy is just insane bullshit that was veiled due to the high commodity prices of past years

It really depends on what technologies and languages they're working with. I barely have 5 years experience and was getting offers from several Toronto companies in the same range as your friends with 10-15 years of experience. If you're a web applications developer or mobile developer, you easily get a job. The company I'm currently working for is still hiring and it's actually challenging to find the right talent, and this is in the bay area.

I live downtown, there is litter everywhere. It is beyond disgusting.

Beats having to guess whether you stepped in human feces or dog feces in San Francisco lol

In Gastown / DTES it is almost always human feces

There are a number of issues with exporting refined product, the main issue being that when you ship raw crude you can ship 100's of products aboard a single vessl vs. when you ship refined products you would basically need one vessel per product.

This is why refineries are typically located to service specific geographic areas.

You COULD put different products in a vessel, truck, or train using isolated compartments/tanks (or in the case of a train, you have multiple tank cars).

But you can still only put one product at a time in a pipeline.

The fundamental idea of economy, or the valuation therein is the prospect of it in the most logically possible way.

For years, our gov't thought that natural resources were the future of our economy, we let oil to drive up CAD value as well as any assets priced in CAD.

Now the prospect of natural resources changed. The market realized we have created way too much new supply while the demand shows little to no change. So the most logical perception is that the Canadian assets are not longer as valuable as thought before. (think oil business as another bubble and it busted) Therefore, all the increase in CAD generated by oil industry is gone.

IMHO, Canada has over-stimulated its economy. We needed the low CDN when oil was hot and stronger now that it is low, at least from the gov't perspective so the life for CDN can be more stable. Yet Harper gov't did the other way, this is why Canadian are actually feeling the heat; we got used to the life of CDN being strong, now it's hard to live the life of CDN being low.

Whose lending these countries money if they're all in debt?
http://i.imgur.com/A4IgYrX.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vkOJqNl6gWg/hqdefault.jpg

Obviously, the Jews.

China!

interesting thread and takes. in for moar.

Recent Macleans article on this very topic.

How Canada's economy went from boom to recession so fast