The Political Economy of Oil and Democracy in Venezuela and Alberta

The relationship between oil and democracy in Venezuela has been marked by the desperate attempt to assert sovereignty over the oil industry, a struggle to shift the locus of power out of the hands of (what the chapter will call) a state-capitalist comprador elite into the hands of the Venezuelan state. In Alberta and Canada, by contrast, the oil and gas industry that intersects with Canadian democracy is, for the most part, very Canadian. There may well be issues of accountability and popular control in Canada that need to be addressed. The article will document the heavy corporate footprint left by the oil and gas industry in the 2012 Alberta provincial election. However, unlike Venezuela, Canada does not face a national task of wrenching control of the bitumen sands from forces outside of the country. The dilemmas posed by the exploitation of bitumen sands in Alberta cannot be outsourced. They are quintessentially Canadian dilemmas to be grappled with and addressed (or ignored and allowed to fester) by our own institutions of democracy and governance