Janett Miller (PNR, March 7) questions how Canadian interests will be served if the LNG companies, proposed for B.C., are owned by foreign companies.
However she has not considered many of the facets of business. In the first place most of our major oil companies — Imperial Oil, Shell, Chevron — are foreign, so there is nothing new here. We like them because they create economic activity and pay for the oil and gas they take from the ground.
In the case of the LNG projects Petronas, or whoever puts up the money to buy the land and build the plant, is putting a lot of money into the Canadian economy. Building and operating the plant makes lots of jobs for Canadians, not only at the site, but across the country where various companies make components.
All these employees are in turn buying groceries, cars and houses and making jobs for lots more people. It’s called prosperity.
One reason we appear to have so many foreign companies is that Canada has a small population and very large resources to develop and we don’t always have the financial resources to do it ourselves.
Never-the-less, we do have Canadian companies, particularly in mining, that invest in the resources of other countries.
That the foreign investor takes the profits bothers many people.
However profits are only a small proportion of the total benefits we take from these enterprises.
The down side of profits is that there may not be any, and this is the risk that these investors take.
Fred Langford
Sidney