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One of my earliest memories is being wildly bucked by a woolly sheep, hanging on with everything my scrawny arms could muster before being hurled into the dirt at the Nosehill Rodeo. I had mud on my face, but I was grinning because I had held on long enough to win the Mutton Busting trophy.

I imagine the pioneers from Sun Company of Canada and Syncrude felt a similar sense of gratification after hanging on for so many years to finally realize the dream of making the oilsands a commercial success.

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But the sands are shifting, and so with it is the recipe for Alberta’s economic success. Rip-and-ship seemed like a great model while it worked, but it also surrendered a lot of power to other actors. With limited capacity to add value to the billions of barrels of bitumen and only one market to sell into, it dealt environmentalists a trump card they played by blocking pipelines and empowered American refiners to hold us over a barrel. Scotiabank estimates Alberta producers have given away $10 billion a year in oil discounts for each of the past two years, because it had no option but to sell to price-making U.S. refiners. To put this number in perspective, that is about 10 times more than a B.C.-style carbon tax would generate from the oilpatch.