Petro-Canada |
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Official Site: Petro-Canada.ca
Wikipedia: Petro-Canada Page Sections History Article Index |
History
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Petro-Canada page on 29 July 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Petro-Canada is a retail and wholesale marketing brand subsidiary of Suncor Energy. Until 1991, it was a crown corporation of Canada (a state-owned enterprise), headquartered at the Suncor Energy Centre in Calgary, Alberta. In August 2009, Petro-Canada merged with Suncor Energy, with Suncor shareholders receiving approximately 60 percent ownership of the combined company and Petro-Canada shareholders receiving approximately 40 percent. The company retained the Suncor Energy name for the merged corporation and its upstream operations. It continues to use the Petro-Canada brand nationwide, except in Newfoundland and Labrador, for downstream retail operations.
Founding
In 1973, world oil prices quadrupled due to the Arab oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War. The province of Alberta had substantial oil reserves, whose extraction had long been controlled by American corporations. The government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the opposition New Democratic Party felt that these corporations geared most of their production to the American market, and as a result little of the benefit of rising oil prices went to Canadians.
Trudeau's Liberals were then in a minority government and dependent upon the support of the NDP to stay in power. The idea also fit with the growing movement toward economic nationalism within the Liberals. The Liberals and NDP passed the bill over the opposition of the Progressive Conservative Party led by Robert Stanfield.
Crown Corporation (1975–1991)
Petro-Canada was founded as a Crown Corporation in 1975 by an act of Parliament. It started its operations on 1 January 1976. The company was given C$1.5 billion in start-up money and easy access to new sources of capital. It was set up in Calgary, despite the hostility of existing oil firms. Its first president was Maurice Strong. The Progressive Conservatives (PCs), then led by Albertan Joe Clark, were opponents of the company, and advocated breaking it up and selling it. However, they were unable to proceed with these plans during their brief time in power.
| Date | Article | Author/Source |
|---|---|---|
| 27 November 2015 | Steel Buildings Play a Role in First-ever Petro-Can on First Nations Land | Metal Structure Concepts |
| 2 December 2015 | Buyatab Powers Petro Canada’s New Petro-Points Redemption Option | Buyatab Online Inc. |