Originally Posted by gideongallery

virtually every country ever formed started out as a resource economy,
when the romans invaded the gauls they set up the government to cut the lumber and mine the mines to pay their duty to rome.

The US was a resource economy when it started too,

our resource ties became a smaller portion of our dollars worth under trudeau, and to some extent mulroney, however harper shifted us back to a resouce economy
which resulted in our dollar being tied heavily to oil prices.

it one of the reasons our dollar is worth so much compared to the US dollar (comparitively to Euro/ yen) we hold our value because oil prices prop our dollar up (which hurts all the other industries)

The carbon tax would have decoupled the dollar from oil prices by quickly putting a buffer between the enviromental responsiblity we has canadian foster which was normally ofset by the lower value of your dollar and the price of the resource we sell (oil)