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Notley trolls federal Liberals as global oil forecasts continue to look grim

On Monday in Calgary, Rachel Notley proposed Ottawa get into the crude-by-rail business.

OTTAWA (660 NEWS) – Premier Rachel Notley took time for a holiday trick in Ottawa.

The Alberta NDP projected figures outside of the federal Liberal holiday party that claimed to show how much money is being lost every day because pipelines aren’t moving Alberta oil to world markets.

While many are applauding the move seeing this as some grade ‘A’ trolling, others are calling it classless.

It isn’t the first time Notley and company have sent not-so-subtle hints to the feds and it won’t be the last time, especially with some bleak forecasts for oil prices going into next year.

Cailin Birch is and economist with the Economist Intelligence Unit and one of the authors of a report delving into oil price predictions around the world.

She believes with the Chinese and the U.S. economies expected to sputter in 2019, there could be a global price drop for oil.

“With 2020 looking like an even more difficult year economically speaking. We are expecting it to feed into prices across the board really as consumption doesn’t look as strong as it has in the past few years.”

She noted other global factors at play.

“Market conditions have changed significantly since OPEC and Russia agreed to rein in production in November 2016. Unprecedented output restraint from most OPEC countries and Russia, together with unexpected supply crunches from more volatile producers, including Venezuela, Libya and Angola, have brought global oil stocks back down to below the previous five-year average,” she said in the report.

While a drop in oil prices in the past five years has fed consumption, she expects that trend to change.

“Remembering of course, that for the last few years it has been inflated a bit. The rate of demand growth has been inflated by the fact that oil prices were so low that it gave this kind of boom to consumption growth. We’re not looking at the same situation anymore.”