Petrocanada

Petro-Canada

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Oil and gas industry
Successor	Suncor Energy
Founded	Ottawa, Ontario (1975)
Headquarters	Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Key people	Steven Williams, President & CEO
Production output	oil, natural gas, petrochemicals
Revenue	C$18.911 billion (2006)
Number of employees	4,514 (2008)
Parent	Suncor Energy
Website	www.petro-canada.ca

Petro-Canada is a retail and wholesale marketing brand of Suncor Energy. Until 1990, it was a crown corporation of Canada (as a state trading enterprise), headquartered at the Petro-Canada 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.

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.

The bill to create a publicly run oil company was introduced by the New Democratic Party in 1973. 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.