The Price of Oil

What is the price of oil? Why is that the price? What is the significance of these facts?

Current price can be found at the Alberta Economic Dashboard. Or there's some good comparative graphs here. As of Jan 2019, it shows that our prices have had an upward trend since Notley took action in December, and now we're much closer to the Texas price, which had mostly been continuing a downwards trend. All prices graphed now show highly synchronized movement during the last month.

What influences the price of oil?
Some factors that make our oil sell for less than our competition (and, of course, each of these factors in turn have their own factors causing them): [link]
 * our (comparative) quality issues [link]
 * the cost of transport from Alberta to refineries in the U.S.
 * our having more supply ("glut") that we can transport and sell
 * the global market that we have little or no control over

Glut
Part of the glut we faced during the fall of 2018 was due to key USA refineries (the largest buyers of Canadian Crude) being closed for maintenance [link].

Rachel Notley imposed a production limit to reduce this factor.

Reasons people care
Obviously oil companies care, they want to make money. And their employees probably care, they want jobs.

Why do general voters care? Mostly because oil is a major industry in Alberta, and can have a significant impact on our whole economy, and thus the lives of people outside of the industry as well.