ajor oil importing country gave high priority to reducing their dependence on foreign oil. Output of coal by the industry increased slightly (see Fig. 4) but would never again be as great as it was during the first half of the century. The second oil price increase in 1976 rose oil prices by another 160 per cent and the price of Cape Breton coal rose from eight dollars per tonne in 1967 to 52 dollars per tonne by 1984. The company began to open new mines Lingan in 1974, Prince in 1976 and in 1987 it began developing a new 600 million-dollar mine at Donkin, predicted to be the largest underground mine in North America. The company was finding new export markets and had just received a 33-year contract to supply the Nova Scotia Power Corporation, which was scrambling to convert its generating plants to coal. The future once again looked bright for the industry as the Fig. 4 Graph showing the Nova Scotia coal output over the last century and a half. Notice the peaks during the first and second world wars and the increase during the 70's. Source: Statistics Canada.price of oil was 40 dollars (U.S.) per barrel and was predicted to be 100 dollars per barrel by the end of the century. The analysts were wrong however, by 1999 the price was more like 15 dollars and the oil industry once again was on its way out (Cameron, 1999).As mentioned before Devco was more of a regional development plan rather than a business, else the Nova Scotia coal industry would have folded a lot sooner than it had. Devco acted as a type of life support system for the Nova Scotian economy effectively serving as a wealth transfer system transfering money from the have provinces to have nots. As of 1995 Devco had managed to acquire 1.2 billion dollars in losses in just 27 years in operation (MacIsaac, 1995). Devco actually turned a profit every year from 1993 to 1997 but those profits were not enough to cover the companies non-operating costs such as pension...
