Petro-Canada is a retail and wholesale marketing brand of Suncor Energy. Until 2009, it was a crown corporation of Canada, 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 and uses the Petro-Canada brand nationwide 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.
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