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“The people of Alberta, I’m sorry to say, they’re terrified by change,” said Dominique Perron, a University of Calgary professor. “They’re not conservative only in terms of being (affiliated with) Conservatives.”

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Perron is from Quebec, but comes by her opinions on Alberta honestly. She has spent the last 25 years here and seems almost apologetic about sharing her opinions in English, even though her book, L’Alberta Autopage: Identité, mythes et discours du pétrole dans l’Ouest canadien made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Prize in 2013.

At least for the majority of the PC’s tenure, she said, much of the province’s politics has been dictated by its dominant product, a substance everyone loves to hate and hates to need. Indeed, oil has given Alberta enormous opportunity, low unemployment, country-leading growth rates, and the highest median household income in Canada, by far, but this success has come at a cost.

“People tend to relate two facts that are actually independent from one another, wealth and the way the government runs (the economy),” Perron said.

By her estimate, oil has allowed the government to paper over years of fiscal mismanagement.

The people of Alberta, I’m sorry to say, they’re terrified by change

Over the past decade, for example, about a third of the government’s total revenues have come not from taxes, but from oil and gas royalties and land leases. But while billions of dollars from these sales filled the coffers, almost none has been put away for savings. Despite a decade of record-high oil prices and resource revenues, the government has run a real deficit every year since 2008. Its $17 billion Heritage Fund will soon be overwhelmed by $31 billion in debt. Even now, the province is almost in a zero-net-asset position.