Alberta’s Alienation from Canada

So, for those of you who don’t know, Alberta is sort of Canada’s Texas: It has a lot of oil and a lot of farms.

Alberta is also the heart of the Canada’s Conservative Party. Virtually all of their seats go to the Conservatives every federal election.

Many Albertans feel isolated and disrespected by Ottawa (our capital) and the East. Back in the 70s, Pierre Trudeau (our current Prime Minister’s father) made them sell oil to Canadians for less than market price and even nationalized a little bit of the market.

Since they also have a lot of money, they make what are called “transfer payments” to the other provinces.

So, they feel like they put in more than they get back.

There’s a lot of truth to this, of course. This isn’t the same “Red State” BS like in the US, where they get more from the Feds than they put in and whine about it.

That said, Alberta has been sitting on black gold and fucked it up.

Fucked it up.

They decided that low taxes were more important than investment. They hardly taxed the oil companies pumping the oil, even the foreign ones, and even during boom times when there was no question those companies would pay.

So, they didn’t get as much money as they should.

They also misspent what money they had, and didn’t think about creating a post-oil future economy.

In Canada, we do have poor provinces. The poorest are the Maritime provinces–the ones up against the Atlantic.

Here’s a funny story: Those provinces used to be rich, a long time ago.

See, England needed lots of masts. You need good trees for masts, and the English cut down all their own, and other Europeans had either done the same or wouldn’t chop down enough of them.

Good masts were incredibly valuable. In addition, the Maritimes had the richest fisheries in the world. There are eyewitness accounts from the early days that you could literally dip a bucket into the Ocean and come up with fish.

So the Maritimes were prosperous.

Then the world moved to Steam engines.

Then the Maritimes, quite deliberately and before the advent of climate change, fished the Grand Banks cods to collapse.

Now, they are poor as hell, and always getting those transfer payments.

So, this is Alberta’s future.

The funny thing is that Alberta is also a big agricultural province, but, of course, since oil makes more money, they’ve gone ahead and polluted like hell, destroying vast swathes of land.

To summarize: Alberta did not invest enough in industries to take over when oil (a non-renewable resource) became less valuable. They did do what they could to fuck up their sustainable resource industry: farming.

Most of this is not the rest of Canada’s fault. Yeah, they would have had more money if Ottawa had given them a complete free hand, but they had plenty of money and wasted it on low taxes and tax cuts and didn’t bother to be good environmental stewards.

These decisions were made in Alberta, by Albertans, not in Ottawa.

Resource economies are always, at best, cyclical. They are always in danger of being destroyed by substitution (as is happening with hydrocarbons). A smart jurisdiction uses their resource-based wealth to buy a future not reliant on those resources.

There are lessons here for a lot of countries and regions. Canada as a whole has fucked up its economic balance over the last 20 years (a different article). Russia is way too reliant on resources. Various US states are going to take it on the chin when hydrocarbon prices collapse, and they too have been short-sighted, greedy, and stupid: They’ve been doing things like polluting their groundwater with fracking.

In the future, water is going to be far more valuable than oil. So is good agricultural land.

These places have gone out of their way to destroy both.

The problem with Ottawa isn’t so much that they interfered in Alberta, but that they interfered in Alberta in the wrong ways.

As for Albertan voters who always vote Conservative: You’re fools. Because they know you will always vote for them, they do nothing for you. When the Conservatives were in power for almost a decade, they sucked up to Ontario and Quebec, because they knew they needed their votes.

You? You got nothing, exactly because they know they don’t need to give you anything.

There are those in the US who might think on this lesson as well.

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