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The most pressing issue now is confronting Alberta’s entirely reasonable and correct concerns about its place in the Canadian federation. Alberta has unquestionably been getting a very raw deal. The federal government can barely conceal its ambivalence about Alberta’s oilpatch, being far more concerned about the unlikely prospect of losing a few thousand SNC-Lavalin jobs in Quebec than more than 100,000 lost jobs in Alberta’s energy sector, the Canadian economy’s most vital single engine. It is outrageous that other Canadian provinces continue to impose so-called environmental restrictions on exports of Alberta’s oil, while importing massive quantities of oil from abroad. This is especially so considering that Alberta workers have for decades been subsidizing higher standards of living in provinces that today actively work to harm the standard of living for Albertans.

Photo by David Kawai/Bloomberg News

Albertans, and millions of others across Canada, have long recognized this. The justified anger helped propel Kenney into office. Once he’s sworn in, he’ll have to do something about it, and deliver tangible results. If he cannot, Canada faces an even greater threat to national unity than already exists. Any Canadian who believes in unity should hope he succeeds.

Whether he can is a question that, troublingly, no one can answer. Alberta cannot get interprovincial export pipelines to tidewater built on its own. Alberta cannot by itself force a renegotiation of the imbalanced equalization system. It can absolutely curtail energy exports to B.C., at least in the short term, as a way to retaliate that province’s ongoing effort to block increased volumes of Alberta oil moving to the West Coast, both overland and underground. But the tactic is not guaranteed to work, or leave Alberta materially better off.