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They don’t get us. Maybe they don’t want to get us. Maybe they get us and don’t give a damn. Maybe they don’t think about us at all.

If you want to see the gaping chasm between us and them, you need go no further than a Thursday lunch in Calgary, on a day when Encana announces they’re pulling up stakes and moving their HQ to the States.

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There he is. Jean Chretien, the former Liberal prime minister. He can be folksy. He can be funny. But he is also tone-deaf.

We’re the golden goose of a colony for the rest of Canada, royally screwed and nowhere near close to getting a fair deal.

We are hurting. Chretien sure as hell didn’t make it any better. On this day if there was a crowd of regular folks in the place instead of suits we’d have seen quite the bun fight break out.

Still, you can feel tension in this well-mannered ballroom.

Chretien doesn’t answer a question on Western outrage. He says he’s lived with “so-called western alienation” all his life.