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Neither is Alberta so alone as it once was, with the emergence of Saskatchewan and Newfoundland as major oil producers (plus smaller but significant industries in B.C. and Manitoba).

Most important, a dear oil policy, as embodied in the federal carbon tax, has very different political consequences than the cheap oil policy of the 1980s. For where the NEP pit the producing and consuming regions against each other, the carbon tax, so far as it hits both consumers and producers of oil (or is perceived to do so), seems to have united them. Or at least it has in Ontario.

Population movements have given Alberta, and the West generally, greater clout in the federation

It is difficult to imagine Peter Lougheed in 1980 receiving the sort of standing ovation Jason Kenney was accorded at a luncheon speech in Toronto earlier this month. But then, even before anyone had heard of carbon taxes, Ontario’s politics seemed to be changing: no longer looking east to Quebec as much, as in the past, but increasingly looking to the West, and identifying with it.

It isn’t just that more of Ontario’s economic interests lie to the west than before, but its political values, once so different, more nearly resemble those of the region. (A Doug Ford government would have been unthinkable in the Loyalist Ontario of 40 years ago.) A political coalition built on Ontario and the West, which in Clark’s day proved neither durable nor capable of delivering a majority, is today a real possibility.

At any rate, that is what this election will decide, as Ontario will decide this election. Only two times since 1921 has a party won a majority in a federal election without also winning a majority of the seats in Ontario. It is particularly crucial to the federal Conservatives. Lacking a historic base in Quebec, they cannot win without it. And it has never been more crucial than it is likely to prove in this election.