'Perhaps it's time for a new existential threat, one festooned with cowboy hats and drenched in oil-soaked bravado. Alberta need only threaten to leave, as Quebec has done for much of the last half century.'

In 1957, the Quebec government paid $39.5 million into a nascent federal government fund designed to equalize the lot of the country’s 10 provinces. Quebec received $46 million in return. Adjusted for inflation, the $6.5 million in Quebec’s favour was a relatively modest $58 million — about the cost of a boutique tax credit to “support digital transformation of print media,” announced in the recent provincial budget.

Nevertheless, Quebec has without exception been on the favourable side of the equalization balance since 1957 — and seen exponentially bigger returns as the years have passed. It has survived successive governments and numerous cyclical economic downturns, various calamitous drops in the price of oil in the West, as well as the collapse of the manufacturing industry in Ontario.

And it endures, despite today’s economic reality. Quebec, home to a healthy economic boon and relatively peachy financial outlook, received $11.7 billion in 2017-18, thanks in no small part to Alberta, currently mired in chronically low oil prices and a resulting higher unemployment rate than Quebec itself.

There’s an obvious solution to this longstanding injustice: Alberta should make a loud, concerted, teeth-bearing threat to separate from the rest of the country.

The embers are already there. Roughly two decades after Western alienation birthed the Reform Party, and 12 years after it helped ensconce an Alberta-centric prime minister in Stephen Harper, Albertans remain as restive as ever.

More than 60 per cent of Albertans believe they’re getting a raw deal within the straitjacket of confederation, according to a recent IPSOS poll. Only 18 per cent of the province feels “the views of Western Canadians are represented in Ottawa.” A full quarter of the population feels the province would be better off as its own country.

With the usual caveat aside — a single poll taken amid a fit of Western pipeline-related pique — it can still be said: these numbers are enough to compel a credible separatist push in the land of oilsands and Old Style Pilsner beer.

Of course, the province doesn’t actually have to separate. It need only take very conspicuous steps toward the idea to scare the rest of the country into action. One need look no further than Quebec to see how well this has worked for over six decades.

Though equalization payments to Quebec have increased without fail since 1957, they really began to climb in 1966 and 1970. Quebec’s share nearly tripled in those four years, to $431 million, while the province’s outlay into the equalization pot remained relatively unchanged.

By no coincidence, these are the years in which Quebec’s separatist movement became a going concern and credible threat. Between 1976 and 1980, the first mandate of the separatist Parti Québécois, equalization payments jumped again by over 66 per cent. They increased by nearly half a billion dollars between the years bracketing the 1995 referendum.

Moreover, the threat of Quebec separation allowed for some of its academics and politicians to claim that the standing equalization formula was actually hurting the province. Jean-François Lisée, who has made a living as both, once wrote how Quebec taxpayer dollars were actually subsidizing employment and investment in other provinces, “costing” the province some 30,000 jobs.

Lisée wrote as much in 2000, presumably with a straight face. He must have, because equalization payments increased by an inflation-adjusted $1.8 billion over the next decade. This included a $1.5-billion shot in the arm courtesy of Stephen Harper in 2007, in order to address Quebec’s alleged “fiscal imbalance”— a bugaboo championed by premier Jean Charest, who promptly turned the resulting windfall into tax cuts to prop up his sputtering re-election gambit that same year.

In short, threatening separation — or promising to be a bulwark against it, which was Charest’s preferred side hustle — has been beneficial for Quebec. Yet the recent, ignoble electoral defeat of the Parti Québécois in the recent election, and the demographic cratering in support for Quebec independence among younger Quebecers, suggest Quebec’s best extortive years are behind us.

Perhaps it is time for a new existential threat, one festooned with cowboy hats and drenched in oil-soaked bravado. Again, Alberta need only threaten to leave, as Quebec has done for much of the last half century. And it had a hell of a run at it. Now it’s time for someone else to reap the fruits of threat-based, money-driven politics. Long live the Wild Rose Republic. Vive l’Alberta libre.

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