The Kingston couple who donated $1,000 to the Alberta government has come forward.

Kanji Nakatsu, a retired Queen’s University professor, and his wife, Susie, a retired health-care researcher, are behind the donation.

The couple decided to make the donation after seeing the low local price of gas in Kingston while on their daily walks. In March, they mailed a cheque to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s office.

“Alberta is really hurting. Is there anything we can do about it?” Kanji said in an interview on Friday.

The historic low gas prices have negatively affected the Alberta economy, which prompted the couple to help in their own way.

Kanji recently retired from Queen’s after a 42-year career in the department of pharmacology in the Queen’s faculty of health sciences.

Susie was a lab technician and trained at Vancouver General Hospital. She worked at Kingston General Hospital and did research at Queen’s.

The couple lives in central Kingston and has two grown children and seven grandchildren.

Both Kanji and Susie grew up in British Columbia, and Kanji attended university at the University of Alberta and University of British Columbia as well as doing post-doctoral work in the United States.

Kanji thought the $1,000 donation was an appropriate amount.

“You want to make it big enough that it means something but not so big that it will break the bank,” he said. “If we donated $1 or $10, I don’t think it would have meant anything.

“Just so the premier out there knows that not all Canadians are like those that oppose the Energy East Pipeline, that we are in it all together.”

He also mentioned that Alberta hasn’t really complained about making equalization payments to poorer provinces. Alberta paid 4.4 per cent of its total provincial revenue in 2017-18 in equalization payments.

“Somebody should tell them they’re appreciated once in a while,” Kanji said.

The couple hasn’t heard back directly from Kenney or his staff.

“Just through Twitter, but we don’t do Twitter. We only heard about it from other people,” Kanji said. “If someone hadn’t told us about it, we would have never known.”

In a tweet this week, Kenney said he was “moved” by the gesture and posted the couple’s letter on his Twitter feed but didn’t divulge their location other to say they were from Kingston.

The Alberta government has yet to add the donation to its coffers.

“We looked at our bank account the other day and it hasn’t come out yet, so I guess it goes into the big hole of bureaucracy and it’ll come out someday,” Kanji said.

Kanji said he and his wife have no preference where the money will go.

“Whatever they decide they want to do,” he said. “It’s not enough money to make that much of a difference to anything, but it’s enough to tell them, yes, we care.”

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