Alberta is giving me a headache.
The province stands alone in its incurable sense of grievance with the rest of the federation.
Not even a $34.2-billion expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline (TMX) built by Ottawa to get Alberta oil to non-U.S. markets for the first time has reduced Alberta’s bellyaching.
The expanded TMX pretty much guarantees high Alberta oil production and employment for decades to come. The Canadians who paid for the TMX with their tax dollars are still waiting for a word of thanks from Albertans.
But Alberta doesn’t do gratitude. It does righteous indignation, ad nauseam.
Perhaps Alberta should go its own way and then have only itself to complain to.
Not that there’s much to complain about in one of the world’s most prosperous jurisdictions.
Even more reason for Alberta to go it alone. Its population of about 4.4 million roughly equates with that of New Zealand and a self-governing Scotland.
At a time when Canada’s sovereignty is under attack from the U.S., a couple of prominent Albertans backed by an energetic grassroots Alberta separatist movement are undermining Canadian unity, which otherwise is at a zenith not seen since Expo 67.
As earlier noted in this space, the most effective means of quickly ending U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic attack on Canada would be a 300 per cent export tax on the Alberta oil shipped to the U.S. The U.S. relies on Alberta for about 20 per cent of its total oil consumption.
But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith balks at that. “If they (Ottawa) start stealing more of our money and trying to control more of our future, I think Albertans will boil over,” Smith said of export tariffs, which no dictionary defines as theft.
The larger context here is Smith’s oxymoronic Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, by which Alberta can attempt to override federal laws it doesn’t like.
And there’s Alberta’s mooted carve-out from the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) by which it seeks 53 per cent of the CPP’s assets, having contributed only about 16 per cent of those assets, according to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
Smith and her Ontario counterpart, Premier Doug Ford, are a study in contrasts.
In waging the tariff war against Trump, Ford has threatened to cut off electricity exports to the U.S.
And in the Ford government’s throne speech last week, Ontario said it will “champion” new oil and natural gas pipelines to reach new markets for Western Canada’s fossil fuels.
That was a generous nod to Alberta.
Smith has not championed but demanded unfettered access to the rest of Canada for new pipelines criss-crossing the country.
If Smith has any sensitivity to people elsewhere in Canada, including Indigenous Peoples, who might object to having pipelines traversing their land, she doesn’t show it.
That unrestricted pipeline construction was one of nine demands Smith made in her first meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney on March 20. She said her demands must be met by a new federal government in six months to avoid an “unprecedented national unity crisis.”
And there’s Preston Manning, a co-founder of the Reform Party and an Alberta nationalist, warning Canadians in an April 2 newspaper column that a vote for the Liberals in the April 28 election is a vote for Western secession — “for the breakup of Canada as we know it.”
Manning has subjected Canadian voters to extortion, a sordid gambit that only the most strident Quebec nationalists have attempted.
Absent Alberta, Canada could confront Trumpism as a more united front.
And Canadian taxpayers would no longer have to subsidize Alberta’s oilpatch, its increased housing supply, and its university research projects.
No one from Ottawa asked me what I would do with the $34 billion in taxpayer money — including mine — allocated to expanding the TMX.
I might have said the TMX can wait.
And suggested that the money be spent instead on cutting health-care wait times and rebuilding a largely deficient long-term-care sector where so many Canadian seniors died in the pandemic.
Alberta’s separation would reduce the Canadian economy by about $460 billion, or 15 per cent. That’s no trivial loss, but it’s bearable.
The real loss would be Alberta’s entrepreneurial culture; its powers of endurance, forged in the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and more than one collapse in world oil prices; and the remarkable people Alberta produces — Peter Lougheed, Marshall McLuhan, Max Ward, Michael J. Fox, Chrystia Freeland, Mark Tewksbury, Grant Fuhr, and k.d. lang, to name a few.
Sadly, the Canadian patriotism those Albertans did and do represent has been betrayed by the self-involved parochialism of Alberta’s current political leadership class and its followers.
If only one could take a pill and make that go away. But it might be that there ain’t no cure for Alberta except to wave goodbye.
