This Albertan regards ‘Western alienation’ as manipulation by local elites

By Alvin FinkelContributor

Thu., Dec. 19, 2019timer3 min. read

Ask 10 Albertans why our province cratered into recession in 1982 and nine will likely blame Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program. In fact, an international economic recession sank oil prices, making further oilsands development impractical. But intertwined elites of oil interests, conservative parties, and conservative media inculcated the Big Lie that “the Ottawa government” authored “our” recession.

Many big lies underlie today’s “Western alienation.” Once based on legitimate grievances, Prairie complaints have always been manipulated by regional elites to disguise internal problems as creations of “Easterners.” That allows elites to absolve themselves regarding local poverty.

This “Western alienation” shtick allows Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to distract Albertans from the massive destruction of public services and unions coupled with a surreptitious economic and political policy shift. Having failed to attract new, private investments for fossil fuels, he is raiding public sector pensions and demanding provincial control over the Canada Pension Plan in Alberta to expand funds available for petroleum investments.

Kenney wages war on two fronts — against the federal government and Canadian environmentalists on one hand, and public employees and their pensions on the other. The two wars have the common aim of reviving Alberta’s main industry as awareness of the destructiveness of fossil fuels suppresses demand.

One big lie is that equalization policies are turning Alberta into a poverty-stricken wasteland. StatsCan figures for 2017 show Alberta GDP per capita is 25 per cent greater than the Canadian pre-tax average. Our poor are as poor as any other province’s poor. But that’s because our politicians, with the partial exception of Rachel Notley’s NDP government, haven’t given a rat’s ass about the poor, not because the federal government has fleeced us.

We have no sales tax. If we had Quebec’s 10 per cent sales tax, we would have large surpluses today rather than the deficit that Kenney blames on the NDP and the federal government. Kenney is exacerbating Alberta’s revenue problem by abandoning the carbon tax and decreasing corporate taxes from 12 per cent to 8 per cent. That has pleased oil companies but most have announced that they will invest this gift outside Alberta.

A related big lie is that Alberta’s public spending is unsustainable. Kenney plans to reduce the proportion of Alberta’s GDP that goes to provincial services to 13.8 per cent by 2022-23, replicating 1997-98, when Klein’s cuts had been fully absorbed. The Royal Bank reports that per capita government expenses in Alberta in 2018-19 represented 16.3 per cent of GDP. It was 24.2 per cent in Quebec, 19.7 per cent in British Columbia, and 18.8 per cent in Ontario. Alberta does spend more dollars on public wages than other provinces, but that is because wages across the board are much higher.

Kenney is distracting Albertans from his gutting of services by putting an array of supposed enemies of Alberta on trial. They include environmentalists, the federal government, the Quebec and British Columbia governments, banks unwilling to lend money to oil investors, and European politicians who have allegedly been brainwashed by green leftists.

He has established a $30 million war room to expose an alleged conspiracy by foreign-funded environmentalists to strand Alberta oil through lack of pipelines. He has also established a “Fair Deal” panel meant to limit Alberta’s relations with the rest of Canada by provincializing the Canada Pension Plan, firing the RCMP, and taking control over firearms legislation.

Kenney’s cuts have reduced his popularity in opinion polls. While public servants reacted with shock when Ralph Klein made his lightning cuts, the Alberta trade union movement has done much over the years to prepare its members for the possibility of a “reKlein” government.

Increasingly, Albertans are questioning the claim that federal policies restrain Alberta, as opposed to a changing world economic order created by the climate crisis. Many feel more alienated from our premier and Big Oil than from Ottawa.

The Notley government took initiatives to diversify Alberta’s economy that Kenney has killed. But we had a glimpse of a way forward and federal-provincial co-operation to get that back on track would make more sense than a phoney war against the federal government.