Albertans Annoyed, Not Alienated

In today’s National Post (subscription required), George Koch and John Weissenberger respond to Canada West Foundation’s Roger Gibbins’s suggestions for how Alberta should proceed in Canada.

Their central point is that Gibbins starts off on the wrong foot by using the language of “alienation,” instead of the more appropriate language of “annoyance”:

By Gibbins’ account, and many others of late, Western “alienation” amounts to mere perception, paranoid fantasy or selfish ingratitude.

In fact, real events shaped our Weltanschauung: Funding of the CPR using tax-free grants of the West’s land and minerals (still exploited today); the National Policy and tariff walls that beggared Western farmers and townsmen for decades; regulated energy prices and export controls; foreign investment restrictions; the National Energy Program; slashing of grain transport subsidies while billions was lavished on Quebec; the CF-18 maintenance contract; Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord; and more recently, the gun registry, HRDC, Adscam, Shawinigate and Kyoto.

All have involved either attacks on the West’s economy and the liberties of Westerners, or waste and corruption harming all of Canada, but using mostly Albertans’ money. Today, the economic “imbalance” amounts to an annual net transfer of more than $10-billion.

That’s what drives Albertans’ present-day annoyance at our lack of national influence. And by the way, it is annoyance, not “alienation” — a term implying we were once an integral part of the Canadian centre, and that we dream only of climbing back into the gentle womb of central Canada. We never were, and today we don’t want to “come in from the cold,” as Gibbins put it. Our message is simple: Quit sabotaging our way of life, and stop wasting our money.

I agree wholeheartedly. Central Canada is simply not the “gentle womb” that Alberta seeks to return to. The whole language of “alienation” bespeaks a gnostic dream of exiles in the wasteland who yearn to return to the source of purity and truth. Using the language of “alienation” for Albertans is about absurd as using it to describe the anger of the American colonists. Anyone who’s read thepolitic.com recently, or ever, will know that your scribes don’t subscribe to such b.s.

Here’s my previous post on Gibbins’s efforts to bring Alberta “in from the cold.”