• toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    Its not nonsense, Alberta gets 0$ in equalization payments most years. They also have a small population with extremely high corporate profits with high margins, so those corporations pay more taxes, regardless if it trickles down to workers or not. Also during a recession oil generally does okay, while other provinces are wiped out.

    • CircaV@lemmy.ca
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      8 hours ago

      Only Alberta babies constantly whinging about equalization payments. JFC. Stop begrudging QC their social programs. If AB wants social programs (🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣) then fucking pay for them with your oil billions. Stop deluding yourselves that you pay for another provinces programs. Am in Ontario, never ONCE does it cross our minds that our equalization payments go to New Brunswick or PEI or some shit. Only Alberta are douchebags this way.

      • toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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        8 hours ago

        The Alberta babies are the one who are changing their referendum laws, I’m unsure what point you think you’re making, is it just an attempt at an ad hominem?

        • CircaV@lemmy.ca
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          8 hours ago

          So? AB could vote 100% to leave and it will never happen. Honestly though, fucking leave. AB would be tiny seeing as AB can’t take with them what’s not theirs. Unceded Indigenous land and Indigenous land covered by treaties. Marlaina’s doing a nice job of distracting you from her huge 180k carpet cleaning bill.

          • toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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            8 hours ago

            The theory is they’re drumming up a crisis in order to get Quebec to agree to pipelines. Its not about actually separating.

            Fixing that fork in the road created with 1961 National Oil Policy, that then brought up huge amounts of pain in the 70s and 80s, which basically flipped the table leading to nationalization attempts and the inevitable failure of the national energy policy.

            • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca
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              7 hours ago

              This is not entirely unlikely. And I would not prima facie be against this approach.

              Except for the fact that the common people don’t get nuance like this, and it just makes the division infinitely worse. The rest of Canada is going to consider Alberta to be traitors, and the part of Alberta that are traitors are going to get fired up with false hope, further stoking their hatred when they are inevitably let down.

              Maybe this is the only way to get east west pipelines. Maybe there are pieces in place behind the scenes. Unfortunately I think it’s unlikely to be very sophisticated, because Smith is in no way a sophisticated thinker. I’m inclined to think the simpler explanation is that Smith is self serving and we really have rural Albertans who have grown up knowing nothing but hatred for eastern liberals, and they’ve been sold a bill of goods that they don’t question and wouldn’t understand if they did.

              • toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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                6 hours ago

                Alberta has no alternatives to export so loses a lot by shipping to the US. Alberta has a huge amount to gain by having alternative shipping routes. I think they’d be happy with things and the media would change their opinion pretty quickly.

    • RaskolnikovsAxe@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Alberta went for many years benefiting from equalization. Saskatchewan just recently became a ‘have’ province after spending decades as a have not. Yes, both provinces were sucking off Ontario’s tit while they were scratching dirt trying to feed themselves, and there were no complaints then…but now, conveniently when oil oligarchs started deciding the politics of those two provinces, now they become ungrateful assholes who want to keep all their money and not help anyone else. Fuck you, I got mine. A tale as old as time.

      We need to nationalize oil and gas and start a proper sovereign wealth fund. Get the private money (especially US) out of there. As soon as we do that I bet all this division would fizzle out.