Secondly, the majority of Canada's economy is service oriented, but due to the way Canada is structured, the super-majority of the transfer payments that the federal government makes to the various provinces comes from resource extraction generated revenues.
The following statements are not meant to be value judgements, they are just simple statements of fact that should give color to the context that is missing from the parent comment. For non-Canadian HN users, in order to guarantee a relatively equal standard of living for Canadian citizens regardless of where they happen to live, the federal government distributes billions of dollars every year to various provinces, taking from the more wealthy provinces and helping shore up the budgets of the less wealthy provinces. These revenues have been generated in overwhelmingly large part by resource extraction, and the service oriented economies of other provinces show 0 possibility of taking up the slack for these revenues should resource extraction end, they simply don't generate enough surplus on a per-capita basis. Without these revenues large portions of Canada would face absolutely devastating cuts to government revenues and thus services, and frankly no government has really put forth any sort of solution to this, outside of larger deficits on a temporary basis. How Canada navigates this difference between its aspirations, a service oriented non-resource economy, and the reality on the ground, an absolute dependence on resource revenues for current quality of life, is probably the biggest question it will face in the 21st Century.
For non-Canadians, if you live in certain economic development zones the Canadian government effectively pays you a bunch of money annually (Northern Residents Deduction) to just keep living there. We just saw how vulnerable these communities are to natural disasters like a pandemic - they also often suffer food security problems during blizzards and rail outages[1]. If there's an economic reason to support communities up there I'm all for it, but I really don't see why we want to go out of our way to subsidize that life choice.
Also specifically on the topic of BC real-estate-as-a-service - it's pretty fucking insane and I have no idea why this market is sustaining itself at this point, we're all due for a shock one of these days that will hurt really bad. That said - BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by the real estate market and, if we saw a price drop, we'd likely see a lot more labour market accessibility go along with it.
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-servi...
As you can see this has absolutely nothing to do with projecting territorial claims, which is why I specifically did not mention that in my description. As I did specifically mention in order to provide relatively level standards of living across the country the federal government transfers money away from more wealthy provinces to less wealthy provinces. As you can see from the table in that link I posted above, provinces like Quebec receive over 10% of their annual budget in the form of transfer payments, this is an even larger percentage of the budget for some of the maritime nations. If you look at the second table on that page you'll note that literally only Ontario and Alberta have higher than Canadian average, average incomes, indicating that these transfer payments are largely funded by those two provinces, and because Alberta is so much higher, it is largely funded by them. As I indicated, figuring out a way to square the reality of these payments vanishing with the current quality of life they afford is a huge challenge for Canada.
Secondly, you talk about Alberta needing to diversify but say "BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by real estate", do you understand that this means that BC is less diversified than Alberta? That BC is more dependent on a single sector, and that sector is literally just flipping homes, not doing any sort of productive manufacturing, or providing a service? Like, I'm not sure how you're so confident in your diagnosis of Alberta's woes, while simultaneously appearing to have no concern for BC?
On the topic of BC's economy, it is unhealthy but the fact that BC's economy comes 17.4%[1] still only puts it 4.4% above Canada at large (13.01%)[2] - that compares to Alberta which derives 16.12% of it's economy from mineral/oil/gas extraction which is 7.9% above Canada at large (8.21%)[2].
BC absolutely has a real estate issue and it's quite concerning - but there is a lot more "natural" activity in that sector nation-wide compared with Alberta's oil dependency. I think it's also fair to view that while the 17.4% of BC's GDP covers pretty much all the economic activity related to real-estate the 16.12% in Alberta misses a lot of the knock-on benefits of the oil industry and dependent businesses... but that's an opinion.
1. (sourced 2018 - wikipedia) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_... I rounded up in the previous post
2. (sourced 2017 - wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industri...
3. (sourced 2019 - statistica whatever that is) https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-...
And yet, Alberta was the most economically successful province, literally subsidizing all others. Go figure how the service transition worked out...
Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.
How so? Oil production is ticking back up and is higher than any time since about 2010.
It was literally all stolen by the Federal government through equalization payment. Can't really blame Alberta here...
The only problem here is that Alberta was forced to give up all its money in equalization payment, and has none left.
Because all modern-day chip are so much environmentally friendly...