The void in Calgary: How office towers emptied in a once bustling downtown
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
Oil and gas dying is part of the problem, but ask many new grads from local universities why they are leaving and the answer is mainly that this is just not the place for them. That's a terrible sign for the future.
The comment by julianlam elsewhere in this thread reminded me of a time I toured a local startup's office who had "reclaimed" an executive level of a previous oil and gas company. The entire floor was decorated like a Roman Emperor's quarters and the boardroom table itself was worth somewhere north of $200k (possibly as much as half a millon).
I am a young guy in Calgary and from Calgary. More than half my high school classmates are gone. Packed up to Vancouver or Toronto, with a few stateside.
Most came back after university for a bit, but then departed.
I guess the difference is most people are moving from smaller places to cities for work and Calgary in theory should be a city where people would want to stay.
Office space vacancies in Calgary are nothing new. The economy will recover, people will forget the hard times, new buildings will go up and we'll do it all over again.
Back in the late 1990's/early 2000's it had a tech boom feel to it. Newly graduated engineers and geologists making the equivalent of $200,000 at 22. A friend from high school dropped out of his 2nd year of university because he could get a job paying $100,000 right now. Plenty of new vehicle, boats and new construction.
The Calgary-Edmonton corridor is one of the wealthiest areas in Canada. Alberta had the highest level of in-migration for a long time.
And keep in mind oil is now at $80/barrel and climbing. Those sweet, sweet oil royalties will be flowing into gov't coffers soon enough.
I immediately hear Ron Howard's voice (Arrested Development narrator) saying "They did waste it".
This quality of the oil makes Alberta extremely sensitive to pricing shenanigans OPEC plays every once in awhile.
A couple years back when oil prices were artificially low, it was due to OPEC pricing oil well below even their cost, purely to drive other oil producers out of the game.
Fracking is actually a reasonably cheap way to extract additional oil from more conventional wells. That happens in Alberta, also.
https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/technical/mining/surface-mi... and https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/technical/mining
These are large surface mines.
The economics of it have to do with the massive amount of earth moved, and the relatively low amount of oil recovered per unit volume... and the work needed to be done to restore the mine afterwards.
Cue the laugh track.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@57.0798964,-111.8686816,106744m/...
It looks a right mess.
The funny thing is I moved to Calgary in the early 2000's when oil was well under $50/bbl and the environment was one of unbounded optimism and potential. When oil hit the same price a few years ago on the way down the would have thought the world ended.
Because the province ran out of the easy to extract oil and had to move to bitumen extraction which requires a much higher price of oil to be profitable.
Oil sands need the price of oil to be in the area of $100+ a barrel to be profitable.
Last figures I saw were $30/barrel was breakeven.
Yes, but this means your variable input costs are proportional to your sales price.
I did a search for some actual numbers and they seem to be all over the place depending on the year, the type of bitumen converters being used, the age of the facility and the actual source. Oil industry numbers were about $20 a barrel less than the numbers I was seeing from investment firms.
I suspect that the numbers I was referencing were for new facilities being built back in 2015 or so. There was a lot of talk about new facilities being put into operation but that was when the price of oil was stratospheric.
Those numbers would have been higher than older facilities or upgraded facilities.
There's no guarantee the economy will recover at this point, and if it does, the likelihood of hitting the 2008 highs is vanishingly small.
There's no plan and has never been a plan to manage the resources of the province, so even the hint of a boom will distort wages up and down the ecosystem for a short period, followed by the waves of layoffs once that hint disappears and massive damage to every industry in the province.
I joined the board of the Alberta tech ecosystem for a term in the late 2010s while angel investing locally, and the picture was dismal but there were sparks of a revival. The current government that took power a few years ago completely ignored the new reality of the province and stomped on the ashes of the ecosystem.
Alberta is unfortunately heading towards Detroit-level dysfunction. There will still be activity, but the Alberta of the past is gone forever.
The only hope Alberta has is to switch government tracks and spend a real decade rebuilding from the continual societal damage that energy has impacted on it. And I'm not even talking about the environment yet. There is a real risk that Alberta will hollow-out and become little more than a slightly richer Saskatchewan.
At lest I hope Albertans will get enough transfers from the fed to run decent medical and education systems, I wouldn’t wish on anyones children the things I’ve seen young people in Detroit have to live through.
But you need to start somewhere.
The "core" of downtown Detroit is now very nice and very enjoyable to spend time in.
The show is watchable btw. for the somehow cyberpunky feeling. Unfortunately canceled after 1 season only, in spite of favourable reviews. Strange.
Anyways, the most memorable thing for me was the part where the protagonist hops into his self-driving e-car to commute from the gated community he lives in, to work in downtown.
There is a sequence where it zooms out, to behind the car and then upwards, like filmed from a quadcopter, or so.
And then you see all the nice trees next to the highway are just fakery, hiding the ghettos next to it, by holographic walls :-)
This mentality is why the current recession that started in 2015 hasn't turned around yet. The major oil and gas companies aren't coming back this time. It's time for the city to invest in something else instead of pandering to an industry that will drop them like a bad habit the moment the barrel drops below a certain price.
If you had 200 people last boom, you’ll have 80 the next.
Sometimes I imagine going back, because my elderly parents are there and my brother is there and I still have lots of friends there. But I can't imagine transplanting my children into that province.
Like you said, the politics are toxic.
Poor quality of municipal services caused by e.g. waste and corruption; or something entirely different?
And Alberta has essentially been a one party state under conservative rule for the last 50+ years (minus one 4 year term where a nominally left wing party took power by "fluke" because of a feud/split in the conservative vote). Every position of consequence there is connected to the conservative party, which is connected in turn to the oil and gas industry.
And they have bungled COVID badly.
Income taxes are way lower in Alberta than Ontario; moving my remote-ok tech job to calgary was equivalent to getting a five-figure raise.
Cycling in Toronto is a life-threatening activity, and Calgary has something like 150km of paved urban pathway.
The politics are toxic in both places.
Calgary is just quieter and I like that. I’m sick of listening to construction, sirens, street car clattering, and apt hvac systems.
The water in Calgary looks appetizing - I spent a lot of time in the outer harbour in Toronto and am acutely aware of the water quality advisories.
The shoreline of Toronto’s harbour front is ugly as sin. Chunks of the Gardiner is falling on peoples’ cars, and is a source of horrible, dementia-inducing noise pollution. Anyone with a balcony in Fort York or City Place probably used it for the first time during the pandemic, and otherwise is just their storage locker.
Calgary has a stunning river that glows with mineralized rocky mountain water, and you can walk or cycle along it for exercise because it isn’t so oversubscribed as the pan am path.
Transit is terrible in both towns but living on the subway was great.
I can afford a 1700sqft inner city calgary home with a garage and a yard for the price of a 900sqft 2bed downtown toronto condo.
The recreation opportunities in Calgary are year round, but in Toronto I felt like the onot things to do in the winter were restaurants and the ago.
The food scene in Toronto is amazing. I miss sushi. The music scene too. But Calgary has world class examples of all this, and this stuff is a lower priority than it once was.
Everything is 8 minutes away from me in Calgary. Try getting anywhere in 8 minutes in Toronto, what with the choking traffic, and the fact that all your friends have to move to orangeville and whitby because of rising prices.
Both cities have incredible energy. I was in calgary for the red mile, and at yonge and dundas when the raps won.
Calgary for me is a better place on balance.
Toronto has gotten so much more expensive in the years that I’ve lived here. I’ll miss the restaurants and the Island, but it’s going to be so amazing to have some space
I miss the food in Vancouver and I wasn't even that much of a foodie. I miss the more diverse population. I really miss Commercial Drive (quiet sob)
But we moved because of house prices. All of the amenities of Vancouver were great but we couldn't actually afford to live there. Its the same reason I don't live in San Fran. I had the opportunity to do so and would have loved to but the prices were insane.
When we first moved I was a bit worried because I would see people in Calgary complain about traffic congestion and traffic noise and then when I finally settled in I wondered what the heck they were even talking about. Even on a bad day it is still much quieter here than Vancouver.
After a certain age the food and the music and the theatre isn't as important.
The rivers are great though and driving down 14th into the core is a nice view.
Then you get downtown...
They typically come with a 'chinook arch' here in Calgary where there is a band of clouds to the south that demarcate the different weather systems.
Its truly something to behold
I grew up in Northern BC so I don't mind the winter. It gets cold for a few weeks but is otherwise bearable.
You get an actual spring here which is nice. Lots of new growth and green things. It is an actual dramatic change which Vancouver doesn't have.
Despite the snow I would never want to be in Vancouver again in winter. The clouds are over your head all the time. It feels oppressive. Winter here has lots of light and sky. And you never get that brown leaf mush stuck on your shoes like you do in Vancouver.
Calgary has over 1000km of paved urban pathway. I'm the creator of a small webapp called yycpathways.ca where you can sync your Strava up to a map of Calgary pathways. As you bike/run/etc the pathways, it will "Pac-Man" away the path and just show you places you haven't been before. Two people have completely covered all the pathways using my app.
But if you leave it to actually go somewhere, cycling is still a life-threatening activity.
another factoid about the paths is the city clears them before roadways after a snowfall!
love the app!
Unfortunately Alberta has mismanaged that fund so it is now far smaller than Norway's.
https://thenarwhal.ca/norway-s-oil-savings-just-hit-1-trilli...
We just prefer the colony model of letting the profits go to anyone but the local government.
To date, no oil sands operation has shutdown.
A while back I wanted to create something similar that'd help me ride every path and side streeet here in Boulder, CO, but it never went anywhere. I especially like the Pac-man idea for unexplored paths!
Any plan to extend it outside of Calgary?
Can't speak to outside of Calgary, but as long as politics is toxic in most places, reason why I stay here even though I could make more elsewhere is cause I can actually be a single guy and afford a decent place in Calgary.
I know married families in Toronto who individually make more than I do and still are struggling to come up with money for a freaking condo. That's insane.
The less than stellar transit and dead downtown scene notwithstanding.
This is completely false.
Albert’s income tax rates are:
10% on the first $131,220 of taxable income, + 12% on the next $26,244, + 13% on the next $52,488, + 14% on the next $104,976, + 15% on the amount over $314,928
Ontario’s income tax rates are:
5.05% on the first $45,142 of taxable income, + 9.15% on the next $45,145, + 11.16% on the next $59,713, + 12.16% on the next $70,000, + 13.16% on the amount over $220,000
Sales tax is lower in Alberta (5% be 13% in Ontario), but income tax, especially on the first $100,000 is significantly higher.
Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
Why are you lying, so blatantly?
I thought that Canada used the metric system. You and also the article expresses measurements in imperial units. Is that still used in Canada?
For people, height is in feet and weight is in pounds.
For distance, it's metric all the time. And that's how we measure our groceries.
For temperature, it's Celsius (except when taking someone's temperature, in which case it could be either).
For the size of your house, it'll be square feet.
And I'm sure a lot of what I just said this will depend on age and location.
How did you get to the lower income tax amount, given that it would appear from the official Canada Revenue Agency website figures[0] that provincial income tax seems generally higher in Alberta than in Ontario - especially the first 45k where the Ontario rate (5.05%) is just over half of the Alberta rate (10%). But even in the highest marginal tax bracket, Ontario seems to top out at 12.15% while Alberta tops out at 14%.
So your statement about income tax savings seems difficult to reconcile with the income tax charts without some other explanation.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
Even though the city was marketed as the "fun" city with all its events and festivals, I found it to be remarkably dead looking (architecturally cold concrete downtown, McMansions and overdeveloped cookie cutter cul de sacs everywhere).
Then we took a trip to Calgary for a couple of days, and I saw an even less appealing place.
Don't get me wrong, these places were filled with nice people, many which I miss having contact with.
But I would not have been able to settle there permanently (architecturally cold cities, extreme overconsumption, focus on fossil fuels and more played a role).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Edmonton_Mall
yet Edmonton itself is only the 33rd largest city in NA. As someone who grew up in a dull commuter suburb and hated every minute of it, this ratio of mall size to population is not inspiring.
Much of the square footage is devoted to entertainment pursuits that don't have a roof and close for the winter elsewhere in Canada.
But also, a fantastically beautiful river valley runs through it with vast green parks all around. Summer festivals that are quite nice. Quite sunny, even when it's cold. Some neat corners and neighbourhoods. A distinct culture of its own, some good restaurants. And politically far more progressive than the rest of the province.
Honestly, if Alberta was just Edmonton, I'd move back. I grew to hate it in my 20s, but I miss a lot about it and in my 40s when I visit I quite enjoy myself.
The situation isn't unique to Calgary. It is the same in a lot of other urban centres (like Oakland) where there was no development focus on anything other than head offices and high rises.
Compare Calgary to Vancouver (I live in C and spent 20+ years in V) where there was some effort to make the downtown a more livable space. I think the downtown here in Calgary is ghastly. Loud. Ugly. Who would want to spend any time in it?
I used to walk around downtown Vancouver all the time. Never do that here.
For decades the governments running Calgary, and Alberta, have not really given a shit about anyone other than large businesses (and their campaign funding) and those businesses have done what they normally do and moved elsewhere once things got tough or they got a better deal.
And, as usual, taxpayers and residents are left with the remains once the party is over and businesses have moved on.
In this case the city has an unliveable downtown filled with skyscrapers no-one wants to move into.
The city had a very progressive urban planning department until about 2007 or so and it shows.
I am not as familiar with the downtown as it exists now but the downtown was, when I lived there, very different than almost any downtown I have been in in North America with the possible exception of San Fran.
Calgary has a lifeless core and the worst urban sprawl in america but it's also because Calgary is wicked cold - the plus 15 (an above ground network walking between office buildings throughout the core for cold winter days) takes a lot of the foot traffic off the streets making it tough for street level businesses and the quality of produce/food is pretty bleak in Alberta unless you love beef and beets.
Vancouver never gets cold so you can literally walk there all year around and has a vibrant food scene and has geographical constraints limiting outward development.
Im not defending Calgarys lack of vision and innovation but they are dealing with completely different market dynamics (boom and bust) and environment.
In terms of tax payers, Alberta has the lowest tax across the country, not sure how much of it really falls on the tax payers but I'm curious about that.
All in all agree with most of your points, just expanding some of the thoughts.
> Im not defending Calgarys lack of vision and innovation but they are dealing with completely different market dynamics (boom and bust) and environment.
They are but at no point has anyone ever tried to address those problems. It was working and the money was coming in so people were happy.
Nothing that Calgary and Alberta is going through now is novel or unforeseen. The boom-bust cycle. The dreadful downtown. People could see the fan and the giant pile of shit but no-one thought it was worth planning for it
> All in all agree with most of your points, just expanding some of the thoughts.
Thanks for helping the discussion along :-)
Another anecdote to refute your point: LA has the best weather in the world, but a completely dead downtown that most people avoid.
You're right that the actual temperatures are pretty similar.
We'll see what happens given the dynamics of a lot of office work going forward. Most people don't want to live in a city apartment per se. They want to live somewhere with easy access to entertainment, restaurants, etc. If there's nowhere to walk to, there's little reason to live somewhere walkable.
As the founder of a small company that hadn't yet turned a profit, I was suitably impressed. Sad to hear they no longer even occupy the space.
On the other hand, their tech scene blew me away. Polar opposite of Toronto's "network first, friends later" attitude. Startups were helping each other out as a matter of course, whereas it always seemed like a competition in TO.
I moved here in 2017 and frankly it's shocking how much different the city is now from the stories people tell me what it was before.
It's shocking the number of layoffs I have heard about since I moved here. I'm surprised the city hasn't seen a massive exodus of people unable to find work.
I remember the weekend I drove out to find a place to live. It was early July and I was looking to rent for September 1. There was nothing available. I don’t mean there was nothing in my price range or there were places, but they were at the corner of crack rock and gunshot wound. There was nothing…
Sunday morning, I called my boss to tell her that I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to find a place. I drove back to Regina Monday without even looking at a place. By Tuesday, she talked one of her friends into renting me a room in his house and I couriered a year of rent cheques to him without even seeing the place.
Six months in, I started looking for an apartment. I lucked out, found a one bedroom and was so damned happy that I rented two places for two months. Nobody in Calgary was even remotely surprised that I’d pay rent on two places - rather, they were surprised that I only rented two places for two months.
Work wise, my company wasn’t even that big, but we couldn’t find enough space for all of us in one building so we were spread out over parts of six floors in four buildings. I liked working there, but if I ever had a bad morning, I could have walked out, made a half dozen calls, walked to my friend’s record store on 17th and had six job offers by the time I made it back downtown. Some of my friends who interviewed there had final questions like “Can you start now? No, what about later this afternoon? Okay, tomorrow? What if we pay you a two week bonus?”
It seems unlikely that Calgary will get another real boom, though. Now that Alberta's mostly just shipping the northern oil sands off through pipelines there isn't a lot of use in having huge offices there.
Calgary used to have one of the highest concentrations of head offices in Canada. The tax rates here were minimal.
I had some friends who did presentation and multimedia development for those companies who were suggesting I move here in the early 2000s since they were swamped with work.
Tax rates fell in other provinces and those head offices relocated to take advantage of the new rates as they tend to do.
People want to blame the oil prices and covid but there was a shift in head offices out of Calgary well before either event.
The main driver was that other provinces beat Alberta to the 'race to the bottom' in terms of tax rates.
It is an indicator that development priorities are ass-backwards. We try to attract big corporations thinking they will bring jobs instead of making cities liveable and attracting or building smaller businesses that will actually stay and help keep the city and the province economically feasible.
The striking part of the linked story is they didn't ask anyone why they don't want to live there, or why they moved away, etc. Just "tax rates always go up and after redevelopment rents will go up even more and I have no idea why nobody is here".
Maybe they have a severe crime problem, or the commute is unbearable, or there's no public transit, or the city council makes bars close at 8pm so young adults can't party. There's plenty of examples from other cities of how to kill a downtown, I'm just curious what Calgary did specifically. Every city in the world has tax problems and redevelopers pushing rents upward. Whats special about Calgary is ... (maybe answer is 'nothing' which is itself the problem?)
Everything shuts down at 5pm and people move back to the suburbs after work. It's fairly dead downtown after rush hour. Finding a coffee shop open at 8 or 9pm? Very few of them.
Art isn't a priority here. Public art installations are ridiculed as a waste of money (though some are accepted over time). Museums and galleries here are minimal.
Music is sterile and many groups skip playing in Alberta. It has gotten better, but Alberta had a reputation for chasing away "immoral" acts in the 90s and 2000s.
Politics are toxic. The current government was elected under a cloud of electoral fraud, does not play well with the opposition and is laser-focused on oil and gas.
Alberta is designed for cars and public transit is a bolt-on, expensive afterthought. This isn't unique to Alberta but it doesn't help. We do have a growing set of bike lanes and support for that has surprised me pleasantly.
Alberta is rich from oil money and if you're in that club, life is good. If not, you're not important to the conversation.
I was lucky to spend a lot of time travelling to the Bay Area, Seattle and other places to see what culture a town could bring beyond "being close to the mountains". I really wish this place would focus on it, but at times it feels like the province is allergic and negatively responds to having any sort of culture.
Being downtown even in the afternoon when there are people there is horrible. There is so much traffic and noise that you don't want to even bother exploring or checking things out.
I avoid downtown.
> I really wish this place would focus on it, but at times it feels like the province is allergic and negatively responds to having any sort of culture.
"culture' doesn't fill your campaign coffers and provide 'incentives' to local politicians.
If you avoid downtown and like suburbs it's a nice city.
You can get a bit creative with this too: e.g. dedicate some floors of the new apartment skyscraper as co-working spaces, and try to plan it so that everyone who rents in the building can use the co-working spaces for "free" as part of their rent and still have some leftover capacity to sell co-working memberships to others nearby as well.
There was some reasons for leaving it in place, and to be fair a major renovation would have to run into these hurdles either way. But it's probably going to be quite a bit more costly then you're imagining.
For some esoteric reason I don't fully understand that likely is some combination of taxes, capital gains and market pricing, commercial landlords seem to think its more advantageous to let properties sit empty for years, than in it is to lower their rates to see them occupied.
Where I live in Vancouver there are busy commercial neighborhoods that have had literally dozens of storefronts sit empty for years because no one can afford the leases and the landlords won't lower their rates.
It just seems to me, an admittedly unsophisticated commercial real estate neophyte, that the market for commercial real-estate seems to be fundamentally detached from market forces, likely due to the creation of taxation and regulation regime that provides incentives for commercial landlords to hold vacant properties rather than lower rates and if we as a society want to fix this, we need to look frameworks that are in place that make it a better deal for commercial landlords to sit on vacant properties than react to market forces and lower rates.
I left because the number of high-tech companies could be counted quite easily. There were pockets of excellence though.
While there is a toxic attitude present there at the same time people can be very open and honest and friendly too. I love the can-do spirit…when they want to people just go ahead and do it. That was refreshing after a lifetime in Toronto.
The people are exceedingly polite, the infrastructure is top notch (compared to most American cities I have visited) and feels like it was built assuming 130% capacity or something. The public transit was free downtown. The city govt was clearly doing a bit of work. Yet I felt the downtown area very lacking.
Calgary on the whole had a very uncanny valley feel to it. Apart from the weather I don't have any complaints about the city. The nature and recreation is world class, Indian food is aplenty, the people are incredibly nice and accommodating yet I wouldn't go back. I guess it just wasn't for me.
There's nothing wrong with them necessarily. But unless you specifically value living in a city for some walkable access to a few restaurants, markets, etc. there usually are not a lot of unique entertainment and other options that aren't available pretty much everywhere that isn't very rural.
Not the infrastructure. Almost every American city I visited looked like it was falling apart.
Vibe is a bit amorphous but I tend to think of vibe as a condensed view of what the city is about, a function of political tendencies, culture (music, sports, tech, entrepreneurship etc) and general friendliness. Job opportunities and decent social life are usually necessary conditions. Major cities like SF and NYC usually have all of them, provided you can afford living there.
But a city like San Antonio cannot offer everything, so if you don't dig Texan/Hispanic culture and don't like basketball, the grand river walk is not going to make you want to live there.
I asked a colleague from the magical land of Canadia whether I should take a flight to London from Edmonton or Calgary after travelling through the Canadian Rockies. She said Edmonton was shit, so Calgary.
As of 2019, Calgary was a kind of US-style car block city, except with nothing to do. Certainly not for tourists. I hope Edmonton isn't really worse, because zzzzz. I was interviewed by the local TV news when I tried to visit a tall building, which was closed.
They do have a lovely park stretching along the river though. I think it'd be a pretty decent place to live if you had a bunch of friends to hang out with. And maybe loads of money too? That helps.
If you're looking for exciting cities I'd stay away from almost ALL Canadian and US locations, but if you're looking for a big cities that supports a lifestyle that's not urba-based, Calgary is pretty great. Everything my family does is either walking distance or a very short drive (I live in the NW beltline) yet I'm very close to all the outdoor-centric activies I love.
I left for a big-tech job in the bay area, but I still miss elements of the Calgary lifestyle. In particular, the insanely low mortgage payments compared to wages led to a feeling that I could feasibly bootstrap a business without taking a huge financial risk.
Downtown is sterile. A nice cafe or more likely a nice restaurant will pop up - but there is nothing around it. In Summer, walking a few blocks is fine. In Winter……
There are tech jobs, as the many government funded programs will promote - but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the big cities. And none of the majors, really.
I feel like I’m just biding time here now. When this lease is up, I expect to move to Vancouver, or maybe even Toronto.
Taxes are slightly lower, sure. But you’re paying for that, even if indirectly.
In its defense (I have no horse in this fight) lots of downtowns in the US are like that. They’re places to work that empty out at 5pm. Seattle comes to mind. Maybe Chicago and St. Louis? It’s been a long time since I’ve been to those, though...
> To bring more people downtown, several office towers have already been turned into apartments, and the federal government has set aside $300-million to convert commercial properties across Canada to rental housing.
However at the moment maybe it's for the better, you don't need to be in the 1% of income earners to buy a house in Calgary.
Many Canadians are strongly against any sort of investment in fossil fuels of any kind.
Makes me wonder how much of Calgary's downstream economic woes is an attributable result of these upstream anti-oil plays.
British Columbia was completely fucked at the time and their premier had a good working relationship with Klein. That was the time for pipelines, not the time for austerity.
Ed Stellmach had little hope after Klein. Klein’s drunk driving was a massive scandal and that didn’t help, but by the time Klein was gone, Alberta’s public service was in the toilet. Provinces have a lot of power under Canada’s constitution but they need a strong public service to capitalize upon that.
For those non-Canadians, Canada has an "equalization" program which is essentially an attempt to "smooth out" tax income across the country, so the "have" provinces fund the "have not" provinces so Canadians across the country can have a similar standard of living and similar services.
Alberta, being the richest province, ends up paying way more equalization to the poorest provinces, mostly Quebec and the Maritimes. This is one of the significant factors of "western alienation", in that Albertans are continuously furious that their funds go to pay for Quebec's generous social systems. In fact, the Alberta government is holding a referendum next week on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Alberta_referendum).
Of course, bringing reality into the situation makes things look a little different, which is something that doesn't happen in the Canadian national discourse. Equalization is complicated, but there is no cheque written from Alberta to Quebec. Instead, the federal government pays Quebec its share of it from its own funds, mostly from federal income and sales taxes. The calculation of it is based on potential tax revenue. Alberta, being a province full of high income earners, has a very high potential tax revenue, so it is a "have" province and doesn't receive equalization. The idea is that provinces that can't raise their own revenue comparable to the other provinces get a break.
The issue is that Alberta has been chronically under taxing for years. It has no sales tax, it has the lowest by far income tax rates of the entire country. The system is designed for provinces to be responsible and raise their own revenue, and then get federal subsidies if that is not enough, but Alberta refuses to play that game. The Alberta government has been able to direct this rage to the federal government and Quebec though when the people really should be looking to their own provincial government instead.
This was really contentious following the oil busy in the mid 2010s. Alberta as a province was hurting, as a significant portion of its revenue came from oil royalties. However, since it refuses to raise taxes, it did not receive equalization payments despite being by all measures except the official ones a "have not" province.
A lot of Albertans are angry about pipelines and not being able to properly export their oil, as other posters have mentioned. Developing more infrastructure probably would be a good thing, especially when oil was cheap. Unfortunately, Canadian political discourse is not serious and its not possible to talk about serious, complex issues nationally.
Your last sentence is one of my favourite things I’ve read about Canadians. It reminds me a little of something Pierre Berton would have written. I love Canada, dig Canadiana and find our people’s history absolutely fascinating. But as a culture, we’ve never been capable of having a complex debate as a nation without going back to the same debates we had pre-Confederation. As far as we’ve come, it wouldn’t be wrong to talk about the Northwest versus Upper Canada. That’s bloody weird…
Have a perfect Friday friend!
Tell me if I'm wrong but someone from Quebec told me that equalization always has to be profitable for Quebec. Else, nationalists will bring up that they are footing the bill for the whole country and want out.
> The Alberta government has been able to direct this rage to the federal government and Quebec though when the people really should be looking to their own provincial government instead.
The same guy told me you could win elections really easily by bashing Quebec (which sounds absurd, here you'll get no reaction bashing NY for gubernatorial race) and that Newfoundland apparently almost went bankrupt twice with such governments (they were doing hydro I think?).
Basically, when the price of oil is over $75/barrel, tar sands extraction spins up, pulling in high priced labour from all over; when it drops below that, there's a lot of layoffs and work stoppage. This is why Alberta is caught in a perpetual boom/bust cycle. And politically, it's really hard to diversify to stabilize and break this cycle, when everyone is screaming for supporting the oil industry. Unqualified support for tar sands exploitation is a litmus test for any Alberta politician.
https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/projects/canadian-refinerie...
I don’t know your background but Canadians all know about the Liberal/NDP breakthrough in Alberta, so I don’t believe that you’re Canadian. So, next obvious question is why are you talking politics if you don’t even know the most extreme basics??
For example, that silly little thing you said about how Canada tends to favour (you spelled it favor) concentrating political and economic power along the cities of the St. Lawrence is genuinely laughable. Yes, Rebel News says that. But no, it’s really not true.
For one, provinces have an unbelievable amount of control. When provinces blame the federal government, it’s to deflect off their own governments’ profound failures. But second, I’m a Western Canadian, always have been and likely always will be. If you’re going to talk about the west like you know it, at least have enough respect to tell the truth. We had a western Prime Minister. Guess what he did?? He fucked the West with the worst economic recovery plan in the entire G8 after the 2008 economic crash. And in 2011, he introduced Bill C-20, which gave Alberta and BC six more seats each, Ontario FIFTEEN more seats and Québec got two. That’s not only a westerner, but that’s THE WESTERNER that Kenney, Moe et all still go to for walking orders. We can’t suddenly claim western alienation because the price of oil dropped especially when a westerner wrote policy that increased it. Perhaps, they have more seats because they have significantly more people?
I honestly don’t think you’re Canadian. If you are, please allocate at least 120 hours to studying the basics of citizenship.
Based on the census. If each citizen's vote is to be counted equally, there's ideally some proportionality to each riding. Of course in reality there's quite a real spread (26K to 132K):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canadian_federal...
Given that Ontario has three times the population of Alberta, is it any wonder that there are more MPs?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_and_territories_of_C...
Alberta has 34 seats in parliament with 4.067 million people for an average of 119k people per federal seat. Maritime provinces like Newfoundland have 7 federal seats with a population of 519k, for an average of 74k people per seat. If you look at our Senate, the representation is even more disproportionate. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, with a combined population of 1.8 million people have 24 seats in the Senate, while Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC, defined as "The West" and with a population of 11 million receive 24 seats as well.
So no, no one is saying "We deserve over-representation because look at our land", people are saying "we are under-represented in the Senate at a 10-1 ratio, and by almost 2-1 in parliament, and still under-represented even if you remove the maritime provinces from the equation". Your statement is empty stereotyping of the most tired variety.
Isn't it a fixed number of senators per state/provinces? Wyoming has the same number of senate seats as California for instance.
No party in this country can win an election without winning in Ontario and so that is where the focus of the elections are.
Until that system changes then it doesn't matter who is in power or where they came from. Ontario has too much concentrated population.
I’ve noticed Canadian democracy has an interesting trait and at this point, I don’t know whether it’s a bug or a feature. Our political parties are in favour of ProRep when they’re in opposition, but the second they’re in power, ProRep is one of those really bad swears they just can’t repeat. This is utterly baffling…
As would the Conservatives. If social conservatives could move their votes to a social conservative party they mostly would I suspect
https://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/stephen-harper-and-...
I think your view of Stephen Harper's performance is not quite correct.
While the proverbial / meme border between the US and Canada is the 49th parallel, in fact 72% of Canada's population lives below that line. The West (Prairies, BC) and North make up 28% of the population.
50% of the population live in Montreal (N46°) or south of it.
If each citizen's vote is counted equally, is it surprising that most of the Members of Parliament represent most of the population?
It's interesting you are bringing up the aerospace sector (so mostly Bombardier) because of the CSeries saga.
Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed on these planes, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways).
No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.
To me, those two cities are exemplars for the concept of 'soul-less glass and steel altars to capitalism'. They're now even more desolate as millennials such as myself left for better opportunities. I also agree with other commenters that the politics there are toxic, and very much stuck in the past. I wish the best for everybody remaining there, hopefully they can transition to a more sustainable economic model and excise the regressive, entitled political culture that's sprung forth from decades of unbridled decadence.