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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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?).
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!
https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/projects/canadian-refinerie...
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.
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.