Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Alberta and I'm quite concerned about this topic. This recent HN comment[0] has been on my mind lately.

I've lived here my whole life and while I have some level of sympathy for the sense of western alienation I feel that it's more of an identity thing that's been fomented by bad actors over the decades for their own personal political agendas and now that it's embedded into people's sense of self from birth it has become hyper-real and a great threat to me and the economic stability of the place that I call home.

Nefarious people can really take advantage of these sentiments and get the people who truly believe them to eagerly do some fantastically bad things that are against their self interest.

I don't know what can be done about that. Like what's the "Ape together Strong"[1] counter to this divisive bullshit?

Alberta has a highly educated population, and one that has robust blue collar abilities, pretty good infrastructure, A shit load of natural resources, enviable geographic advantages in terms of security and isolation, and overall a very good quality of life.

What Alberta needs is to be honest with itself and recognize that so many of our issues are caused by ourselves and our inability to coordinate as a people against internal and external forces. Separating won't change that, it'll only make it worse.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apes-together-strong

> I've lived here my whole life and while I have some level of sympathy for the sense of western alienation I feel that it's more of an identity thing that's been fomented by bad actors...

As someone who grew up in Ontario, there is a real "f*ck Alberta" mentality in the central provinces.

I grew up in Alberta and now live in Ontario and in my mind it's less "fuck Alberta" and more "I don't give a fuck about Alberta". Most Ontarians don't care about Alberta, its well being, or what its citizens want. Perhaps this is inevitable in a country as large as Canada.

A good parallel is America's "flyover country".

I'm from BC. Seeing Alberta and the US as some sort of parallel to Russia and Ukraine feels like some new level of paranoia.

If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?

Alberta is not going to separate from Canada. The US is not going to invade Canada. This is just noise. There's plenty of things that matter that we need to focus on instead of this nonsense.

I guess Brexit shows us that the public can vote for stupid things.

> What Alberta needs is to be honest with itself and recognize that so many of our issues are caused by ourselves and our inability to coordinate as a people against internal and external forces. Separating won't change that, it'll only make it worse.

Can you expand on this? What sort of issues do Albertans cause to themselves?

I'm a bit busy at the moment so my comment will be in point form.

* Tying personal identity to a commodity which has a price that experiences guaranteed and radical fluctuations.

* Being the only province that doesn't have a provincial sales tax to provide some sort of stability to the provincial budget.

* Perpetually voting conservative at a provincial and federal level regardless of what that those policies those parties propose and enact, or the corruption that they blatantly practice.

* Embracing an 'us or them' mentality in all things, being unwilling to compromise or work with people viewed as outsiders. Any push back from outsiders leaders to Albertan leaders feigning moral injury in a way that would make a soccer player at the world cup blush.

* Letting oil companies act with impunity (orphaned wells, policies to hobble wind and solar)

* Always reactive -- never proactive. “Please God, give me one more oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time.”

* Bizarre centre of the universe thinking that ultimately stems from an insecurity of realizing that it's not and never will be and not being able to accept that it's okay.

* Head in the sand mentality w.r.t. climate change and therefore no planning for long term water sources for southern Alberta.

I find it interesting that one of only 7 NDP MPs elected in the last election was in Alberta.

Sounds like the rest of Canada.

Seriously though, to some of your points:

- If the province can be funded without a sales tax that sounds like something that benefits the people, not sure why this is a problem. If the province runs into budget issues I'm sure they'll figure out where to get the money. There has to be some advantage to this.

- The NDP was the provincial (majority) government 2015-2019. I guess people weren't happy with them so they voted for a different government. That sounds like democracy in action not perpetually voting one way. The last federal conservative government was a while back (Harper) and really there is not a ton of difference (IMO) between the Liberals and the Conservatives in terms of policy and I would argue the Liberals have been plenty corrupt. I don't recall a lot of corruption under Harper (but that might just be me not paying attention). I think for a province like Alberta supporting a party which calls for investing in resource production and export is pretty logical (and is really the logical thing for Canada that even Carney has called for in response to PP).

- Why would oil companies care if Alberta uses wind or solar (is it worthwhile doing solar?). Presumably most of their product is for export. https://economicdashboard.alberta.ca/dashboard/renewable-ene... shows that Alberta is actually switching to more renewable energy.

- Is there a real risk of running out of water in Southern Alberta? I'm not familiar with the situation.

Well that's just it, Over the long run Alberta has proven that it is not able to run a balanced budget[0][1][2] and the only times where it has come close have been achieved through a combination of high oil prices, the selling off of municipal and provincial assets which ultimately cost Albertans more in the long run, and heavy cuts to infrastructure and social spending that are merely deficits of a different kind.

At the same time the development of the O&G industry put great strain on existing infrastructure with schools massively underfunded, understaffed and with too many students[3] and the Alberta capital of Edmonton not having a new hospital constructed since 1988 while the population has nearly doubled.[4]

The NDP win in 2015 was a complete aberration that is unlikely to be repeated in the future. From 1971 to 2015 the Progressive Conservatives held power until the combination of electorate fatigue towards their rule and a schism in the party lead to a vote split that enabled the NDP to win. the price of oil promptly shit the bed[5] causing the return of massive deficits and this combined with sustained attacks on the provincial NDP inaccurately painting it as anti O&G industry lead to a narrow NDP defeat and the return of the PCs reborn as the UCP. To look at it another way with the UCP in office until at least 2027 that means that we're looking at conservatives running Alberta for 52 of 56 years or 93% of the time.

It's also noteworthy that in the past twenty years the only Premier to successfully complete a full term and not have to resign in disgrace or be ousted by the party has been the NDP leader. Every other conservative Premier has stepped down before completing a full term. Functionally what's occurring in Alberta is that the Premier is picked at the conservative party leader convention and many centre or centre left Albertans buy party memberships to have a say in the leader because they understand that the actual provincial election does not determine who the leader is.

Your question about why O&G companies care so much about solar and wind production is a good one, I think it's a combination of two things -- One they view the success of it anywhere as a threat to their continued existence and two they have truly bought into the propaganda that their industry puts out about climate change so they're in complete denial about the necessity to move away from hydrocarbon extraction. Alberta was making great strides to move towards renewable energy but those moves were squashed by the UCP in the past few years when they implemented an outright moratorium on new projects which scuttled a lot of projects and has effectively neutered the industry in Alberta as investors are now seeking more politically stable regions for their investments[6] despite Alberta having tremendous potential for solar and wind production[7].

Much of Southern Alberta is located in a region known as Palliser's Triangle[8] which is susceptible to periodic droughts. With much of the region dependent on glacier fed rivers that originate in the Rocky Mountains it is only a matter of time before those glacier sources dry up and ground water sources prove to be insufficient for the burgeoning population of Calgary and the agriculture industry. Tough decisions will need to be made and the current UCP leader's ambitions to double the population of Alberta by 2050[9] may just not be tenable.

[0] https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/50-Ye...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_budget#Historical_budg...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-s-5-2b-budge...

[3] https://calgaryherald.com/news/in-a-crisis-hundreds-of-schoo...

[4] https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/alberta-puts-2m-to...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_oil_glut

[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/solar-wind-investment...

[7] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-sources/renewable...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palliser%27s_Triangle

[9] https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2024/08/09/alberta-government-b...

How old are YOU? I think there's a certain age bracket who thinks the US would never invade Canada, and if you were a bit older you might not be so certain.

In my 50s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com