On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 12:48, Owen Byrne wrote:
> I suppose Canada, which is supposed to be a "loose confederation" of 2
> founding nations (French and English) can be cited as a success. The
> jury is still out, but so far only a few brief rebellions and
> referendums and such, still together after 130+ years.
Alberta, and to a lesser extent some of the other Western provinces, is
definitely not happy with the current arrangement.  Some of this has to
do with the strange way the Canadian government is structured.  When I
was last up in Alberta (a month ago), the newspapers were reporting
something like 70% of Albertans favor separating from Canada, and over
several distinct issues.
The problem is basically that while Alberta is an economic powerhouse
that is propping up the weaker economies of the Eastern provinces, their
interests are openly and unapologetically ignored by the government in
Ottawa.  While Alberta sends something like twice the tax dollars to
Ottawa per capita of the average Canadian, they only have token
representation in the federal government.  While I'm not clear on
exactly how the government works up there, representation is not
entirely based on population, and it works out that some eastern
provinces with populations smaller than the city of Calgary alone have
substantially more representatives in the legislature than the entire
province of Alberta.
The long and the short of it is that the eastern provinces use Alberta
as a personal ATM machine for their social programs while not even so
much as throwing Alberta a bone, and are able to do so because even the
sparsely populated eastern provinces can out-vote Alberta despite having
fewer people.  Or something like that.  The Canadian government is less
restricted than the US government, so they can do strange things, like
having restrictive regulations that only apply to certain provinces,
Alberta being on the receiving end of many such obscenities.  It is
essentially a much worse version of what is happening in the
inter-mountain West of the US.  Unlike the US case though, the rest of
Canada would really be hurting if they weren't receiving all those tax
dollars from Alberta.  OTOH, Alberta would probably thrive.
I have friends in Alberta, and visit occasionally, but I'm not totally
clear on everything that goes on in that country, due to my partial
unfamiliarity with how the government works up there, so I'm a little
fuzzy on some of the details.  What I do know is that on average the
Albertans are quite unhappy with their current position in Canada and
the sentiment has been getting worse over the years.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com