Are eastern Canadians aware of the calamity of their predicament? The eastern free-ride is over.
The have not provinces for years have been using the transfer payment money to top up the salaries and benefits of their civil servants. What is left of the funds goes to education and Medicare.
Source: Brain Lee Crawley while he was a director of the Halifax — Atlantic Institute for Marketing Studies (AIMS) organization. Today he is with the Montreal Institute. Crawley revealed that information when he addressed the audience at the Calgary Congress in 2006.
The majority Alberta crowd were shocked to hear that story that most Albertans realize they are shafted everyday while they remain a province in Canada. Unfortunately for Canada, and its precarious future, the top up story was another blow beneath the Alberta belt.
The recent national news about the lion’s share of transfer payments going to Quebec is old news in Alberta. Shocked as they were, discovering more abuse of Alberta’s money simply adds more people to the growing numbers of western Canadians that realize, for their very survival, they must soon abandon the Canadian Titanic. The time has long past where rearranging the deck chairs on this doomed ship will save it.
The growing Ontario and Quebec debt is out of control, a combined debt of half a trillion dollars. Add the Maritime provinces’ debt and the B.C. debt ($60 billion), and normal thinking people in the west — led by Alberta and Saskatchewan — may soon make the decision to go it alone.
A new nation in the west will not necessarily include the NDP and Liberal free-loaders on the west coast and Vancouver Island. The B.C. refusal to build the pipeline, I believe, will see the B.C. Peace River district soon abandon the B.C. government and move their land and assets into Alberta.
Alberta and Saskatchewan’s trump card, regardless of the present problems in the U.S., is that they can always ship their oil and gas through the Pacific Northwest states.
The Americans are responsible in the first place for helping Alberta develop their oil and gas industry. In the beginning, Ontario and Quebec were not interested in investing in western petroleum, too risky and expensive they said. Ontario and Quebec missed the boat on the largest industrial complex in the history of North America. In those days central Canada owned the rights to the western resource base, they never thought they would lose those rights.
Ontario and Quebec never got over losing control of the west’s natural resources. The 1931-33 Statute of Westminster granted western Canadians the right to “own their own mineral rights.”
Premier W.A.C. Bennett realized years ago that in order to keep the B.C. Peace district a part of B.C. he had to build the Pacific Great Eastern Railway (the PGE). Subsequent governments changed the name to BC Rail. The fraudulent deal to sell BC Rail to CN Rail was the straw that broke the back of the B.C. Liberals — not to mention fraud at ICBC and BC Hydro. CN was one of the largest contributors to Gordon Campbell’s election campaigns.
Most of the B.C. Conservatives I travel with believe Campbell and Shifty Christie — she was his deputy premier — ordered his attorney general and a B.C. judge to seal the evidence of the sale in a court order.
The corruption is a mile deep. The HST and carbon tax are serious problems — unfortunately they are just two of two many problems, causing the Liberals to self destruct.
Only in Canada, eh?
Ernie Slump
Penticton