Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.