You're right but you should cite something other than the CBC, since it will just be immediately dismissed by the biased as biased.
Alberta is very important economically. I'm from there. Ontario (I live there) and Quebec and BC are also massively important. And fanning the flames of disinformation and playing grievance politics to make Albertans feel discriminated against has become an extremely serious problem.
Wab Kinew was very eloquent on this topic yesterday.
I would think Ontario is the centre of Canada as it has the most people and the financial centre. Google's AI says 38% of GDP. And the problem Alberta faces is who wants to separate, what do they want to do afterwards and what ground do they actually own (vs. treaties that predate Alberta).
When Alberta at least catches up to Quebec in practicing being independent (runs its own police, collects its own taxes, has its own pension system, maintains foreign services, ... They might decide the extra taxes to pay for such is less "fun". And they need a border to ship stuff through.
North America's biggest oil pipeline -- Enbridge Mainline, which has a capacity of 3.2M barrels per day -- runs east through Sask, Manitoba, ducks down through Michigan, and then splits before coming back into Canada in Ontario in two places (including Line9 ~1km from my house.)
Ontario is one of Alberta's biggest customers.
Then there's westbound ... TMX capacity of 890,000 barrels a day, to BC ports (and then on to China).
Did you watch this video? About half way through he confirms that Alberta has the highest GDP/capita in Canada and is the largest (per capita) tax contributor. Ontario is obviously larger in absolute terms, but it has at least 4x the population.
As with any time you deploy an average... (And I'd expect better on this forum of all places)
Show me the distribution. Show me the median not just the mean. Show me the standard deviation.
Otherwise ... abused.
Yes, we all know oil is an extremely profitable (and environmentally destructive) commodity. That doesn't make the typical Albertans somehow responsible for holding up all of confederation. Just means oil is making some people very rich. For now.
I'm from there and my family is in Alberta. I can tell you now that the oil industry ain't doing jack squat for them.
I think 70-80% of investors are down South, so not much stays here no. And jack shit goes into the heritage fund, just for aimco to throw away (sorry invest).
Alberta is very important economically. I'm from there. Ontario (I live there) and Quebec and BC are also massively important. And fanning the flames of disinformation and playing grievance politics to make Albertans feel discriminated against has become an extremely serious problem.
Wab Kinew was very eloquent on this topic yesterday.