The Western Canadian voices demanding separation are getting louder and for very good reason.
The West’s disillusion with the Confederation of Canada goes far beyond the present situation where Liberal government incompetence and it’s illusion that our country can save the planet destroying our energy industry is only part of the reason that the “West Wants Out”.
For many of the past 152 years, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have always been second cousins or what Ottawa considered just a vast open space necessary only to connect Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes to BC to ensure that America didn’t take Canada in the mid 1800s.
Canadian politicians and most of its citizens pride themselves on their willingness to compromise and that is also part of our problem. This country has been nothing but a series of disingenuous compromises since 1867. With no national standards for anything, Canada compromises on everything. We compromise on social programs, on subsidies to businesses and crown corporations, on NGOs that in turn do nothing but harm our economy. We donate tax dollars to corrupt Chinese communist governments to build oil pipelines in Asia yet are unwilling to build our own. We let America take advantage of us at every turn without a whimper. We demand free trade with the world yet have no free trade between provinces, each of which have their own unnecessary bureaucracy that prohibits economic growth both provincially and nationally.
Canada has become an unrecognizable land mass of a dozen little countries dependant on an Eastern cabal controlled primarily by Quebec. The structure of the country is absolutely ludicrous. Examples include the unfair and arbitrary breakdown of parliamentary ridings and senate seats where the western provinces are intentionally out numbered and unequal. These numbers are symptoms of the lie of Confederation. It should be no surprise to our federal government that the prairie provinces believe they have no voice. Preston Manning summed it up; “our provinces are equal, some are just more equal than others”.
The Trudeau government’s betrayal of Western Canada’s energy industry is beyond intelligent understanding. The west’s vibrant, well managed, environmentally conscious, technologically advanced industry is renowned for its professionalism around the world. The west’s energy industry used to provide some 20 per cent of Canadian GDP. Economist Trevor Tombe told the Business News Network that since 2014 Canada’s wealth would have been $130 billion larger, unemployment would be almost 1 per cent lower and the federal deficit would be $13 billion smaller if the Trudeau government had supported the energy industry instead of gutting it in the name of environmentalism.
- L. Leugner, Retired Canadian soldier, businessman, author and angry Albertan.
