For a decade, the West was in. In 2006, Stephen Harper, having brought the Conservative party to power, said almost exactly that, in front of party faithful in Calgary.
But now, there’s little doubt that Alberta’s feeling aggrieved. Western alienation, always there, is now located somewhere at the nexus of a Venn diagram featuring the economic downturn here, the carbon tax, equalization payments and the struggle to get pipelines built.
“There is that overall sense that when central Canadian issues — steel or autos or dairy — are in play, they’re a priority, and when western issues are in play they’re either not taken seriously or they are of such a secondary nature that they’re not thought through carefully enough and they are essentially botched,” said Faron Ellis, a political scientist at Lethbridge College in southern Alberta.
And that’s not helped by Thursday’s Federal Court of Appeal ruling, which ensures that pipe, while it may be laid eventually, in Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, isn’t going to be done soon.
Tyler Dawson – National Post – August 30, 2018.
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