A network of inauthentic YouTube channels posing as Albertan voices is spreading misleading content about separation and U.S. annexation, reaching tens of millions of viewers, according to a new report.
I mean there was a fuck up at a national level as well. Canada gutted its publicly owned oil assets and handed the whole show over to private capital. This is a textbook case of neoliberalism doing exactly what it says on the tin.
Back in the 70s and early 80s, there was actually a wave of state intervention. The feds were terrified of American control of our resources, so in 1975 Trudeau created Petro-Canada as a federal Crown corporation. Out west, provinces followed suit with Saskatchewan starting SaskOil in 1973.
But then Mulroney’s PC swept into power in 1984. Mulroney immediately began gutting the nationalist energy policies at the federal level. The process of killing Petro-Canada as a public entity began in 1990 when they sold the first shares to the public. This was an ideologically driven decision.
Alberta absolutely loved the whole privatization wave and by the time Ralph Klein was Premier in the 90s, the province was already deep into deregulation. Alberta had successfully argued that Ottawa should get out of the business entirely and leave it to the free market i.e., the multinationals, and the feds finally sold their last shares in Petro-Canada in 2004.
The federal Liberals under Chretien and Martin finished the job Mulroney started because they had fully adopted Third Way politics . They didn’t want to own oil companies and they wanted tax revenue. Meanwhile, Alberta uses the memory of the hated National Energy Program from 1980 as a cudgel to this day. Any time Ottawa tries to regulate emissions or climate change, Alberta screams separation and Ottawa is killing us.
And now the profits are privatized to shareholders and CEOs, while the environmental destruction is socialized onto the public and the planet. Alberta continues to act like a victim of federal overreach while simultaneously demanding that Ottawa build pipelines and bail out the industry whenever prices crash. It’s capitalism all the way down. The public built the infrastructure and took the risk and the private sector took the winnings.
I was tracking with you til that last paragraph. Alberta does NOT want Ottawa to build pipelines, we want Ottawa to get out of the way and stop blocking them with so many regulations that no company wants to invest here. Billions in investment has fled the province. And if they did build one, they wouldnt be allowed to ship it out because there’s a tanker ban on the west coast (which there isn’t on the east coast, go figure).
Alberta doesnt ask for bailouts, we just want Ottawa to stop blocking our main resource. We could be supplying the world with tons of LNG if Trudeau hadn’t said there’s ‘no business case’ for selling when countries came knocking. Look at where we’d be now if he hadn’t been so myopic.
Alberta absolutely does ask for bail outs and cries every time the price of oil drops. Meanwhile, Alberta demanding that we just throw regulations out of the window and destroy the environment to build pipelines on the cheap is the real myopia. If Alberta wasn’t just giving oil away to Americans, then Alberta could be rich beyond belief along with the rest of Canada. Instead, Alberta hasn’t even bothered investing in domestic refining infrastructure allowing American companies to plunder national resources in Canada.
You are correct that in 2018, Ottawa gave a $1.6-billion aid package aimed at assisting the oil and gas sector through loan guarantees and investments. Meanwhile, in 2024, Alberta’s GDP was approximately 474 billion, a major net contributor to federal finances, providing over 20 billion more in taxes than it receives back in federal spending.
So, if that little 1.6 billion loan/investment was your version of a “bailout every time prices crash” have at 'er, but its obviously not true. We don’t need bailouts, we’re providing 15% of Canada’s overall economic health and we give FAR more to Ottawa than Ottawa gives to us.
First off, you are seriously downplaying the bailout history. That $1.6 billion in 2018 was pocket change compared to the COVID era blank check. In 2020, Ottawa bought the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. Then they spent another $9 billion on construction. That is the federal government becoming a pipeline operator because private capital refused to touch it. Then came the $1.7 billion abandonment fund for orphan wells. Then the $15 billion in loan guarantees and tax deferrals. Then the $2.2 billion for methane cleanup. The list goes on and on. The fossil fuel sector has received over $70 billion in public money since 2020 by some estimates. So spare me the little 1.6 billion routine.
Second, the whole net contributor argument is a trick. Yes, Alberta sends more tax revenue to Ottawa than it gets back in transfers. That is literally how a federation works. Ontario also does that. British Columbia also does that. The entire point of equalization is to pool resources so people in PEI and Manitoba can have hospitals and schools. However, Alberta itself benefits massively from that system. The banks, the RCMP, the EI system, and the border security that keeps your exports flowing are all paid for by federal tax dollars that Alberta businesses and workers also use. You think the oil would just magically float to tankers without coast guard icebreakers paid for by everyone?
Third, the oil industry itself is not the net contributor you think it is. Most of those corporate profits leave the country going to Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial. Their shareholders are in New York, London, and Toronto. The royalty regime in Alberta has always been a joke. Norway saved a trillion dollars from its oil while Alberta saved a big fat nothing. So when you say Alberta provides 15% of Canada’s GDP, what you really mean is a handful of multinational corporations extract a non renewable resource, ship the raw bitumen out, keep most of the profit, wreck the land, and then Alberta points to the tax withholding and says look how generous we are.
To sum up, Alberta blew the windfall on tax cuts for the wealthy, and now demands a gold star for paying its bills like every other province.
In 2020, Ottawa bought the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. Then they spent another $9 billion on construction. That is the federal government becoming a pipeline operator because private capital refused to touch it.
You were lamenting bailouts. BUYING a pipeline and paying Canadians to build it is how construction of a valuable asset works. They didnt lose money on it, and it wasnt a giveaway (A bailout is when Ottawa gives a Bombardier money over and over again because it never stays profitable but they need to keep buying those Quebec votes)
Your second point is weak. Every province benefits from those same federally paid services. But only three provinces pay equalization and get none of it back
2024-2025 Equalization Payments Received (Estimated)
Quebec: ~$13.316 billion ($1,545 per capita)
Manitoba: ~$4.352 billion (approx. $3,000+ per capita)
Nova Scotia: ~$3.284 billion ($3,252 per capita)
New Brunswick: ~$2.897 billion ($3,629 per capita)
Ontario: ~$576 million (or $0 in some formulas)
Newfoundland & Labrador: ~$336 million
Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan: $0
Your third point has some validity, except for the part about not saving any money for the province. Our Heritage Fund has risen from nearly empty to currently at 30 billion and likely to rise again this year with the oil price surge.
But the oil company shareholders are everywhere, including Canadians and in your CPP retirement fund too. (Its a bit ironic to complain about that when that when our new PM moved Brookfield headquarters to the US to better access American funds). Thats the way international investing works in this world and the way that MOST of the large corporations in Canada operate.
Let’s peel back another layer of this neoliberal onion here. You’re now moving the goalposts from we never get bailouts to actually buying a pipeline was a smart investment. Let me take these one by one.
You are correct that buying an asset is different from a grant. But here is the problem. The private sector refused to build TMX. Kinder Morgan wanted out because of environmental opposition and cost overruns. So Ottawa stepped in as buyer of last resort. That is a socialist rescue of a failing private project, and the asset is not even finished yet. Current cost estimates have ballooned to over $30 billion while the original estimate was $7 billion. The government will never see that money back. They will sell it at a massive loss to a private consortium years from now, likely one of the same oil companies that refused to build it in the first place. That’s just a bailout with extra steps.
And your Bombardier jab is cute but irrelevant. We can criticize Quebec’s corporate welfare while also criticizing Alberta’s. Two things can be true. The difference is Bombardier builds trains and planes. The oil industry burns the planet. One is a bit more urgent than the other.
Your table is accurate. Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan pay in and get nothing back. Nobody disputes that. But you are confusing equalization payments with total federal spending. Equalization is just one program. It is not the whole picture.
What about federal infrastructure spending. What about defense contracts. What about the fact that the Canada Pension Plan invests heavily in Alberta oil. What about the massive tax breaks for oil companies embedded in the federal tax code. What about the fact that Ottawa spends billions on cleanup of abandoned wells, a liability that belongs to the provinces.
The equalization formula exists because resource revenues are volatile and uneven. Alberta benefited from that very formula when oil prices crashed in the 80s. Alberta received equalization payments as recently as the 1960s. The story of a perpetual donor province is a very recent invention.
More importantly, the per capita argument cuts against you. Quebec gets less per person than Manitoba or New Brunswick. And the formula is designed to account for provincial capacity to raise revenue. Alberta has the highest GDP per capita in the country by a massive margin. Of course you pay in, that’s just mathematics.
You are right that the Heritage Fund is currently around $30 billion, but let’s put that number in context. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is over $1.6 trillion and Alaska’s Permanent Fund is over $80 billion. Alberta has been pumping oil for over 75 years, and a $30 billion savings account is an embarrassingly small amount of money to show for it. It’s basically pocket change being less than a single year of current provincial revenue. If oil vanished tomorrow, that fund would cover about six months of health care spending.
And where did the rest of the money go. It went to tax cuts, corporate subsidies, and low royalty rates. The province chose to hand wealth directly to industry rather than save it.
You are absolutely right that CPP invests in oil. But pointing out that Canadian pensions are entangled with oil extraction is not a defense of the system. It is an indictment of it. The fact that workers’ retirement savings depend on burning carbon is precisely the problem. It traps us in a fossil fuel economy even as the world burns.
And your dig about the new PM moving Brookfield to the US. Yes, that is also bad. Neoliberalism hurts everyone eventually. I oppose capital flight and corporate tax avoidance across the board. I do not defend Brookfield just because it is headquartered in Toronto.
Your original claim was that Alberta does not need bailouts because it is a net contributor. But every single downturn proves otherwise. The industry is structurally unstable relying on high prices, export markets, and constant government intervention. The TMX purchase, the orphan well cleanup, the wage subsidies, the loan guarantees. These are all bailouts. They just wear different clothes.
Exactly, just look at Norway where they nationalized oil. This could’ve been us.
But the government of Alberta fucked it up. Not Canada.
I mean there was a fuck up at a national level as well. Canada gutted its publicly owned oil assets and handed the whole show over to private capital. This is a textbook case of neoliberalism doing exactly what it says on the tin.
Back in the 70s and early 80s, there was actually a wave of state intervention. The feds were terrified of American control of our resources, so in 1975 Trudeau created Petro-Canada as a federal Crown corporation. Out west, provinces followed suit with Saskatchewan starting SaskOil in 1973.
But then Mulroney’s PC swept into power in 1984. Mulroney immediately began gutting the nationalist energy policies at the federal level. The process of killing Petro-Canada as a public entity began in 1990 when they sold the first shares to the public. This was an ideologically driven decision.
Alberta absolutely loved the whole privatization wave and by the time Ralph Klein was Premier in the 90s, the province was already deep into deregulation. Alberta had successfully argued that Ottawa should get out of the business entirely and leave it to the free market i.e., the multinationals, and the feds finally sold their last shares in Petro-Canada in 2004.
The federal Liberals under Chretien and Martin finished the job Mulroney started because they had fully adopted Third Way politics . They didn’t want to own oil companies and they wanted tax revenue. Meanwhile, Alberta uses the memory of the hated National Energy Program from 1980 as a cudgel to this day. Any time Ottawa tries to regulate emissions or climate change, Alberta screams separation and Ottawa is killing us.
And now the profits are privatized to shareholders and CEOs, while the environmental destruction is socialized onto the public and the planet. Alberta continues to act like a victim of federal overreach while simultaneously demanding that Ottawa build pipelines and bail out the industry whenever prices crash. It’s capitalism all the way down. The public built the infrastructure and took the risk and the private sector took the winnings.
I forgot this was lemmy.ml lol now your comment makes much more sense. 💯 agree they both sold our soul to the devil.
I was tracking with you til that last paragraph. Alberta does NOT want Ottawa to build pipelines, we want Ottawa to get out of the way and stop blocking them with so many regulations that no company wants to invest here. Billions in investment has fled the province. And if they did build one, they wouldnt be allowed to ship it out because there’s a tanker ban on the west coast (which there isn’t on the east coast, go figure).
Alberta doesnt ask for bailouts, we just want Ottawa to stop blocking our main resource. We could be supplying the world with tons of LNG if Trudeau hadn’t said there’s ‘no business case’ for selling when countries came knocking. Look at where we’d be now if he hadn’t been so myopic.
Alberta absolutely does ask for bail outs and cries every time the price of oil drops. Meanwhile, Alberta demanding that we just throw regulations out of the window and destroy the environment to build pipelines on the cheap is the real myopia. If Alberta wasn’t just giving oil away to Americans, then Alberta could be rich beyond belief along with the rest of Canada. Instead, Alberta hasn’t even bothered investing in domestic refining infrastructure allowing American companies to plunder national resources in Canada.
You are correct that in 2018, Ottawa gave a $1.6-billion aid package aimed at assisting the oil and gas sector through loan guarantees and investments. Meanwhile, in 2024, Alberta’s GDP was approximately 474 billion, a major net contributor to federal finances, providing over 20 billion more in taxes than it receives back in federal spending.
So, if that little 1.6 billion loan/investment was your version of a “bailout every time prices crash” have at 'er, but its obviously not true. We don’t need bailouts, we’re providing 15% of Canada’s overall economic health and we give FAR more to Ottawa than Ottawa gives to us.
First off, you are seriously downplaying the bailout history. That $1.6 billion in 2018 was pocket change compared to the COVID era blank check. In 2020, Ottawa bought the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. Then they spent another $9 billion on construction. That is the federal government becoming a pipeline operator because private capital refused to touch it. Then came the $1.7 billion abandonment fund for orphan wells. Then the $15 billion in loan guarantees and tax deferrals. Then the $2.2 billion for methane cleanup. The list goes on and on. The fossil fuel sector has received over $70 billion in public money since 2020 by some estimates. So spare me the little 1.6 billion routine.
Second, the whole net contributor argument is a trick. Yes, Alberta sends more tax revenue to Ottawa than it gets back in transfers. That is literally how a federation works. Ontario also does that. British Columbia also does that. The entire point of equalization is to pool resources so people in PEI and Manitoba can have hospitals and schools. However, Alberta itself benefits massively from that system. The banks, the RCMP, the EI system, and the border security that keeps your exports flowing are all paid for by federal tax dollars that Alberta businesses and workers also use. You think the oil would just magically float to tankers without coast guard icebreakers paid for by everyone?
Third, the oil industry itself is not the net contributor you think it is. Most of those corporate profits leave the country going to Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial. Their shareholders are in New York, London, and Toronto. The royalty regime in Alberta has always been a joke. Norway saved a trillion dollars from its oil while Alberta saved a big fat nothing. So when you say Alberta provides 15% of Canada’s GDP, what you really mean is a handful of multinational corporations extract a non renewable resource, ship the raw bitumen out, keep most of the profit, wreck the land, and then Alberta points to the tax withholding and says look how generous we are.
To sum up, Alberta blew the windfall on tax cuts for the wealthy, and now demands a gold star for paying its bills like every other province.
You were lamenting bailouts. BUYING a pipeline and paying Canadians to build it is how construction of a valuable asset works. They didnt lose money on it, and it wasnt a giveaway (A bailout is when Ottawa gives a Bombardier money over and over again because it never stays profitable but they need to keep buying those Quebec votes)
Your second point is weak. Every province benefits from those same federally paid services. But only three provinces pay equalization and get none of it back
2024-2025 Equalization Payments Received (Estimated)
Your third point has some validity, except for the part about not saving any money for the province. Our Heritage Fund has risen from nearly empty to currently at 30 billion and likely to rise again this year with the oil price surge.
But the oil company shareholders are everywhere, including Canadians and in your CPP retirement fund too. (Its a bit ironic to complain about that when that when our new PM moved Brookfield headquarters to the US to better access American funds). Thats the way international investing works in this world and the way that MOST of the large corporations in Canada operate.
Let’s peel back another layer of this neoliberal onion here. You’re now moving the goalposts from we never get bailouts to actually buying a pipeline was a smart investment. Let me take these one by one.
You are correct that buying an asset is different from a grant. But here is the problem. The private sector refused to build TMX. Kinder Morgan wanted out because of environmental opposition and cost overruns. So Ottawa stepped in as buyer of last resort. That is a socialist rescue of a failing private project, and the asset is not even finished yet. Current cost estimates have ballooned to over $30 billion while the original estimate was $7 billion. The government will never see that money back. They will sell it at a massive loss to a private consortium years from now, likely one of the same oil companies that refused to build it in the first place. That’s just a bailout with extra steps.
And your Bombardier jab is cute but irrelevant. We can criticize Quebec’s corporate welfare while also criticizing Alberta’s. Two things can be true. The difference is Bombardier builds trains and planes. The oil industry burns the planet. One is a bit more urgent than the other.
Your table is accurate. Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan pay in and get nothing back. Nobody disputes that. But you are confusing equalization payments with total federal spending. Equalization is just one program. It is not the whole picture.
What about federal infrastructure spending. What about defense contracts. What about the fact that the Canada Pension Plan invests heavily in Alberta oil. What about the massive tax breaks for oil companies embedded in the federal tax code. What about the fact that Ottawa spends billions on cleanup of abandoned wells, a liability that belongs to the provinces.
The equalization formula exists because resource revenues are volatile and uneven. Alberta benefited from that very formula when oil prices crashed in the 80s. Alberta received equalization payments as recently as the 1960s. The story of a perpetual donor province is a very recent invention.
More importantly, the per capita argument cuts against you. Quebec gets less per person than Manitoba or New Brunswick. And the formula is designed to account for provincial capacity to raise revenue. Alberta has the highest GDP per capita in the country by a massive margin. Of course you pay in, that’s just mathematics.
You are right that the Heritage Fund is currently around $30 billion, but let’s put that number in context. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is over $1.6 trillion and Alaska’s Permanent Fund is over $80 billion. Alberta has been pumping oil for over 75 years, and a $30 billion savings account is an embarrassingly small amount of money to show for it. It’s basically pocket change being less than a single year of current provincial revenue. If oil vanished tomorrow, that fund would cover about six months of health care spending.
And where did the rest of the money go. It went to tax cuts, corporate subsidies, and low royalty rates. The province chose to hand wealth directly to industry rather than save it.
You are absolutely right that CPP invests in oil. But pointing out that Canadian pensions are entangled with oil extraction is not a defense of the system. It is an indictment of it. The fact that workers’ retirement savings depend on burning carbon is precisely the problem. It traps us in a fossil fuel economy even as the world burns.
And your dig about the new PM moving Brookfield to the US. Yes, that is also bad. Neoliberalism hurts everyone eventually. I oppose capital flight and corporate tax avoidance across the board. I do not defend Brookfield just because it is headquartered in Toronto.
Your original claim was that Alberta does not need bailouts because it is a net contributor. But every single downturn proves otherwise. The industry is structurally unstable relying on high prices, export markets, and constant government intervention. The TMX purchase, the orphan well cleanup, the wage subsidies, the loan guarantees. These are all bailouts. They just wear different clothes.
A few trillion dollar fund is what we could have had.
sigh…