The stranded Province

The Federal election results paint a picture of a deeply divided Canada.  Solid Liberal red in southern Ontario; the revival of the Bloc Quebecois in la Belle Province; and in the three Prairie Provinces, a sea of Tory blue with the exception of one NDP redoubt in Alberta.  Governing for the next four years, or however long the minority government lasts, is going to be challenging.

If the media are to be believed, the West is up in arms at the results, fearful that its interests will be neglected in Ottawa.  There's talk, especially in Alberta, of a renewed fervour for separation from Canada -- inevitably, this has been dubbed "Wexit".  Albertans need to think long and hard before even considering this.

It should first of all be said that there's no evidence that Justin Trudeau has it in for Alberta. He has tried everything he can to secure the extra pipeline capacity that the Province needs to export its oil, up to and including the purchase of the Trans-Mountain pipeline from its former owner, Kinder-Morgan. Attempts to expedite expansion of that pipeline have been stymied by fierce opposition from the government of British Columbia, as well as by some (but not all) of the Indigenous communities along the route.

The other potential pipeline routes run east and south.  The Energy East plan was intended to supplant imported oil in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, but Quebec is even more fiercely anti-pipeline than BC is.  Expansion of pipelines across the border into the US similarly faces strong opposition in North Dakota and elsewhere; the US, now self-sufficient in oil, has a dwindling interest in helping to solve Alberta's problems.

And that's Alberta's immediate problem in a nutshell.  It lacks ready access either to tidewater or overland export markets.  It's hard to see how poisoning relations with the rest of Canada, and potentially threatening an acrimonious divorce, would alleviate that problem in any way -- rather the reverse, in fact.

In truth, though, the problem is much worse than that. Albertans may not like it, but the world is on a path away from fossil fuels, at an ever-increasing pace.  Investors are already starting to worry about oil wells and related infrastructure becoming "stranded assets" and are marking down share prices in response. Any new pipeline built today will take decades to pay off, and it seems very unlikely that the Alberta oil sector is going to last that long, at least not at anything like its present scale. We may not yet be talking about "the orderly management of decline", but we must surely be well past reckless doubling-down on what looks like a losing bet.

In short, Alberta is both boxed in by its geography and on the wrong side of progress.  That seems like a situation where you would want all the help you can get from your friends and neighbours, rather than trying to barge ahead on your own.  There's much that can be done to make the job easier: this very thoughtful article from the CBC website, written by a professor from the University of Calgary, is a good place to start.