randy harmer

Bruce Pardy stood up and called it what it is: Canada has become a grift. Government has a say in everything—how you heat your home, whether you can build a pipeline, how much of your paycheque you keep, whether your grandchildren can ever leave the basement. Property feels less like something you own and more like something you’re allowed to keep as long as you keep paying the privilege. For Alberta that grift has a name and a history. My grandmother was four years old in Stettler when the Milch Cow cartoon showed the West feeding Ottawa while Ottawa milked the cow. She lived the Dirty Thirties and both wars. I lived the National Energy Program—rigs shut down, unemployment spiked, families counting coins. My grandchildren now live in the basement because housing is unaffordable and entry-level work is scarce while Ottawa keeps adding rules that make it harder for the province that actually produces to keep producing. Alberta receives zero equalization. Quebec receives $13.9 billion of the $27 billion pot this year. Fraser Institute numbers put Alberta’s net contribution to federal finances at roughly $322 billion from 2007 to 2027. Northern Gateway cancelled. Energy East killed in process. TMX bought for $4.5 billion and turned into a $34 billion taxpayer liability. Pacific Link remains a poster with oil maybe in the 2030s, public ownership, and carbon capture as the price of admission. No private capital will touch a new line under these rules. The federal government is broke, yet it keeps interfering—shifting goalposts, tanker bans that stay in place, regulatory layers that crush profitability, and an equalization formula that rewards provinces for not maximizing their own capacity while extracting from the ones that do. The Liberal government does not represent Alberta and never has. It represents the transfer that keeps the rest of the federation solvent and the regulatory power that decides how much of Alberta’s output is allowed to leave the ground. Generational families who built this province, paid the taxes, and shipped the oil, grain, and cheque are done being told that unity means accepting a one-way street. We are the doers and the workers. We notice when the grift lands hardest on the people who still produce. Whether today’s vote settles anything or not, this does not go away. Ottawa can keep milking the cow or it can stop treating Alberta’s families as the bank that pays the bill while others make the decisions. The coin-counting has already started.