Jared Wesley, Ken Boessenkool, Trevor Tombe, and Peggy Garritty are part of a federalist group campaigning against Alberta’s independence. They put their heads together and penned an article in The Hub explaining how equalization allegedly benefits Alberta. It’s a long article, but embarrassingly weak in its points.

How can one make a case for a lopsided system that unfairly drains one region in favour of others? The effort of this group demonstrates that you can’t.

To begin with, the authors imply equalization offers a hedge for Alberta if oil and gas prices were to collapse. They claim, “When oil prices collapse and resource revenues evaporate, provinces like Alberta can suffer dramatic fiscal losses almost overnight.”

The problem with their case there is that oil prices have collapsed multiple times and Alberta didn’t get a penny in equalization.

• Oil price 1985 $10 per barrel. Equalization to Alberta: $0
• Oil price 1997 $10 per barrel. Equalization to Alberta: $0
• Oil price 2008 $10 per barrel. Equalization to Alberta: $0
• Oil price 2020 $10 per barrel. Equalization to Alberta: $0

Total equalization received by Alberta in the last 60 years? Zero dollars.

In other words, Alberta gets screwed by equalization both when coming and going. The program offers nothing to Albertans as a buffer against volatile commodity prices.

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They then claim Alberta benefits because the provinces receiving equalization can afford to train better workers who will migrate to Alberta and contribute to the economy. In that case, perhaps Alberta should begin sending equalization to India and West Africa as well. It’s only an investment into ourselves, right?

Equalization has the opposite effect of what the writers claim. 

Provinces with depressed economies can afford to keep their workers due to the artificial wealth created through equalization. They expand government jobs while neglecting to develop value added resources in their regions. The natural migration of labour is stunted.

Without equalization, more workers would leave the regions without strong economic bases and migrate to provinces like Alberta.

Instead, we have provinces in the East that maintain populations through perpetual interprovincial welfare while Western provinces are forced to try to draw international immigrants to fill labour voids. Equalization imbalances the entire country.

The article then descends into the absurd and claims that equalization aids with Alberta’s autonomy within the federation. They say that without equalization, Ottawa would have to expand its role to fill the program needs of provinces further.

The problem is that’s exactly what equalization is. It takes a special sort of gall to claim that parasitically draining from the productive and handing it to the negligent somehow empowers the one being pilfered from.

If the writers of the article thought they were encouraging Albertans to embrace federalism they were sorely mistaken. Even with four of them putting their minds together the case they made was nothing less than embarrassing.

There is no way to spin equalization as a benefit for Alberta and the article in The Hub proves it. They would have been better off to just avoid the issue.