[woob]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

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I like to believe the Reddit is not a good representation of the population as a whole. Or a part, even. Maybe the scrapings of goop you get when you clean out a grease hood.

While I agree with you about most of reddit, like anything else, there are diamonds in the rough.

Spoiler!

More articles like this need to be written. Imho, regionalism is a huge destructive force in Canada right now. We have a huge country, and it is difficult sometimes to feel empathy for people who live 1000 in away, in a place you have never visited and don't really understand. Treating something as "out of sight out of mind" is much harder when it is in your own backyard.

I am a lifelong Torontonian who moved to Calgary about a year ago. My wife is from northern Alberta, but I don't even know anyone who works in the oil patch, except for my Environmental Scientist brother in law, whose firm is having tough times.

I came to Alberta with some preconceived notions, but they turned out to be wrong. I planned to be out of work for a long time when I got here, but found a great job in a month (turns out the job market here is actually pretty great if your skills don't lie in engineering, geology, environmental science, or other oil and gas related specialties). I figured oil drove everything here, but was wrong. Calgarians understand the importance of the oil industry that built the city, and still drives a huge portion of it, but there is not a single Calgarian I have met who isn't gung ho about diversification (between 1987 and 2014 oil and gas' portion of Calgary's GDP dropped from 54.9% to 31.5%. For perspective, that 23.4% drop in the percentage of GDP is approximately the percentage of Toronto's economy represented by all manufactured production.) And, of course, I assumed that Albertans didn't care much about the environment, but was very wrong. They do care a lot about the environment, in fact, they are much more outdoorsy than people in Toronto. Whereas nature is a distant thing for many Torontonians, a lot of people I know here spend pretty much every weekend they can in the mountains and are very protective of the province's vast beautiful landscape.

Ultimately, Albertans are very similar to Ontarians in pretty much every way. Blue collar workers here work on the rigs, instead of in manufacturing plants. People here who don't work on the rigs still understand how important oil is to the economy, just like Ontarians understand how important manufacturing is there. People in both places want to help the environment, but also understand economic realities and the need to diversify away from environmentally harmful industries like oil and car manufacturing, in a sustainable way.

Oil companies here have vastly improved their emissions and environmental record over the years, not because of people 1000km away who want the oil sands shut down, but because Albertans demanded accountability. Albertans elected an NDP government who ran on a platform of social licence. Notley was a cheerleader for Trudeau's carbon taxation (ie. The anti-Ford). She agreed to shackle her province's most important industry, to force further accountability, in exchange for pipelines for the oil that was already on its way from projects approved years ago that were just about to come online. She will probably lose her job because she trusted Trudeau, in that regard.

The idea that Trudeau killed the Harper-approved Northern Gateway pipeline to appeal to voters who have never been within a day's drive of the area affected, is utterly bonkers to me. But it stems from this "holier than thou" regionalism that has people on the eastern side of the country judging Alberta's industry without actually understanding Alberta, as a whole. Ontarians rightfully feel bad for the people of Oshawa, who's economy is going to be crushed by this plant closure. They supported financial assistance for the production of fossil fuel guzzling automobiles during the financial crisis, but somehow feel that the industry producing the fuel that drives those cars should be shut down. Quebec supported financial assistance for Bombardier, to help them build fossil fuel guzzling jets, but, again, seem to feel that different rules should apply to the industry that actually fuels them. BC actually supports Trans Mountain, but its government used "every tool on the toolbox" to fight against it, despite its predecessor already approving it, then happily approved the largest fossil fuel project in Canada's history in it's own province.

I would have hoped that Trump would have taught us a lesson these past couple of years: we can't always count on the states. United we can stand our ground, but divided, we will fall. NAFTA negotiations should have been a good example of this. We don't realize how interconnected we are, but those talks should have showed us. Do you know how we got such a good NAFTA deal last time around? It was the guarantee of our energy from the west that won us a trade deal that helped the rest of the country. This time around, we had hamstrung ourselves such that we didn't have the capacity to send our energy anywhere else, and that leverage disappeared (and before anyone says it, yes the US produces their own oil now, but they make a fortune off of buying ours, refining it and shipping it elsewhere. They also benefit from lower energy prices all over the country because Alberta's supply drives down west Texas prices, which are around $10/barrel below the world Brent price). Dairy farmers in Quebec may not realize that they suffered because of the death of Energy East, but they did. In fact, every province will end up taking a hit on healthcare costs because of patent protection rights we gave the Americans in that deal. If we had a couple pipelines to the coast, maybe that doesn't happen.

We need to stop, as a country, hating on our brothers and sisters. The idea that someone in downtown Toronto can condemn racists and homophobes for judging people they don't understand, and then, in the next breath judging Canadians from a province they have never visited, is the sort of hypocrisy that is driving us apart. We need to stop with this attitude that we are Ontarians or Albertans, BC'ers or Quebecois, instead of all just being Canadians. When Alberta succeeds, Canada succeeds. When Ontario succeeds, Canada succeeds. We need to stop pushing each other down and start supporting our brothers and sisters. We may live 1000's of km apart, but we are one country. We need to start acting like it.