Thanos Thanos:
1) There's no blue Kool-Aid with me, because I am NOT a conservative. And if I voted for the federal Conservatives in the last elections it wasn't out of love for them, it was because I knew exactly what kind of mortal threat to Alberta Justin Trudeau is. He might have hid it somewhat in 2015 but he's more than proven it since. My mistake with Trudeau was in hoping he wouldn't be that way but obviously that was a major mistake on my part.
You may not be a 'Conservative' per se, but if you vote for them and you are singing from the same song sheet as the Three Stooges (Kenney, Moe and Scheer), it's hard not to say you're part of their choir.
Thanos Thanos:
2) Maybe you had some instances of some jack-offs out here being gleeful over what happened in Ontario but I certainly didn't.
Thre was plenty of schadenfreude from Alberta about managing your finances better, moving to where jobs are, etc.
And I agree with you that Alberta has been the fantastic economic colony Sir John A MacDonald and other 19th century Canadian leaders envisioned it to be. However, that doesn't give us carte blanche to act they way many here do.
Thanos Thanos:
What killed them was the free trade deals, with those companies buggering off elsewhere for the lower labour costs. And that is something that didn't happen under Harper or some other evil Conservatives from Alberta. It happened under one of their great Liberal saints, Jean Chretien, who dove headfirst into the free trade deals of the 1990's with the full support of the Ontario and Quebec voters who kept voting him back in over and over and over again regardless of his own proven crimes and scandals.
Actually, FTA and NAFTA were supported and negotiated by the PCs under Mulroney (free trade was main issue in the 1988 election), Chretien just got to sign on the dotted line after Mulroney lost the 1993 election because of the GST.
Thanos Thanos:
3) Comparisons to Alaska are as wrong as comparisons to Norway are. Alaskans don't have to kick more to the US federal government in order to pay for luxuries in, say, Virginia in the way Albertans have to for Quebec. The oil revenue in Alaska belongs almost entirely to the state and almost all of it stays in the state. There's no end-run on the federal level when Alaskans end up paying more in income taxes that allows the feds to get around oil revenue not going directly to them from the state. That's the major difference compared to what happens elsewhere and what happens in Canada.
Alaskans pay federal income tax just like Albertans do - and the US federal government transfers some of those funds back (for social security programs) to the states just like our federal government does. The only real difference is that the US sends a smaller percentage back to the states than Canada does, mostly because it has to fund defence and federal entitlement programs.
Thanos Thanos:
I got some silliness about Paul Martin giving a tax credit or minor federal investment in the oilsands when he was PM as being a reason to be "grateful" for how the federal government treats us. Just like they occasionally trot out some long-obsolete comment about some sort of federal policy or investment in Turner Valley back in 1947. So, you did a minor investment in 1947 and tossed us a bone under Paul Martin. Well, I guess that more than pays back for the over $600 billion Albertans have sent to you since the mid-1960's. Yes, with that kind of "giving" from Central Canada I guess I should really be absolutely grateful for their generosity and concern.
You make it sound like that's ALL the federal government has ever given Alberta, when the fact is it sends BILLIONS of dollars in transfers every year to fund our health care and social programs. It also spends hundreds of millions (if not more) every year on building infrastructure (roads, transit, hospitals, research centres, universities, etc) as part of cost-sharing agreements. For example, the feds are ponying up $1.5 BILLION just for Calgary's Greenline LRT, and close to another Billion for LRT in Edmonton. Do we get less than we put in? Of course we do, just like everyone else - otherwise there would be no money for defence, international affairs or lots of other federal departments.
Thanos Thanos:
If we spent money on building infrastructure, education, and health care out here then they accuse us of being wasteful. If we didn't spend money on those essentials then we'd be a bunch of quasi-American assholes refusing to help the poor.
Sorry but no. The only people calling Albertans wasteful are right wing Albertans (and maybe the right wing groups like CTF and the Frasier Institute).
For the last 30 years, Albertans chose to pay less taxes than anyone else in Canada, and it was possible because we were pulling in between $5 and $10 Billion per year in royalties. Now that the golden goose has stopped laying bitumen eggs, everyone still expects the party to go on, with lots of spending and low, low taxes.
Sorry, but finance doesn't work that way. As Trevor Toombs put it in 2017 - our deficit is a choice Albertans make with our votes (it's even more appropriate in 2020 under Kenney):
https://www.macleans.ca/economy/economi ... he-budget/If we were really so worried about debt, we'd open up our wallets and ante up in paying an appropriate level of taxes. If we had the same taxation levels as Ontario, we'd be running a surplus right now.
Heck, if we even had a small PST, we'd just about wipe out our deficit. But that sort of suggestion gets you metaphorically tarred and feathered here in Alberta.
Thanos Thanos:
Don't you get tired of them saying these things, of them doing these things, and just tired of them in general? This is how they always triangulate against us, to keep us second-class and powerless in the way they've always wanted us to be.
Sure that shit bothers me, but it also bothers me the way Klein and now Kenney say the same kind of shit about central Canadians/Liberals/environmentalists/etc.
As the saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right.
CKA Uber 
CKA Moderator 
