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Tory Plan to Boost Alberta, BC in Parliament, Reduce Ontario

CDL.TO said:
That's not the Canada I know.
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Unfortunately its the Canada many Conservatives want.

The Conservative party should just consider itself a regionalist Western party that lures federalist Quebec voters with a false sense of reality.
 
The Conservative party should just consider itself a regionalist Western party that lures federalist Quebec voters with a false sense of reality
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Wow quite a partisan comment. I'd suggest that you've taken one piece of public policy and held that up as evidence of anti-Ontario bias.

The decision to tax income trusts and the decision to regulate emissions of GHGs, NOX, SOX and VOX, have had a disproportionately negative impact on Western Canadians than other regions of the country. So I'd take some exception to your generalization, that this is a western based government.

There are no "magic bullets" in public policy where all regions equally benefit or mutually "suffer". Canada is a complex country.The region that loses under one decision may be the winner on another issue.

Neverthless, Ontario will under the new arrangement still be by far the most vote rich province in Canada. Conversely, Alberta is still vastly under-represented on the basis of its economic contributions to the wealth of this country. There are more than a few Albertans that would love an arrangement where representation in the House of COmmons was based on a the provinces contributions to the GDP.

If you want to whine about the current distribution of seats, vent your wrath on little PEI.
 
ungodly:

Neverthless, Ontario will under the new arrangement still be by far the most vote rich province in Canada. Conversely, Alberta is still vastly under-represented on the basis of its economic contributions to the wealth of this country.
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Since when is representation grounded in the basis of economic contribution?

AoD
 
ungodlycrosscheck said:
There are more than a few Albertans that would love an arrangement where representation in the House of COmmons was based on a the provinces contributions to the GDP.
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If we do that, we should abandon any pretense of democracy. Have the government raise revenues by selling votes at a dollar apiece. Any individual or corporation can buy as many as they please.

If you want to whine about the current distribution of seats, vent your wrath on little PEI.
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PEI will never get another seat. It only has the excess it has now because of the Constitutional requirement that a province`s MPs not be outnumbered by its Senators. This is no excuse to disproportionately distribute new seats. You also have the problem of anti-urban bias in seat allocation, which is inherently undemocratic.
 
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that altering the formula for seat distribution by factoring a province's wealth or output in anyway makes sense. What I am saying is from having lived more than a decade in Western Canada, I've heard more than a few reasonably intelligent people say with a straight face that Alberta's representation in the HoC should bear some resemblance to the disproportionate revenue it has exported through transfers to other regions of the country.
 
I've heard more than a few reasonably intelligent people say with a straight face that Alberta's representation in the HoC should bear some resemblance to the disproportionate revenue it has exported through transfers to other regions of the country.
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I am sure the same Albertans had advocated such a scheme when their province was the net recipient of equalization and other ferderal payments...for oh, practically anytime prior to the 70s.

AoD
 
ungodly, I know you weren't advocating such a scheme.

As far as these people being intelligent, perhaps; critical thinkers, probably not.
 
My mistake, a bit of independent research shows that Alberta was a net recipient of equalization payments for the years 1957-65 (the initial eight years of the program), however since then they have not received any equalization payments.
 
And are you aware that in addition to equalization, the rest of Canada paid well in excess of $10 billion (in contemporary dollars) to subsidize Alberta's failing oil industry. That's right, for decades Ontario was forced to buy Alberta's oil at a fixed price, way above the world price, in order to prop up Alberta's oil industry. Then, after the oil crisis pushed the world price above the fixed price Ontario had been paying for Alberta's oil, Alberta immediately screamed bloody murder that they were being cheated.
 
Just so I understand are you contending that Alberta actually benefited by the imposition of the National Energy Program which established a Made in Canada price for oil and paralyzed the domestic O&G sector?

Anyway, let's discuss via PM as opposed to diverting this thread further from its creators' intent. Mea culpa!
 
Haha, well I'm the creator. What you don't understand is that history started before 1980. Alberta had a captive market in Ontario, which was not allowed to by cheap foreign oil all through the 60s. Alberta benefitted from a fixed price then. Only when the fixed price would benefit the people who'd been paying the subsidy all those years did Alberta finally start to scream.

I really don't think the NEP had much long-term effect on Alberta either way. No, of course an additional tax wouldn't be good for the oil industry in Alberta. But it would be good for the country as a whole, and I think that's what matters the most. All the hysterics about the NEP bus in the Alberta oil industry is quite ridiculous. Houston had a huge depression at the exact same time. No NEP there! It's pretty obvious that one of the highest-cost oil jurisdictions in the world would face serious economic contraction when the world price for oil plummetted by over 60% in the early 80s.
 
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