A Eulogy for Rachel Notley

The Tyee's Mitchell Anderson has penned a farewell to "The Sad, Timid Failure of Rachel Notley," the soon to be ousted premier of Alberta.

Notley, writes Anderson, came to power promising to get tough with the oil giants, see that Alberta got its fair share of energy revenues, only to "morph into a fossil fuel sycophant," an avatar of the late Ralph Klein.

Albertans are entirely correct to believe they have been ripped off for decades on resource wealth. Since 1972 the province has produced over 17 billionbarrels of conventional crude oil worth almost $1 trillion, assuming a price of $40 USD per barrel. (Alberta sweet crude was at over $80 in 2014.) Where did the money go? 

Under our constitution this is Alberta’s oil, not Canada’s. For all the whining about western alienation, the fact is that successive Alberta governments have conjured the almost unimaginable alchemy of somehow converting $1 trillion in resource bounty (not even counting bitumen or natural gas) into $47 billion of provincial debt. 

Notley now plays the same dog-eared card used by so many premiers before her — that this is somehow all the fault of Ottawa and the rest of the country. The oil barons of Texas must be clinking glasses of bourbon in celebration of how easy it was to divide and dupe such Canadian bumpkins.

If the Wild Rose is the symbol of Alberta, taking massive revenue windfalls and "pissing it all away" is the provincial ethos. Coastal British Columbians keep that in mind when the governments in Ottawa and Edmonton angrily shout that keeping this dark farce going is a matter of "national interest." For this we're supposed to submit to their plans to put our pristine coast at serious risk of environmental catastrophe?

Jason Kenney will be in power soon enough and then the fight will worsen. It'll be Jason and Justin and their damned, bitumen-fueled Gotterdammerung.