Why We Have Had it With Canada and are Seeking a Divorce

[Herman]

Is the fall referendum going ahead?

Hell yes.

[Herman]

Danielle Smith says if the courts try to block Alberta's independence referendum in October. She's moving ahead with it anyways.

[Herman]

[Herman]

"Things have never been better in Canada"
- Mark Carney

[Herman]

This is from my friends at the Alberta Prosperity Project.

We recently reviewed some Alberta housing data, and a tension stood out.

In 2025, Alberta broke records with over 50,000 housing starts, accounting for one quarter of all new homes built in Canada. That's genuinely impressive.

Yet, a gap of roughly 14,000 homes per year still exists.

Here's the key point to understand. Alberta is building faster than any province in Canada. But Ottawa controls immigration targets. Between 2023 and 2025, over 440,000 people moved to Alberta. That's a lot of new households needing homes.

When housing demand is set in Ottawa but housing supply is built in Alberta, the math becomes complicated.

Some jurisdictions have shown that aligning population growth with local housing supply leads to better outcomes for families. The question worth asking is whether Alberta should set its own policies.

[Herman]

Initiated by the Trudeau federal government in 2015 when it withdrew Northern Gateway after a ten-year regulatory process, the onslaught of the energy sector began. With the guidance of his university buddy Gerald Butts, Energy East, and the Trans Mountain fiasco, capital investment is avoiding our country, with the knowledge that pipelines are only the visible head of the climate crisis dragon.

We are now saddled with one of the world's "climate crisis" leaders, Mark Carney, who, through much of this period, was a personal advisor to the Liberal Party. BTW, his wife, Diana Fox Carney, works with Gerald Butts at the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory agency.

It is deeply concerning that the provinces, including Alberta and Saskatchewan, also buy into the narrative and are making expensive and damaging policies as a result of the narrative. Credit to Scott Moe, who announced Saskatchewan will continue its coal-fired electrical generation plant (near Estevan) for its full life cycle, even after the feds mandated an earlier closure date. This and his comments, "come and get me," are an early indication of Western defiance.

The current proposed pipeline to the Pacific is subject to the Carney conditions of sharply higher carbon costs in Alberta, and the decarbonization of oil (an expensive and open-ended risk to the economics of this major project). As the industry is unlikely to capitalize on a low-return pipeline, the risk is that Alberta and/or the Canadian governments will bear the cost of this process, spending other people's money to support a false narrative.

Why should Canadians fund the bias, ego, and ambition of the Prime Minister who is treating Canada as his climate playground? Has any customer ever made decarbonized oil a condition for purchasing Canadian oil? Is it a condition for imported oil to central Canada? Why not?

Carney has so far avoided the conflict between his long-held beliefs and global activities in his new role. He is now campaigning on "build Canada" with policies that make our most important industry less competitive. These pages have on many occasions warned about his personal conflict.

[Herman]

Between 2007 and 2022, Albertans sent $244.6 billion more to Ottawa than we received back. That's not over a century. That's fifteen years.

Extending that pattern further back reveals staggering cumulative totals.

Here's what makes the number sting. While Alberta bankrolls the federation, federal policies actively undermine our economy. Bill C-69, ruled largely unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, drove investment away. The Northern Gateway pipeline was cancelled outright. Energy East was killed by regulatory hurdles. Oil and gas investment dropped 56 percent in a decade.

Meanwhile, a 2024 Deloitte report found Ottawa's emissions cap alone will shrink Alberta's GDP by $191 billion over ten years.

We're not just paying more than our share. We're paying more while being told to produce less.

[Herman]

[Herman]

[Herman]

Dictator Carney is a recruiter for the prairie independence movement.

[Herman]

Prairie Independence is the choice between becoming Dubai 2.0 or Venezuela 2.0.

[Herman]

[Herman]

The question is no longer whether Canada is in decline.
The question is how much longer Alberta and Saskatchewan are willing to stay on the sinking ship.

[Herman]

Equalization reform intended to restrain costs has actually resulted in $10.5 billion in higher spending since 2018/19
By: Ben Eisen and Joel Emes
               - article below
•  In 2009, the federal government altered the equalization formula by creating a rule requiring aggregate payments to grow in line with recent national nominal economic growth. This change is known as the Fixed Growth Rate (FGR) rule.
• The rule was introduced to control program costs, which had risen rapidly in the preceding decade. However, following convergence in provincial fiscal capacity beginning around 2015, it began to require upward adjustments rather than downward ones, functioning as a floor rather than a ceiling.
• We refer to payments generated by the FGR's floor function as constituting "over-equalization." This bulletin estimates their cost since 2018/19 at approximately $10.5 billion, with the rule accounting for more than 10 percent of total program costs in three separate years.
• A more fundamental problem, which we illustrate, is that the FGR severs the link between changes to the equalization formula and changes in total program spending. This limits the potential effectiveness of many reform options.
• We review a range of reform proposals and show that, absent changes to the FGR itself, they would primarily reallocate payments among provinces rather than reduce aggregate spending.
• In this important sense, the program is broken: a rule intended to constrain program costs now prevents the formula from adjusting total spending in line with changes in relative provincial fiscal capacity and limits the effectiveness of many possible policy reforms.
       -- Fraser Institute, April 16, 2026

[Herman]