Blame Ottawa? Most of Alberta’s economic discontent has roots in policies cooked up right here at home

Conventional wisdom in Canadian political and media circles seems to be that Albertans are almost to a man and woman deeply discontented with their relationship with the rest of Canada.

Yet recent polling about the divisive and deceptively worded separation referendum foisted on Albertans by their province’s now separatist dominated United Conservative Party Government strongly suggests this is not the real story. 

Despite a massive foreign-funded disinformation and misinformation campaign and the willing collaboration of a significant sector of Canadian mass media, Albertans are still overwhelmingly in favour of remaining part of Canada. 

If they’re so unhappy, it’s reasonable to ask, why do they want to stay? 

Well, maybe they can smell the aroma of BS that’s blowing on the breeze nowadays – and not just from all the farmers’ fields around here. 

The separatist propaganda machine would like you to think it’s because the majority of Albertans are frightened sissies, cowed by the “woke agenda,” cowering in fear before a gloriously beckoning MAGA future. 

This, of course, is nonsense, and rather insulting. Just the same, concern about what the significant number of racist, neo-fascist, misogynist, and Christian nationalist individuals who have gravitated to the Alberta separatist movement would do if they ever got real power in an independent nation is entirely justified. 

It’s reasonable to wonder, though, about the true origin of the economic problems that separatists and the UCP government alike want us to think have all been perpetrated on Alberta by Ottawa’s notorious “Laurentian elites.”* 

What is the origin of Albertans’ legitimate economic worries, then? As Edmonton-raised economist Jim Stanford wrote in a recent paper on the separatists’ false promises, “the core source of Albertans’ mistreatment in recent years lies right here in Alberta.” 

“Successive conservative governments in Alberta have long practised ‘blame Ottawa’ politics,” wrote Dr. Stanford, who is now director of the Centre for Future Work and the Harold Innis Industry Professor in Economics at McMaster University. According to this narrative, he explained, “whatever is wrong in the province must be the fault of an intrusive, acquisitive federal government, perpetually interfering with the province’s affairs and stealing its resources, taxes and wealth.”

Alberta conservative governments operating under various trade names have raised this narrative of victimization to a form of art, and it’s reached new levels of hysteria under the leadership of Premier Danielle Smith. But while the hard times are real for many Albertans, Dr. Stanford argues, “the claim that Ottawa is fully and solely to blame for this hardship bears no relationship to economic reality.”

“By many key indicators, Alberta has performed uniquely poorly relative to other provinces, including economic growth, investment, wages, and living standards,” he said in the report commissioned by the Alberta Federation of Labour and published on Aug. 31. Indeed, this has been obvious since the UCP took power under Jason Kenney in 2019.

Citing published analysis by many economists, Dr. Stanford’s report debunks the claims of separatists that we’d all be richer, lower taxed and happier if only Alberta were free of Ottawa.

Remember, Dr. Stanford noted, that here in what was once the highest paid jurisdiction in Canada for working people, productivity per worker is still higher than in any other province, “yet wages now barely match the national average.” What happened? 

Thanks to the wage-suppression policies of the UCP, introduced by Mr. Kenney after his election in 2019 and continued to this day under Premier Danielle Smith, Alberta is the only province where real wages relative to inflation have fallen since that year, Dr. Stanford pointed out. In 2015, average Alberta wages were 16 per cent above the national average. That wage advantage has now all but disappeared. 

“The fact Alberta wages have lagged so far behind the rest of the country cannot be blamed on federal policies,” he wrote. 

Federal policy would have had similar impact in all provinces. Rather, “Alberta’s aggressive and perverse efforts to deliberately suppress wages (such as the eight-year freeze on the minimum wage, and harsh restrictions on union organizing and collective bargaining) are the culprit,” he argued. “The UCP Government continues to deliberately suppress wages through multiple channels.” 

Meanwhile, “production and export of petroleum have never been higher, and petroleum profits are setting new records,” Dr. Stanford wrote. “Yet petroleum employment declined by 40,000 in the last decade.” This, he noted, is “not because Ottawa was somehow handcuffing this industry, but because petroleum companies found ways to produce more oil and gas with fewer workers.”

Even during the much-disparaged Trudeau government, thanks to the federal expenditure on pipeline expansion Alberta’s exports grew at a much faster pace than the Canadian average. “The claim that Alberta is ‘blocked’ from exporting its petroleum and other products by Ottawa is exactly backwards,” Dr. Stanford said. “Whatever’s wrong in Alberta, it must be due to what’s happening within the province not due to a failure to export.”

The data shows that corporate investment, however, is down, despite all the favours done for big business and especially the oil industry by the UCP. “The petroleum industry is more concerned with paying record dividends and share buybacks than reinvesting in Alberta’s economy.” And thanks to Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Persian Gulf, profits were up more than 144 per cent in this year’s second quarter. In the same period, investment was down. 

At the same time, the UCP has done nothing to slow the elimination of jobs by the petroleum industry, including moving work from Alberta to foreign corporate offices. Since 2014, oil production has increased by almost 60 per cent while employment has fallen more than 25 per cent. “The industry is producing more, and generating more profits, but with fewer workers. That is the consequence of corporate cost-cutting, not Ottawa’s policies.”

And while nominal wages may be down thanks to the UCP, the impact of inflation has been worse, once again because of provincial policies – including higher increases in electricity, insurance and tuition costs than in any other province. Average real wages fell 3 per cent between 2019 and 2025, the only province in which they fell. 

“All of these policies reinforce the shift of wealth from workers to business, and reinforce workers’ hardship,” Dr. Stanford explained. “None of them have anything to do with the federal government.”

I will return very soon to Dr. Stanford’s analysis of what hard economic data say about the “false narratives and phony claims” – in many cases, outright lies – promoted by Alberta separatists inside and outside the UCP. DJC 

*That fatuous term, by the way, was coined by a Globe and Mail journalist, born and raised in Ontario and best known for his admiring take on Stephen Harper’s Conservative rule – in other words, the very definition of a Laurentian elite.