What We Get Wrong About Alberta

Debunking the great myth of Prairie conservatism.

- Jen Gerson

It's the Friday of the Thanksgiving long weekend in downtown Calgary, and Ontario premier Doug Ford has filled a conference centre with rowdy fans united in their hatred of a carbon tax. Many oil-patch workers were hit hard when the price of crude tanked in 2015; work camps disappeared and with them the last good jobs. The economy has recovered some, but Alberta is not what it was at its peak, before the oil price crashed. Consumer debt is high, and it’s still not uncommon to hear of houses on the market that won’t sell for months or years. An ethic of hard work and good money has soured into idleness. It is not so much that the people here are now insurmountably poor but rather that they are disappointed.

United Conservative Party leader and would-be premier Jason Kenney, who has invited Ford to join him here, takes the stage and commiserates with the crowd: the event is part of a long build-up to the provincial election that will take place this spring. Sure, Alberta had seen oil busts before, he says, “but something was different this time — this time, we seem to have governments in Edmonton and in Ottawa that were stacking the decks against working Albertans, that were doing everything they could to make a bad situation even worse.”