Oil riches threaten Canada’s unity

CALGARY – Vic Fedeli, the mayor of North Bay, was not pleased when Alberta health officials showed up in his depressed northern Ontario mining community and invited local doctors and nurses to interview for higher-paying jobs in their oil-rich home province.

“Barbarians at the gate,” he says.

Much of Canada is having a similar reaction. With the increase in world energy prices, Alberta’s growing capacity to attract professionals and investors and to shape Canada’s economic agenda is stirring resentment elsewhere in the nation, sparking a fight that could do more to shake national unity than 40 years of separatist strife in French-speaking Quebec.
“These debates about money are fundamentally debates about the type of federation we want,” said Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, a law professor at the University of Toronto and specialist on Canadian federalism. “They could possibly lead to more substantial changes in the long term than all the debates we’ve had in the past.”

Alberta’s oil riches, and what to do about them, have become a campaign issue in Canada’s January 23 national election.

New Zealand Herald