A friend wrote to me in some despair a few weeks ago. “More than any time in my lifetime,” he wrote, “I feel like Canada doesn’t really exist.”
That was last month. Since then there have been a number of further signs of national disintegration and – its handmaiden – provincial lawlessness. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was the most explicit in this regard, invoking the Trudeau government’s decision to exempt heating oil from the carbon tax as justification for instructing the province’s energy utility not to collect the tax on natural gas, the dominant source of heat among his constituents.
But then, economic logic isn’t the point. The point of leaving the CPP isn’t to produce better pensions for Albertans. The point is to slam the door. The people behind this idea are the same people behind the Alberta Sovereignty Act. They’re not interested in rational public policy, and they’re certainly not interested in the consequences, either for Albertans or Canadians generally.
It was the federal government that was supposed to protect our rights, as it was also to enforce the economic union. But the former task was handed off to the courts, and the latter has been entrusted to the provinces, which is to say the cause of the problem. Which leads us to our present fix, of more or less complete federal impotence, if not irrelevance.