Klein Must Share

However, Mr. Courchene said continued financial growth would prompt Canadians to flock to Alberta, weakening all the other provinces in the process. "If Alberta spends all of it internally it either means zero taxes in Alberta or Cadillac versions of all public services, or variations of both. "Who's about to live in Saskatchewan in those scenarios? You could just go to Alberta and be unemployed and probably get welfare that's a bit more than you could earn in Saskatchewan," Mr. Courchene said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The real difficulty that Canada faces is that if Alberta starts spending this on infrastructure. It can have a health system, an education system, an environmental -- anything it wants -- that no other province can afford. If that happens, the Confederation is gone." Mr. Courchene, a Sask- atchewan-raised Princeton graduate, is a former director of Queen's University's School of Policy Studies and is the author of some 250 books on Canadian policy issues. He said he had mixed feelings about initiating a discussion that could stir up divisive sentiment. "This is the beginning of a 'let those eastern bastards freeze in hell' type of scenario," he said. "I guess someone has to say it." The infamous National Energy Program, imposed by the Trudeau government when crude prices soared in 1980, was used as a mechanism to distribute wealth from Alberta to the rest of the country. However, it chilled investment and remains a flashpoint for Western alienation. On Wednesday, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein reminisced about the "ghost towns" that Edmonton and Calgary became in the wake of the NEP and warned Prime Minister Paul Martin against a similar redistribution strategy. Responding to reports that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Alberta's wealth was becoming "the elephant in the room," Mr. Klein said Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Martin should "keep your hands off" his province's oil riches. "If they are the great Canadians that they profess to be, then they'll leave us alone and respect the constitution," he told reporters. Mr. Courchene agrees that the NEP was a "disaster," but says some sort of revenue-sharing mechanism is needed for the good of the country. "Alberta's biggest fear should be that Ottawa put in another National Energy Program. But ... it came in because the system couldn't afford to handle the cost of it," he said. "If Alberta sits tight and keeps collecting all these revenues, Ottawa's going to step in. I don't think Ottawa can tolerate $7-billion a year. The pressures on the rest of the country will be too hard." http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=5c32a294-57f9-4182-9a75-08562b9622b8 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 31, 2005]

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