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A crumbling vision: there seems to be trouble in the Canadian family over the concept of sharing. Equalization is meant to help Canada''s poorer provinces, with Ottawa taking revenue from the richer provinces and giving it to the poorer ones so every Canadian can have access to an equal level of government services. (National Unity-Inequality).

Article Excerpt
While Alberta is super rich, some other provinces are not. New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord says: "Unfortunately, where you live is increasingly an important factor in how equally you are treated as a Canadian." And that, he says, is causing increasing alienation "not just by province and region, but between have and have-not areas, between rich clusters of urban wealth and poorer, rural communities."

Some are beginning to feel Alberta is a bit out of step with unity concepts. Premier Ralph Klein is floating the idea of taking more river water to feed the provincial thirst, but some of those rivers flow across the border into Saskatchewan where their content is also needed. Alberta pays its nurses way more than its neighbours, attracting them to migrate from other provinces. Soon, Alberta's debt will be gone, and it might even do away with provincial income tax--it is now the only province without a provincial sales tax. That rumbling sound we hear is all the people moving to Alberta to live in a tax-free haven. Almost 22,000 Canadians moved to Alberta in 2000, up from almost 14,000 in 1999, and most of the new arrivals were from B.C. and Saskatchewan, looking not just for tax breaks, but for jobs.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien almost got tarred and feathered in Edmonton in August 2001 when he said Alberta's oil and gas wealth should be shared with the rest of the country and used to help solve Canada's social problems: "We have to make sure that every person in every part of Canada benefits from the potential and the wealth that belongs to the people of Canada." Oooooh, that sounded like Ottawa was thinking about resurrecting the hated National Energy, Plan to a lot of Albertans. The NEP was born in 1980 when oil prices soared from $15 a barrel to more than $35 a barrel in 1981. Ottawa introduced a stiff tax on the revenues of oil and gas companies to beef up its share of the profits. The money...