If a referendum were held tomorrow, I am absolutely convinced that the majority of voters in Alberta and Saskatchewan would vote to separate from Canada.  And who could blame them?

You will notice that I did not mention Manitoba or British Columbia.  Manitoba would be welcome should it be interested, as our values and work ethics seem to be similar.  British Columbia would not because I am convinced that their laid-back lazy culture and socialist leanings would clash with the get-things-done attitude of those of us who live on the prairies.  British Columbians, those limousine liberals, would, I am convinced, be an ongoing thorn in our sides and we would be better off without them.

The exiting provinces, and particularly Alberta, have been abused, treated with disrespect and ignored by both of the legitimate federal political parties once they gained power.  And that is true of the Conservative Party of Canada, which the West has dutifully and continuously supported for as long as I can remember.  We were treated better by the Harper government, but we were never showered with the largess that ended up in the hands of those living in the Province of Quebec, the City of Toronto or the Maritimes.

When our oil and gas industry started to take off in the 1970s, and Alberta began to experience some semblance of prosperity, Trudeau Senior—that rich-kid law professor, the guy who did not do a day’s work until well into his 40s and then took on the useless profession as a professor of Constitutional Law (the most boring speciality the legal business has perpetuated and believe me, that is saying something)—came along to steal our prosperity from us and give it away to his Eastern Canadian voting base.  This rich kid then had the audacity to form Petro Canada and put the hanger-on, bureaucrat, Maurice Strong in charge.  When this raving career, government mandarin got down to running a business he appeared to know little about, he had no trouble spending public money with reckless abandon, while the rest of the oil and gas industry suffered.  One example of his disdain for the average Canadian and their tax dollars involved the furnishing of Petro Canada’s executive suites.  I have it on first-hand reliable authority that Strong approved the purchase of an elephant-skin chesterfield for the outrageous sum of $150,000 in 1970s dollars. This fellow Strong jumped on the climate change bandwagon early in that game and, in the company of other charlatans, became quite wealthy.  He then wallowed in further largess as an oddball representative of some United Nations boondoggle.  Strong was a master at living high on the government or quasi-government hog and continued that feat until the day he died.

Virtually the moment the National Energy Program was announced, the telephones in my law firm quit ringing.  Alberta plunged into a depression that took us a decade to recover from.  Now, Junior is doing the same thing to us but only worse and, given my age, I do not have another decade to spare before we get our economy back.

As long as federal governments make politically based decisions, Alberta and Saskatchewan are doomed.  Only the most naive would think otherwise.  If Junior really cared about the wellbeing of our country, Quebec and British Columbia would have been advised that the Energy East and Trans Mountain pipelines were in the national interest, and they were going to get built whether the premiers of those two provinces liked it or not. But Junior doesn’t care.  His only interest is to be re-elected because what else could this inept individual do?

It has been much publicized that Alberta has sent billions of dollars to Quebec in equalization payments, but I am told that Quebec politicians—aided and abetted by Junior and his cabal of incompetent federal cabinet ministers—have convinced Quebecers that they are actually net contributors to our union. And, of course, Quebecers believe that clap trap even though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.  Quebecers, being serial “takers,” have a vested interest in playing the role of the poor member of Confederation and in accepting handouts because, were the handouts not forthcoming, these people would have abandoned the Canadian ship a very long time ago.  Some might call them political whores, selling their votes to which ever political party is the highest bidder.

The Government of Canada finally approved the Trans Mountain Pipeline.  Of course, the pipeline was approved with myriad conditions. The speculation is that the controlling—or entire—interest in the pipeline will be sold to our Indigenous friends who do not have the money to do what they want to do without you and I, the stupid Canadian Taxpayers, guaranteeing the money they must borrow to do the deal they covet. Why don’t we just give the whole 4.5 billion paid for the pipeline to these folks and get this charade, this debacle, over with once and for all?  The really dumb thing is that even if we did what I suggest, the approximately 115 Indigenous bands between Alberta and BC’s coast would have to agree on various matters, and to revert to the vernacular of my youth, that just ain’t going to happen.  These people couldn’t agree on what day it is, never mind agreeing amongst themselves on the decisions necessary to run a major pipeline.  You will then know what it feels like to have the Indigenous tail wag the country’s dog.  We pay and pay again, and the clear but unspoken message is for us white guys to just shut up, be played for fools and learn to like the abuse.  We are not allowed to criticize any decisions that are made to favour minorities because such criticism is not politically correct and could be deemed “hate speech.”  We could, in theory anyway, go to jail if we oppose anything that is proposed for minorities.

This entire Trans Mountain Pipeline episode is a sick joke.  Kinder Morgan would have built the pipeline without one dollar of public money being required, but the environmentalists, Indigenous peoples and just plain stupid politicians made their task impossible.  To cut their losses, Kinder Morgan sold the pipeline to the Federal Government and we shall see just how big a mess these people can make of this self-inflicted boondoggle.

And does anyone with a brain in their head wonder, even for a moment, why the majority of Albertans want to escape this mental institution we call Canada?

This country is too big with too many divergent cultures, work ethics, backgrounds and sense of fair play to continue as a country.  I have little if anything in common with the Maritimes, Quebec, the City of Toronto and certainly British Columbia.  The French do not have an inherent entrepreneur spirit unless, of course, the rest of us bail them out with our tax dollars as in the case of Bombardier, the Government of Quebec and others.

And finally, can anyone show me a successful country with two official languages?  As far as I know there isn’t one.  English-speaking Canadians have bent over backwards to placate those in our country who refuse to learn English, notwithstanding that this pocket of French-only speakers is surrounded by approximately 25 million English-speaking Canadians, in addition to 330 million to the south who speak primarily English.  Yet, there are people in Quebec who stubbornly refuse to have their children learn English.  If that lunacy is not tantamount to parental neglect, I do not know what is.

English Canada has, for the most part, accepted the silliness of English/French lettering on everything we buy.  We sit on an aeroplane and listen patiently while instructions are repeated in French when there isn’t a unilingual Frenchman within miles of that plane and not a single person sitting there understands a word that is being said because we do not have to learn or understand a language that has been internationally dead for years. English Canadians dutifully sit back and accept the preferential treatment given to French Canadians applying to work for the Federal Government, and even though most of us cannot understand a word they say in English, they are deemed to be bilingual and paid a bonus for, in effect, not being able to properly converse in English.  This charade was the doing of Trudeau senior when he pushed through the Official Languages Act in the late 1960s.  French Canadians have been on the gravy train ever since.

I am writing things that I know English Canadians agree with, but we have been brow-beaten into believing that what has occurred is just and proper.  It is not.  The French in Quebec have taken advantage of the good nature of English Canada and most are sick to death of what is occurring and what has occurred in the past.  Now there is a new group of individuals at the trough and these folks have become experts at holding out their hands for free stuff. The Quebec-dominated politicians are only too ready to fill their palms with our hard-earned money in return for their votes.

After considering all of the above—and I expect others can think of numerous other examples—why on earth would Alberta and Saskatchewan stay involved with a country that has become an international joke governed by incompetent ideologues?

I vote to go and the sooner the better.  Instead of spending the next ten years trying to undo what the grade-three drama teacher and his cabal of incompetents have done to our provinces, let’s use that time to establish a new and better state.  Our first step is to find a credible leader and that my friends will be a herculean task.  But if we care about our grandchildren’s future, we have no choice but to at least try.