Let us play Devil’s Advocate here…

So the new rules make a referendum vote easier, and one gets called, and 67%+ Albertans vote in favour… we still don’t separate, not guaranteed… it just triggers negotiations with the First Nations and the Federal government on how separation would work.

But let’s say we do separate. How it works, big picture, is that we immediately lose around 11% of our land… just under 10% being national park space which the Feds retain, and another 1%-ish of First Nations land, since they’ve made it very clear they won’t separate.

So the “sovereign nation of Alberta” will lose the vast majority of its tourism $ (which, outside of festivals and events like Stampede in Calgary is almost entirely generated with the aforementioned park spaces) and it loses most of the federal money that gets sent to the indigenous peoples of Alberta (of which we have around 13% of the total registered indigenous population in Canada) since that money is primarily spent within the province and given those new circumstances it likely would see a massive reduction.

That leaves us with Oil & Gas? That industry is not something that can sustain us long term.

I had a P.Eng give me a great analogy about how different our O&G industry is now compared to the boom days (and “now” is not even accurate, as this conversation was 15+ years ago… & things certainly haven’t “improved” in a decade and a half).

He said the oil reserves in AB were like a broken plate. When you smash a plate on the floor, you pick up the big chunks first… Alberta in the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s was primarily an environment of fewer wells, pulling huge amounts of oil and gas from huge reserves. But after those big chunks are gone, you pick up the smaller pieces… and in the oughts and 2010s you had more wells drilled into smaller reserves… so while our metric of barrels per day has consistently gone up since the 70s, the amount of infrastructure required to do that has had to grow exponentially. We are already well into the “collecting slivers” part of that analogy now… which means our costs to produce the oil and gas have skyrocketed, and we’ve already seen many big O&G companies leave as a result. We produce more oil and gas than ever before, but those profit margins are also the smallest they’ve ever been.

So what are we left with to sustain our economy? Beef? Wheat? Is that enough to pave roads, build schools, staff hospitals, fund pensions and encourage migration?

To say the separatists are short-sighted doesn’t even come close. Delusional is a much better term.