Leslie 🇨🇦🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

My reaction to today's announcement: I'm not against a sovereign wealth fund. Far from it. But I think we need to ask ourselves why we keep needing to create newer and newer agencies and programs to get around our actual, basic problem: we're a bad investment.

From 1977: "Western alienation from, and its anger at, the East are real and are deadly serious. Roland Bird, author of a 24-page special issue on Canada in the influential British magazine, The Economist, found the west's attitude toward the east as a "hatred that is almost pathological." Hatred is almost too glib a word. Indifference, impatience, contempt, are better descriptions of the west's mood." This is a bomb of an article, dropped by a Toronto Star commentator, Richard Gwyn, in 1980. He travelled throughout the West to find out whether separation was supported as much as people said it was and he came to the conclusion that the West would indeed separate. Of course, he was wrong. After 17 years of Liberal federal governance (minus 8 months of the Joe Clark Conservatives in 1979) support for Western separation was at its peak. What kept separation from succeeding though, in the early 80s, was division and infighting within the separatist camp. Then in 1984, Westerners became optimistic that the Mulroney Conservatives would turn the country around for them and began to believe things would get better. They didn't; instead it was just more of the same unequal treatment from Ottawa. Then Preston Manning and the Reform Party came in and convinced everyone that the slogan "The West Wants In" could become a reality and they went with it through several more years of Liberal federal governance until the early 2000s when they folded back in with the Progressive Conservtives to form the Conservative Party of Canada. Nine years of the Harper-led Conservatives in government got the West bupkiss, followed by another nine years of Justin Trudeau, taking us to today. Will we learn from history and face the fact that unless the West is willing to walk away from Confederation, that we are just signing up for more years of Liberal madness? Even if the Conservatives win an election one of these times, how long will they get, and what can they possibly get accomplished with a stacked Senate, stacked judiciary and stacked Civil Service, before the Liberals come roaring back? It's time to wake up and smell reality--we can't change this country, can we?

"and provinces should be required to put up all its assets from their petroleum rents" If you want to send support for Alberta separation to 60%, this would be a *great* way to do it.

OK I am panicking now “Where there is at the heart of all these projects, including resources, provincial jurisdiction; where the federal government is catalyzing, helping to make the project happen through a tax or other incentive - regulatory support - and at the core there is a commercial business making a profit, it is fair, right, just, smart for Canadians to have a share directly in those profits.”