Dear Jason Kenney,
We have taken careful note of the message sent yesterday by your citizens who, at 61.7%, want to end the equalization program. You find this program unfair to you and too generous to us. You are right. Our own calculations indicate that, through this program, your citizens send us approximately two billion dollars each year. It must stop.
The time has therefore come to do our accounts and we have instructed our economists to update the invoice which we will gladly send you.
It was half with Quebecers’ money that the territory of Alberta was bought back from the British by Canada in 1870. It was half with our money that all federal investments were made, in particular l arrival of the railway in Calgary in 1883, essential to your grain exports. It is half with our money that your territory developed until your first major discovery of oil, in 1943. With compound interest, it must be a happy jackpot.
To ensure the profitability of your tar sands, according to a federal statement, Ottawa invested approximately $ 70 billion, only between 1970 and 2015. Since, at this stage, Quebec contributed 20% to federal spending, we therefore disbursed 14 billion in 45 years in your industry.
However, we think we are below the truth with these figures. In a moment of great frankness when he was no longer Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien told your Edmonton Journal : “If I had offered Quebec what I gave Alberta in terms of government assistance for the tar sands, I would have won all the seats in Quebec!” “
We must be on the cheap, dear Jason Kenney, and subtract from this bill the sums invested by Albertans over the past decades in our gigantic dams and long-distance power lines. Easy: Albertans, like other Canadians, contributed zero dollars.
Invest in Alberta, then get poorer
Our calculation must include what Alberta has cost us in terms of job losses. When the price of your oil is high, it pushes the value of the Canadian dollar up against the US dollar. In the early 2000s, when you were having an oil boom, the dollar became a petrodollar. Well done for you, but that meant that our manufacturing industry, which exports its products to the United States in Canadian dollars, saw its prices rise in a completely artificial way and therefore became less competitive.
Researchers from the University of Ottawa, Luxembourg and Amsterdam allow us to estimate that between 2002 and 2007, your prosperity destroyed no less than 55,000 well-paid manufacturing jobs. In short, the billions that we have invested in you to make your bituminous oil profitable have eliminated our own jobs. By dint of enriching Alberta, we have impoverished Quebec.
But we have not yet addressed the big question of the day: the environmental cost that Alberta imposes on the rest of Canada, therefore on Quebec, by producing what François Legault has quite rightly, but little diplomatically, called du “Dirty oil”. Why dirty? Because the amount of energy needed to get oil out of the sands is much greater than the amount of energy for a traditional oil field, like those off Newfoundland, the North Sea or Algeria.
According to the federal inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by province, Alberta emits 55 tonnes of GHG per capita per year more than Quebec. I repeat: more than Quebec.
You often complain, Mr. Prime Minister, that we prefer to buy oil from dictatorial countries, like Saudi Arabia, rather than from you, our fellow Canadians. It was never true. But in recent years, and thanks to the decision of the sovereignist government of Pauline Marois and her Minister of the Environment, Yves-François Blanchet, to reverse the flow of an existing pipeline, 53% of the oil consumed in Quebec comes from at your house.
According to a calculation by the Suzuki Foundation, we buy from you these years for three billion dollars of oil per year. Or one and a half times what you send us in equalization. We are still awaiting the erection in Edmonton of statues in honor of Mr.me Marois and M. Blanchet.
But by buying Alberta oil, Quebec is contributing to the ongoing ecological disaster. Now that you have notified us, by referendum, of the end of equalization, the environmentalists that we are should declare the end of our participation in this disaster.
If we tax the oil we import based on its carbon footprint, Alberta’s oil will immediately be uncompetitive with the less harmful Newfoundland or North Sea oil. That will make you three billion less sales every year, dear Jason Kenney, but we are sure you put that loss in the balance by launching your referendum.
Sincerely, Quebecers who know how to count.
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