Watch out, rest of Canada!
You’re in for it now!
This is the new Alberta, and you’re going to need to get the hell out of our way! We’ll be taking over our share of the Canada Pension Plan, and we’ll be investing it in fossil fuel infrastructure or whatever we like, thank you very much!
And you’ll be reforming Confederation to get rid of that annoying equalization plan so we can keep all our money, or we’ll be having a national unity crisis, have you got that?
And don’t blame our leader, Jason Kenney. He’s Canada’s biggest patriot, a really huge patriot, very patriotic. But those darned Wexiters will be up to something if he doesn’t get his way. So get cracking!
Plus, we’ll be firing the RCMP and having the Royal Alberta Mounted Police (RAMP) take over for them, so the Mounties might as well drop their investigation into fraud and vote buying in the United Conservative Party’s leadership campaign because the minute we’re an independent republic we’ll be taking that stuff right out of the Criminal Code anyway, just like we’re doing right now with the charges under the old Alberta election financing laws.
And by the way, if we do charge anyone, you won’t be hearing about it either, because it’s none of your darned business.
Plus you’re going to need to fork over the dough to us to clean up all those dirty abandoned oil wells plus all the ones that haven’t been abandoned yet but will be soon because we don’t try very hard to make the companies that drill them clean up their messes like they do in North Dakota.
Anyway, like our finance minister Travis Toews just told your finance minister Bill Morneau, we need the money to create all the jobs that went missing when oil prices took a dive, plus the ones we’re getting rid of in the civil service, schools and hospitals. Also, we want federal tax breaks for oil companies, because we’re plumb out of tax breaks we can give them and ours aren’t working.
Just like Gary Mar — who should’ve been premier instead of Alison Redford and is now the CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, which is almost as good if you ask us — keeps saying over and over, all Canada benefitted from the money those oil companies made, so now all of Canada is going to have to pay to clean up their messes!
Oh, and while you’re figuring out how to pay for the cleanup, our favourite economist Jack Mintz says you’re going to have to cut your taxes. So start thinking about that, too!
In other words, we’re not just going to build a firewall, we’re going to build two firewalls, with lots of pipelines running through them, and you’re going to pay for them!*
And that’s just today’s demands. We’ve got a whole Fair Deal Panel, with Preston Manning on it and everything, looking into things you’re going to have to do to fix our economy. So brace yourselves, Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, because we’re going to have more as soon as we’re back from dodging those furious teachers on our Christmas break!
And if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have gone and won that election last month that our guy Andy Scheer was supposed to win. If you hadn’t messed up like that, Mr. Kenney would be running Canada now from Calgary just like he was supposed to be.
Now get the hell off our lawn, Ottawa! And please cut our grass!**
Seriously, people, you couldn’t make this stuff up!
*Thanks to @RealDonaldTrump for this line.
**Thanks to @TomPark1n for this one.
David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.
Image: David J. Climenhaga
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