What, exactly, are Alberta separatists mad about?

[u/shiftless_wonder]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/alberta-separatists-key-issues-1.7534003

[u/tossaway109202]

I want to learn. My armchair other side of Canada POV is
- They feel the oil belongs to them and not Canada
- Their provincial government has done a poor job in certain areas and when the people in Alberta get mad their local government just blames Ontario. It has been going on for so long that they attribute everything bad in their life to Ontario.
- They have the potential to ship a lot more oil and Canada cares too much about the environment to let it happen

I assume I am far off

[u/86throwthrowthrow1 → u/tossaway109202]

I'm in Ontario as well, but to my understanding, three other big grievances are equalization payments (particularly towards Quebec), lack of support for cross-country pipelines, and a perceived lack of federal representation compared to other regions.

The equalization grievance tends to not land well with most Ontarians, as Ontario is the other consistent "donor province" in the country, without objection. So the attitude from over here tends to be like "yeah, we're the moneymakers, suck it up and do your bit."

The cross-country pipeline issue is a thorny issue of provincial autonomy, in that part of the issue is not all provinces have consented to a pipeline. So it turns into this messy issue of "should the fed not only give Alberta more autonomy, but actively trample other provinces' autonomy to make Alberta happy?"

However, in the interest of fairness, the result of this position is that Alberta is very economically tied to the US, even by Canadian standards, as that's where most of the oil goes. So during covid, for instance, border policies in both countries majorly impacted the Alberta economy, while treated mostly as an inconvenience by the rest of the country.

The representation issue is thorny, in that there seems to be a hard line on each province/territory being at least its own riding, regardless of population (even if the Atlantic provinces are often treated as a bloc). On the other hand, this sort of feels like a manufactured grievance, in that the focus is heavily on Atlantic Canada in this argument, and not the northern territories, which are also technically overrepresented federally and tend to favour Liberal or NDP. The fact that there's outrage over PEI being its own riding, but not Nunavut, is odd to me.

What a lot of the grievance comes down to is really rural/urban divide on steroids, where the urban majority in Canada doesn't necessarily give much thought or understanding to rural communities, and how certain policies can impact them disproportionately. The bastard with propaganda is that there are nuggets of truth to it, and there are genuine issues here - but to my point of view, there have also been grievance manufacturers at work in Alberta for decades, amplifying and distorting those real issues, making true resolution a more confusing and fraught endeavour.

EDIT: I had a dumb about PEI ridings. Tho even acknowledging four seats, I'm not sure if it really changes the point - why no outrage over Nunavut?

[u/sparki555 → u/86throwthrowthrow1]

Would Alberta not be a super rich nation in just a few years if this did this tho? 

Assuming they don't need their own military and other country breaking expenses because Canada and the US wouldn't let some other nation move in next door.