Why so many Albertans are giving up on their country - Macleans

‘Wexit’ reflects a cartoon version of the province that other Canadians find easy to attack—because it spares them the burden of self-examination"

"After spending more than a decade reporting from Alberta, I have to confess that I’m tired of trying to explain western alienation to the East. (Please note, if you will, that everything east of Manitoba is considered “the East” to me.)

I could waste more time explaining the current equalization formula and its faults; delve into the decades-old constitutional arguments that affirmed provinces’ rights to their resource royalties, or discuss the respective greenhouse gas emissions intensity of various subtypes of crude, based on well-to-wheel measurements. We could talk about macroeconomic oil demand, the unemployment rate, the economic argument for pipelines like the Trans Mountain expansion; Bills C-69 and C-48, the oil price differential, the public purse’s dependence on oil and gas royalties. We could go back in time, to the National Energy Program, to 1905, to Frederick Haultain, to the doomed province of Buffalo; to the railways, the crow rate, and the robber barons of the East. 

For now, I’ll pass. It feels too futile—like trying to explain an emotion (and a not-always-rational one, as is the way with emotions)—to people who don’t want to hear it. I have only a few observations. And they are not of Alberta, but rather of Canada. ...

It doesn’t seem to be enough to perceive Albertans as wrong, or mired in a declining oil-and-gas industry that produces significant greenhouse gas emissions—they must also be bad people. 

And what consideration is owed to a pack of hard-luck deplorables? 

If you view the province as a collection of regressive hicks whose only claim to wealth is that they were lucky enough to be born on valuable dirt, then it becomes very easy to decimate that wealth. Or, at the very least, to greet the crisis playing out in this province with smug contempt. The oil crash of 2014 and subsequent economic decline becomes a manifestation of divine justice. 

The province’s suffering is proper and righteous. 

The indifference of the nation is justified. ...

Baked into that moral calculus is an implicit political one: it’s a very fine thing to wipe an industry off the map in a part of the map that doesn’t matter. 

Pundits based in Toronto have responded to the last .. federal election results by offering reams of opinions explaining to Albertans why their current predicament is entirely their own fault."

As you can see, the East is unwittingly paving the road for Alberta Separation. And it will be the last road they ever pave, because after Alberta's gone, they'll come to the stark realization ... that roads are made with oil. 

I gleaned the gold from this article, but if you wish to read it in its entirety, and be warned, it is a gross article, one that describes Wexit and Albertians as racist (those parts I have omitted ), you can click here. Otherwise, I would suggest you stay clear of anything Maclean's publishes, it only makes you dumber to read it.