Jason Kenney has been talking Alberta's independence. He's been suggesting Alberta take Quebec's approach to federalism. But that approach has evolved. Chantal Hebert writes:
Quebec has operated its own system since the Canada Pension Plan was introduced in 1966.
At the time of the inception of the CPP every province had the option of going it alone. The main rationale behind Quebec’s choice of a separate route was to give its government the ability to use the pension fund to play a leadership role in the shaping of the province’s economic fabric.
That may be a goal worth pursuing in Alberta, but it does come with the need to set up a bureaucracy to administer a system that ultimately — for reasons of labour mobility — would offer relatively identical benefits to those on offer under the CPP.
Ditto in the case of having the province run its own police force — something, for the record, that Quebec was doing decades before the RCMP as we know it was created in 1920 — or taking over the collection of all income tax from the federal government.
The problem with setting up these individual entities is that administrative costs cut deeply into provincial revenues:
The reason Quebec is currently pursuing the latter option [having the federal government assume income tax administrative costs] has more to do with saving money and freeing the province’s taxpayers from the long-standing burden of filing two income tax reports every April, than provincial autonomy.
A few years ago, a commission costed the duplication at almost half a billion dollars a year and recommended Quebec join the other provinces in having Ottawa collect the taxes on its behalf.
That turned out to be a federalist bridge too far even for the then-Liberal Quebec government, hence the demand that the federal government hand over its collection responsibilities to the province instead.
It is hard to see how any of the above options adds up to more leverage for Alberta rather than to a series of solutions in search of a problem. If anything, by focusing on federal-provincial arrangements at a time when the climate-change issue is playing out globally the province risks missing the forest for the trees.
The bottom line is that Mr. Kenney's proposed solutions to Alberta's problems -- like Mr. Kenney himself -- is firmly rooted in the past. They were proposed solutions to past problems, not the ones Alberta faces today. And, therefore, things will get worse for Albertans.
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