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We're talking about completely different things here, and it's a bit concerning that you're so confident about your understanding of the Canadian economy and va
by jgon 5y ago
We're talking about completely different things here, and it's a bit concerning that you're so confident about your understanding of the Canadian economy and various provincial economies while not knowing what Equalization payments are or how they work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canad...
As you can see this has absolutely nothing to do with projecting territorial claims, which is why I specifically did not mention that in my description. As I did specifically mention in order to provide relatively level standards of living across the country the federal government transfers money away from more wealthy provinces to less wealthy provinces. As you can see from the table in that link I posted above, provinces like Quebec receive over 10% of their annual budget in the form of transfer payments, this is an even larger percentage of the budget for some of the maritime nations. If you look at the second table on that page you'll note that literally only Ontario and Alberta have higher than Canadian average, average incomes, indicating that these transfer payments are largely funded by those two provinces, and because Alberta is so much higher, it is largely funded by them. As I indicated, figuring out a way to square the reality of these payments vanishing with the current quality of life they afford is a huge challenge for Canada.
Secondly, you talk about Alberta needing to diversify but say "BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by real estate", do you understand that this means that BC is less diversified than Alberta? That BC is more dependent on a single sector, and that sector is literally just flipping homes, not doing any sort of productive manufacturing, or providing a service? Like, I'm not sure how you're so confident in your diagnosis of Alberta's woes, while simultaneously appearing to have no concern for BC?
- munk-a 5y agoAh my apology I thought you were specifically talking about the northern resident credit. Wealth sharing between provinces is an extremely common habit world-wide, the US has loads of this and, most of the wealth sharing ends up coming from sources that aren't tied to natural resource exploitation like the financial markets in NYC. Quebec is a big beneficiary of these payments but Ontario and BC are both excluded from these benefits - losing the oil revenue likely means these payments (and nation wide standard of living) would suffer as a result but I don't think that's a surprise when it comes to considering any artificial economic action. We're talking trading some of our excess productive capacity for cleaner air or cleaner water or not being submerged due to global warming - free money won't ever emerge from regulation - but we might end up losing less "goodness" to externalities like pollution. On the topic of BC's economy, it is unhealthy but the fact that BC's economy comes 17.4%[1] still only puts it 4.4% above Canada at large (13.01%)[2] - that compares to Alberta which derives 16.12% of it's economy from mineral/oil/gas extraction which is 7.9% above Canada at large (8.21%)[2]. BC absolutely has a real estate issue and it's quite concerning - but there is a lot more "natural" activity in that sector nation-wide compared with Alberta's oil dependency. I think it's also fair to view that while the 17.4% of BC's GDP covers pretty much all the economic activity related to real-estate the 16.12% in Alberta misses a lot of the knock-on benefits of the oil industry and dependent businesses... but that's an opinion. 1. (sourced 2018 - wikipedia) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_Columbia%27s_Gross_Domestic_Product_%28GDP%29_by_Sector%2C_2018.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_... I rounded up in the previous post 2. (sourced 2017 - wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industri... 3. (sourced 2019 - statistica whatever that is) https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-of-alberta-canada-by-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-...