- the fact that AB has always elected a centrist party and has never accepted transfer payments, whereas Ont elects Libs and is now a loser province with no end in site??
You're confused. Alberta gets transfer payments every year from Ottawa. Canada Health Transfer, Canada Social Transfer, recently the Wait Times Reduction.
All money collected by Revenue Canada and doled out to the provinces.
You're thinking about Equalization payments.
And if you read any Canadian history, you would realize that the Equalization program exists thanks in part to Alberta! Strange, I know. You're probably thinking, hogwash!
But it's true. In the depression the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments flirted with bankruptcy. There was a report called the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, which looked at the economic hardships post-depression. And one of the recommendations was for an equalization program (launched in 1957), which Alberta benefited from in those early years.
I'll break it down for you, these are equalization payments made to Alberta, in millions of dollars:
1957- 12
1958-13
1959- 16
1960- 15
1961- 14
1962- 12
1963- 7
1964- 1
You can find all those values in Table 1 of this publication:
http://www.irpp.org/wp/archive/wp2004-10.pdf
It's a popular talking point, especially for Albertans to say they never have received transfer payments. But that is wrong, way wrong. You still do, and early on you were a recipient of equalization payments. In fact, your province recieved equalization payments more times than Ontario has.
So shut the phuck up already about mismanaged money.
The math has been explained to you many times, how equalization is accounted. If other provinces pull up the average, then a province can become a "have-not" province through simple laws of math.
Since the equalization is a per capita basis, that means it's an average. And the average of any population is highly influenced by extreme values. So if one province has extremely rich tax payers, and is derived from natural resource revenue, then that is going to impact the formula and how those payments are distributed in a major way.
But I guess if you haven't figured this out yet, it's probably never going to sink in.