My mom told me that when oil was first discovered in Leduc, Alberta the Province asked the Feds to help develop it. They were denied. So the Province went "south" for investments and expertise which is why most of the oil developed were by U.S. firms. As a result, the Alberta Treasury Branch was also created so that Albertans didn't have to rely on "eastern" banks for loans etc. With the above info, this all makes sense now.
And as we see it's still a challenge today with the petroleum industry and fed gov'ts. The eastern voters for the most part prefer a 'no pipelines no oil' policy, so to make them happy the feds are pushing that to the detriment of alberta. The only reason they ever backed it at all was for revenues, they liked the money. But now that trudeau has said that balanced budgets don't matter and there's no problem borrowing 100 billion a year or whatever, that's not an issue anymore.
We even saw that with Dion's run - if you'll recall he was asked about carbon tax and restrictions on alberta oil and he said "Well we don't want to KILL the cash-cow.... " That's how they see alberta specifically and the west in general. And it's been a problem federally for ages - the majority of votes are in the east by far - so pander to the east and use the west to raise cash to pay for things the east wants. Thats why the reform party's mantra was "the west wants in". To which all of the parties federally said "no, we're good as is thanks".
As western populations grow the parties have to pay more and more attention to what's going on here. We have something close to about 25 percent of the population now, which isn't enough to win by itself but it IS enough to deny a majority to a party. And with the Bloc basically taking quebec out of the game for the libs and cpc that matters even more.
Right now bc and alberta are leading the western pack by far when it comes to population growth - hopefully at some point sask and man will kick it into gear as well and really start
Alberta got a giant push when Tommy Douglas tried to force Shell and Imperial Oil in SK into Crown Assets.
Both immediately packed up drilling operations and left SK for AB.
Yeah - trudeau the first bypassed that by just creating petro-can so he didn't have to take anything over

Ahhhh the NEP, fun days.