In the past couple of weeks, a retired senior oil executive, Gwyn Morgan, a former premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, and a veteran journalist, Don Braid, all commented publicly on the current position of Alberta in Canada. They agreed on the nature of the problem, but stopped short of suggesting the obvious response. It’s not that difficult.

Wall and Morgan emphasized the parallel between the current Trudeau government’s assault on Alberta with the earlier attack initiated by his father, the National Energy Program. In place of a single plan to confiscate Western wealth, however, we find a series of incremental policies designed to ensure that, as Trudeau’s principal secretary Gerald Butts once put it, there would be no Canadian hydrocarbon industry within a generation. This is a much more radical policy than the NEP because it‘s informed by the ideological fashion of anti-carbon environmentalism. Certainly Butts and Trudeau’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, are fully credentialed climate-change alarmists. And the prime minister himself has mused about shutting down the oil sands, allowing only that “we need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.” Note the emphasis: they have to manage the transition, not Albertans who actually own the resource.

In reality, however, the current mix of policies is not about the environment, climate change, or even oil. It’s about re-asserting the rule of Laurentian Canada – that’s the Canada of the St. Lawrence Valley, i.e., the urbanized portions of Ontario and Quebec – over the West. This objective has been a structural constant of Canadian politics since before Confederation. The difference today is that we can do something about it. Let’s connect the dots.

We begin with our version of what pre-Revolution American colonists called a “long train of abuses and usurpations.” Just looking at the current Liberal initiatives, the first insult was Bill C-48. It is often called a tanker ban on the northern B.C. coast. But it is not a ban on tankers transiting the Inside Passage; it’s a ban on the export of primary and refined hydrocarbons from Alberta that necessarily would use tankers to do so. Then came the completely bogus notion of a Great Bear Rain Forest, through which pipelines never shall pass. Thus was Enbridge’s Northern Gateway extinguished. Back then many Albertans were still naïve enough to think that the Trudeau Laurentians were actually concerned with the environment; accordingly, protestations were muted.

Then came the post-regulatory hearings to kill TransCanada Corporation’s Energy East pipeline by introducing the novel notion of “upstream emissions.” This time we noticed that the objections all came from Laurentian Canada and that nothing was said or done about the hundreds of tankers filled with Saudi crude that annually ply the St. Lawrence. Nor was anything said or done about the “upstream emissions” of foreign oil.

There remained the project to twin Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline. But after some deft moves, often portrayed as mismanagement, Trans-Mountain expansion is dead. Worse, the Government of (Laurentian) Canada now owns the pipe and can interrupt at will our last link to global markets. To add further insults, the federal carbon tax and Bill C-69, which imposes a huge new regulatory burden, all but ensure there will be no capital investment in energy in Alberta or Saskatchewan.

Wall and Morgan say they are “hopeful” because they retain the commonsensical assumption that, in the teeth of all evidence, the Laurentians actually support a strong domestic energy industry. Braid was more realistic when he noted that “for many of Trudeau’s MPs and ministers,” that is, for Trudeau’s Laurentians, “the crisis looks like a kind of victory. The plan for Alberta is working. Just a little early, that’s all.” From the start, the Laurentians have wanted to shut down the oil industry because it provides us with a measure of autonomy. So far they are succeeding.

There was a demonstration by concerned energy industry supporters in Calgary when Trudeau was in town last week. There was a meeting between him and energy leaders where he learned again what he already knew: the condition of the Alberta economy was parlous indeed. He gave evasive responses to pointed and direct questions. Premier Notley wanted Ottawa to join the province and purchase more locomotives and tank cars. Radio silence from the Laurentians.