Does Western Alienation exist, and how can we fix it?

[Nouvellecosse]

Vid of course is exactly right on this. Anyone who takes the position that we should just be blindly barreling (pardon the pun) ahead with oil is just in basket case territory. There's legitimate debate in terms of how fast it's feasible to transition away from it but that's about it. I recall the Atlantic fisheries even had some similarity to this situation in the sense that for year scientists were warning that harvesting fish at those levels was unsustainable and that we risked a total collapse of the stock, but there was very little attempt to cut back due to political considerations.

Once the numbers dropped so drastically that there was no other choice but to cut harvesting, there were still many people in the Atlantic region who were mad and disagreed with the decision. They saw the dept. of fisheries and oceans as this extension of government authority from outside the region being wielded by unsympathetic people who weren't being directly harmed by their decisions. It sounds crazy but that's what people are like. They aren't rational when it comes to money and they vent their anger in whatever manner is most comforting.

Sometimes I wonder whether having such a geography makes stuff like this more harmful since there will inevitably be cases where natural resource industries are limited to sub regions. It's hard to say but I'd guess that if the oil industry were spread more evenly across the country it might make for greater national unity but it would make difficult decisions such as to phase out fossil fuel production even more difficult or perhaps impossible. If the people in those AB and SK who currently voted 80% against anything that disrupts the oil sector were spread evenly across the country, there would probably have been a blue majority since not only did they win the popular vote, but people influence one another and those economic fears could easily have influenced more of the population. On the other hand, if you didn't have an entire region so directly dependent on one industry, maybe no one would be so freaked out about its decline.

Either way, what we really need is a strategy to move forward, develop a new economy, and focus on the positive. There's nothing productive in pretending that nothing needs to change.