the facts just confuse right wing idiots

"Contrary to commonly held beliefs, the Alberta government does not actually send money to have-not provinces like Quebec. Nor do any of the revenues, collected by the Alberta government from the oil industry, make their way to Quebec through equalization. Nor are Albertans who have lost their jobs during the economic downturn currently contributing anything to equalization. Nor does any individual Albertan contribute disproportionately to equalization."

Alberta doesn’t send oil money to have-nots, and Ontario contributes more than Alberta

The vitriol from Alberta’s loud and angry right started within hours of the announcement by Montréal-area mayors, back in January, that they would stand in opposition to the proposed Energy East Pipeline. In particular, Wildrose finance critic Derek Fildebrandt wasted no time jumping onto Twitter and asserting that: “If Quebec has such a big problem with our energy industry, it can give back the $73B in Equalization.”

This sentiment was quickly echoed—and continues to be repeated—by conservative politicians, pundits and media outlets across the country. Just last week, Wildrose leader Brian Jean announced that his party had pulled together an expert panel to study equalization and author a report on it for the provincial legislature.

The panel is headed by Frank Atkins, a University of Calgary professor and researcher at the ultra-conservative Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The panel also includes staffers from like-minded think tanks: the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and the Fraser Institute. One of the panel’s first acts was convincing its right-wing friends at Postmedia to run an op-ed, penned by Atkins, highlighting the “problems” with equalization—which was published in theEdmonton Journal on the exact same day (February 18) that Postmedia papers featured articles about the creation of the panel.

The problem with all this noise from the right is that it appears to be less about highlighting the genuine issues and challenges that currently exist with equalization, and more about exploiting generally flawed assumptions about how equalization works, all for the sake of fuelling anger and resentment toward Quebec and the federal government.