on mon NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER owen byrne wrote i suppose canada which is supposed to be a loose confederation of NUMBER founding nations french and english can be cited as a success the jury is still out but so far only a few brief rebellions and referendums and such still together after NUMBER years alberta and to a lesser extent some of the other western provinces is definitely not happy with the current arrangement some of this has to do with the strange way the canadian government is structured when i was last up in alberta a month ago the newspapers were reporting something like NUMBER of albertans favor separating from canada and over several distinct issues the problem is basically that while alberta is an economic powerhouse that is propping up the weaker economies of the eastern provinces their interests are openly and unapologetically ignored by the government in ottawa while alberta sends something like twice the tax dollars to ottawa per capita of the average canadian they only have token representation in the federal government while i m not clear on exactly how the government works up there representation is not entirely based on population and it works out that some eastern provinces with populations smaller than the city of calgary alone have substantially more representatives in the legislature than the entire province of alberta the long and the short of it is that the eastern provinces use alberta as a personal atm machine for their social programs while not even so much as throwing alberta a bone and are able to do so because even the sparsely populated eastern provinces can out vote alberta despite having fewer people or something like that the canadian government is less restricted than the us government so they can do strange things like having restrictive regulations that only apply to certain provinces alberta being on the receiving end of many such obscenities it is essentially a much worse version of what is happening in the inter mountain west of the us unlike the us case though the rest of canada would really be hurting if they weren t receiving all those tax dollars from alberta otoh alberta would probably thrive i have friends in alberta and visit occasionally but i m not totally clear on everything that goes on in that country due to my partial unfamiliarity with how the government works up there so i m a little fuzzy on some of the details what i do know is that on average the albertans are quite unhappy with their current position in canada and the sentiment has been getting worse over the years cheers james rogers jamesr URL 