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Colby Cosh: Did the Globe and Mail just advocate for Alberta separatism?

A sovereign wealth fund for Alberta, as a recent editorial called for, really only has a point if you consider the province to be a nation

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Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not sure you noticed, but there was Norwailing in the Globe and Mail this week. In the year 2026! It’s making a comeback! Norwailing is my term for columns and editorials that castigate the province of Alberta for spending government revenues from oil and gas on current programs instead of socking the money away and living on taxes in the meantime. This is a greedy and short-sighted policy, unlike the one pursued by the exemplary and beautiful state of Norway, which … well, we might as well quote the Globe’s unsigned Tuesday leader:

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“By contrast, Norway has shown what a disciplined approach can do. Starting in 1996, the country funnelled its petroleum revenues into a sovereign fund, with sharply defined limits on how much can be spent each year. The result has been the creation of a massive financial asset, nearly $2.9-trillion in 2025, or about $510,000 for each Norwegian.

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“By contrast, Albertans’ per capita savings, through the Heritage Fund, are a relative pittance – and lower than they were four decades ago.”

For the benefit of laypersons, we’ll note that the newspaper “editorial boards” who write such pieces don’t always include literal editors, which is how you can end up starting back-to-back paragraphs with “By contrast.” Anyway, the Norwailing argument is spotted at regular intervals in Canadian publications, and is sometimes made by Albertans themselves. It’s a favourite of precisely the same liberals who will, when not immediately engaged in Norwailing, refer to government program spending as “investment” and defend it on that basis.

The Alberta Heritage Fund was, for example, pillaged ruthlessly to help pay for my hometown’s public library and, through a Heritage Scholarship, my higher education. The inferior national newspaper, using its collective voice, is arguing that I should feel guilty about this shameless theft from tomorrow’s Albertans.

The headline of the editorial is in fact “Alberta’s oil inheritance is being pilfered (by Albertans).” Someone glancing at the page would probably think this was just a cute Chestertonian paradox of the kind beloved by newspaper writers. In fact, it is the deadly serious premise of the article. Albertans-now are irresponsibly “siphoning off Alberta’s oil wealth” from Albertans-future.

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Norwailers never seem to notice that governments, including Canada’s, redistribute wealth between generations as a matter of routine. These columns and essays always seem to be written by people who have had a temporary fit of anarcho-capitalism and who believe taxation and redistribution are forms of theft. Norway’s sovereign oil fund went 25 years without any withdrawals for current spending while Norwegian citizens paid some of the highest personal taxes in the democratic world. From a point of view that is perfectly symmetrical with the Norwailer’s, this can be regarded as having stolen from the present to help fund a future Norway that would have enjoyed greater abundance anyhow.

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The Norwailing argument against Alberta always appeals to the special nature of oil and gas revenues as being “non-renewable” in some way that bubble gum from a bubble gum factory isn’t. And of course there’s an additional hint of the view that petro dollars are fundamentally undeserved, a matter of dumb geological luck. Sixteen years ago, in another publication, I referred to this as “Ebsenism” in reference to the introduction of the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, wherein Buddy Ebsen’s character Jed Clampett, an ignorant yokel, gets unfathomably rich after a stray round from his squirrel gun penetrates the earth and creates a sudden spurt of black gold on his land.

That reference may have died of old age in the meantime, or even been stillborn. But I’ll make the same retorts I always do. One is that conventional oil and natural gas in Alberta have turned out to be astonishingly renewable, thanks to hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and other technical developments. Not one of the Norwailers I’ve been hearing carry on about the Alberta Heritage Fund for decades has ever bothered to observe that the fund was created for the specific reason that our oil reserves were expected — by overwhelming consensus of the experts of the day — to run out in the mid-1980s.

And when it comes to the Athabasca oil sands, now overwhelmingly dominant in any accounting of Alberta petro-wealth … well, you have heard of the “Syncrude” company that scoops the goop up there, yeah? The “Syn” part stands for “synthetic,” as in “synthetic crude oil,” as in “a synthesized industrial product that requires a raw resource to be retrieved and processed in the same way as bubble gum from a bubble gum factory.”

The source of this oil is “non-renewable,” but we’ll have real trouble putting a serious dent in it before the world transcends fossil fuels. For 60 or 70 years the “wealth” in the oil sands was mostly regarded as a potential cheap source, not of fuel, but of road asphalt. It was Albertan scientists and engineers, mostly, who developed the practical processing and extraction techniques that created the wealth. Less Ebsen, more Edison.

None of this, however, is what strikes me most acutely about present-day Norwailing. What I notice now is that Norway’s wealth-fund policy is justifiable only on nationalistic grounds, on multiple strong premises of undivided Norwegian sovereignty and the continuity of a distinctive Norwegian people. I do not castigate them for saving for their own posterity: they are doing it in the exclusive patriotic interests of Norwegians. They do it because Norwegians share a unique set of ideals and folkways that they wish to preserve, along with the language of Ibsen and Hamsun and Knausgård. They do it because Norwegians are an extended family with a common past, a common destiny, and obligations to one another that transcend generic humanitarianism.

They also exercise democratic control over who enters Norway and how many newcomers join the club of Norwegian citizens, thereby diluting the per-capita value of the big fat fund. And that fund is operated on made-in-Norway ethical principles which exclude some species of investment, and which therefore carry an opportunity cost that Norwegians have collectively agreed among themselves to bear.

None of this is practically or normatively true of Albertans … or is it? The Alberta separatists to my right are jostling me most uncomfortably in the ribs right now. A sovereign wealth fund? It’s a marvelous idea! Let’s go get the sovereignty and then talk about it! There’s a petition and everything!

If Alberta is not a nation in some meaningful way, it is hard to see any point to policies predicated on nationhood. We cannot know who wrote this Norwailing editorial for the Globe, but it is hard to see why a non-Albertan would ever care to jab a hectoring finger at us Albertans about our fiscal choices, even if the justification for them is poor. Obviously we must rule out blind, instinctive Laurentian resentment. Can it be that the Alberta-separatist cause has established a fifth column in the offices of a certain news organ?

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