By Bob Weber
Oil, pipelines and grievance – to non-Albertans, that may sound like all the province ever talks about. A disruptive presence in the locker room of Confederation, a whining first-liner who’d rather muse about a trade than improve his play. Why, they ask, can’t Albertans be normal about what is, after all, just another industry? Here’s why: Oil is the money behind low taxes and high wages. Oil is the home team, a genuine world class success story developed right here. Oil is culture – one study found that when asked to draw a typical Albertan, children drew a rig worker. But most of all, oil is power. When you’re a province with deep-seated feelings of being shut out, when your government’s base is composed of those who feel that most keenly, it’s hard to be normal about power.
Power, however, depends on unity and unity must be created. To wit: on May 5, 2015, Albertans elected the first New Democratic government in the province’s history. The next morning, Carol Potter was riding an elevator up the headquarters of the energy company where she worked in corporate finance. One of those in the crowded car was the company’s CEO.
“I was riding up in the elevator with him and several other executives the morning after the NDP won,” recalls Potter, whose decades-long career in the industry included stints in several oil and gas majors as well as the regulator. “(The CEO) said, ‘Who voted for the NDP? This has to stop.’” Statistically, someone in that elevator probably had voted ND – the party had just taken 14 of Calgary’s 25 ridings. But nobody ‘fessed up. “I didn’t say it because I’m not incredibly stupid,” said Potter. “It was, message sent. It’s an unwritten rule. They don’t take kindly to questioning of certain things.”
Alberta’s unwritten rules, of course, are rooted in hard numbers. In 2024-25, one dollar out of every four the province spent came from oil and gas royalties. Although numbers have declined, about 140,000 Albertans still work in the industry. It’s responsible for about a fifth of the province’s GDP. That buys influence.
It also buys consensus. EnergiMedia spoke about that consensus with someone who has decades of high-level involvement in different aspects of the industry. “What is the culture that companies are aiming to create?” asked the person, who asked for anonymity and will be referred to as Jones. “In a generous way, I would call it maybe ‘educating’. Or serving up certain political or policy perspectives to employees with the hopes that they will adopt them. There’s this idea that people fundamentally are maybe being told what to say, what to say at the family dinner, what to say at barbecues about specific issues.”
Communicating a corporate position on political issues that affect business is one thing, Jones said. “If you inform people about what the company’s position is, you check the box by creating the awareness and the transparency that the employees know what the company thinks. But it becomes another thing when you then are suggesting to that employee or even directing that employee that a good soldier will vote this way or a good soldier will tell all their friends what the company thinks and own that message themselves as an individual in their groups.”
Jones has seen “education” cross the line into manipulation.
“The more philosophical part about how some of these companies are communicating to their employees (is) to try to make their employees feel anger, that the reason our business had a bad year wasn’t to do with the that we manage the business. It’s actually to do with … fill in the blank. It’s to do with something in the political environment that has been against us. And this has fomented a lot of the anger that you feel we have to, quote, send a message to Ottawa.”
Albertans do have concerns about the industry’s power – at least when times are good, says Anthony Sayers, a University of Calgary political scientist who’s releasing a book this summer on western alienation. “They have reasonable concerns regarding its effect on public policy and critical issues such as the environment.” But Albertans are also very aware of the side on which their bread is buttered. “When times are bad, they are less worried about both these things.” We rally ‘round the flag when the industry is attacked.
“I understand why people treat Alberta as a whiny province that’s a pain in the ass,” says Sayers, who grew up in Australia. “But it turns out a lot of this stuff is true. There was an initial insult to the West – not just Alberta – that treated the West as an internal colony. The three Prairie provinces were created as vassal provinces. They were designed to be extracted. They weren’t introduced to Confederation as equal players.” The West, from John A. Macdonald on, was to be a source of raw materials and market for central Canadian manufacturers. Newly created provinces weren’t even given control over their natural resources.
Nor did the idea of Canada, conceived as a partnership between French and English, fit western reality. Far from a tidy bicultural blend, the West was a piquant stew of German, central European, Scandinavian, American and many other nationalities, including vibrant First Nations. Alberta and Saskatchewan, says Sayers, are the only two provinces in which neither French nor British immigrants were ever the majority. The mismatch between conception and reality has lingered. Sayers refers to a 1971 meeting between then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau and then-Alberta premier Harry Strom. “Strom said to Trudeau, ‘I didn’t grow up in a binational, bicultural country. I grew up in a multicultural country.’ (Strom) spoke Swedish at home and he had neighbours that spoke Ukrainian, German, French. English was basically a minority language in his part of Alberta. The point is that there’s a real history here. Alberta’s view of the country is in fact different from Ottawa’s.”
Not only is Alberta a place with a history of being left out, its governing party is driven by those who feel left out. Sayers refers to research that shows a sizeable shift in membership of the United Conservatives during Premier Danielle Smith’s tenure. Much of that shift has increased the voice of rural people, especially the socially and religiously conservative. “Those types of people have been excluded from Alberta politics since Social Credit in the ‘70s,” Sayers says. “Those people have been largely excluded from politics for a long time and now they’ve got a taste of it with the UCP – and they’ve got a taste of it particularly under Danielle Smith’s leadership.”
None of this resentment is unique to Alberta. Sayers points out almost every province has threatened to leave Confederation at one time or another. What makes Alberta different – and powers its dissent – is that Alberta went from ranches to rigs and got rich.
In 1900, five years before provincehood, the region that became Alberta had the smallest population in the country. Now it has the fourth largest. In 1950, just before Alberta’s original oil boom, the province was home to six per cent of Canadians. Now, 12 per cent of us live in Wild Rose Country. It is home to the country’s third-largest economy and its main export – oil and gas – dwarfs those of other provinces. According to the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Centre, Ontario’s automotive exports were worth $75 billion in 2023, before tariffs started to bite. The Canadian Energy Centre reported Alberta’s energy exports in 2024 were worth $130 billion. “Alberta just happened to be the province that went from peripheral and unimportant to very important,” says Sayers. “The oil and gas industry is the engine that drives that. That’s why Albertans are embedded with it.”
Of course, the oilpatch is not a monoculture – socially, politically, or philosophically. Everyone interviewed for this article emphasized that they worked amicably alongside people with varying beliefs. Anyone who’s spent any time in Alberta can find the same.
But there is pressure to toe the line. Andrew Johnson, an environmental consultant who worked for years on oilsands projects, calls it tunnel vision. “The environmental people obviously had no idea what they were talking about,” is how he characterized it. “(Industry leaders) were very much interested in having an us-and-them, almost confrontational setup against environmental people. We were going to need oil and gas forever.” He describes an attitude that sees energy paying the piper with every right to call the tune. “If the general public really understood how good this was for them, they wouldn’t put up all these roadblocks. It’s almost like there’s a sort of condescension toward people who aren’t in the industry. It’s with us or against us. And if you’re against us, it’s obviously because you have a lack of understanding.”
Potter’s experience was similar. “My take was, ‘We’re oil and gas. We will do what we want. If there’s some negative consequences, oh well, our province is getting rich because of it.’”
Industry understands this consensus is critical to its influence. As questions about that influence and the impacts of its activities grow, Jones said its wagons are circling. “I was blessed to cut my teeth in an environment where really the engineers and the scientists were the brains of the operation and had free rein to ask very difficult questions and to have divergent perspectives,” said Jones. “I don’t believe that environment exists today.
“As much as (industry leaders) accuse people in Ottawa from being detached from reality or people in Edmonton from being detached from reality, they are actually detached from reality. They’ve created these echo chambers around themselves of sycophants that just nod yes. (To) even dissent to maybe inform your CEO of stand up at a town hall and ask a question that might not align with the corporate view is becoming very hard in the ‘patch.”
Oil has made Alberta powerful, fuelling its rise and amplifying its voice. And oil is how we got to a place where a provincial premier can use national unity as a bargaining chip to wring concessions from Ottawa for her favourite industry. Arguably, Danielle Smith is paying a price. Recent polls suggest a slim majority of Albertans no longer think she’s doing a good job. But maybe she doesn’t care. She’s made a deal with Prime Minister Mark Carney and has encouraging talks with Ontario Premier Rob Ford. And once again, the talk is all oil, pipelines and grievance.
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