Gil McGowan: Alberta Separation Would Devastate Workers

Alberta separatists promise that leaving Canada would make the province richer, freer and better able to develop its oil industry. Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, says the evidence points in the opposite direction. In this interview, McGowan discusses a new report by economist Jim Stanford, False Promises, Big Dangers: How Separation Would Hurt Alberta Workers. The report argues that working Albertans would bear some of the heaviest costs of separation through recession, job losses, higher taxes, weaker public services and uncertainty around federal programs and legal protections. But the interview also turns to a deeper problem inside Alberta's economy. Oil production and profits have climbed while employment in the industry has fallen by roughly 40,000 jobs since 2014. McGowan argues that major oil sands producers now return far more cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks instead of reinvesting it in new production and jobs. The result is a striking contradiction: Alberta is producing more oil and generating more wealth, while its historic wage advantage has largely disappeared and many workers are struggling with rising costs and deteriorating public services. Markham Hislop and McGowan discuss what separation could mean for Alberta workers, why the "Ottawa is holding us back" narrative is so powerful, and whether the province's real economic problem is less about Canada than about how Alberta's wealth is distributed.