Albertans gamble and win -- and losers hate that!
By Ian Robinson
As if they didn't hate us enough already, the Rest of Canada just got another reason to resent Alberta.
If you haven't heard it from them yet, you will. Let's call it the Lotto 64-Whine.
Not only did a ticket sold in Alberta pick up the record $54-million prize, two other Alberta tickets earned six-figure wins.
Added salt in the ROC wound: The winning Camrose 17 are oil workers, a class of folks who rank up there with crack dealers in the estimation of the eastern media.
That Alberta-sold tickets did so well answers a question recently on everybody's lips: What are you gonna do with your $400 Ralphbucks rebate?
Apparently we're gonna blow it early on lottery tickets.
Albertans like to gamble. That so many of us live here who weren't born here is evidence of that.
A huge number of us are the ones who looked around us back East -- as my wife and I did while an NDP government was ravaging Ontario's public purse and sucking tax bucks out of us like a vampire with a heavy thirst -- hauled up stakes and headed West.
New Albertans roll the dice just by moving, from the Newfie drywaller to the doctor from Bombay to the cute waitress from Thailand who is just here for the snowboarding.
We gamble professionally and personally. And when we're done with that, apparently we just gamble for fun.
The ROC hates us for that, too.
Despite their smug superiority, characterized by the constant litany of insults in their public press characterizing us as redneck racists, I'm pretty sure their resentment of Alberta has a lot to do with a sense that they're kind of like the fat girl who wasn't invited to the prom.
We're at the party and they're not.
In his first term, U.S. President George W. Bush brought in an educational initiative called No Child Left Behind. Canada does the same thing on a national basis for the provinces, through so-called equalization grants, which ought to be called: No Loser Left Behind.
You'd think the losers, the ones who don't pay their own way, would harbour just a smidgen of gratitude for the ones who prop up their provinces. You'd be wrong.
A Quebec cabinet minister last week slammed the federal government for wanting to give Alberta more federal bucks to reduce the imaginary scourge of greenhouse gases under the insane Kyoto treaty. Quebec won't subsidize Alberta on Kyoto, its environment minister Thomas Mulcair warned.
Like me when I first read that, you're probably gritting your teeth about now. Le Hand-Out Province won't subsidize ALBERTA?
We took a shot on fiscal responsibility from an elected representative of the province whose contributions to this country appear limited to the ungodly caterwauling of Celine Dion and the notion it's somehow acceptable to melt cheese on fries?
Has there been a moment in the history of this Confederation when Quebec actually pulled its own weight?
It's officially a have-not province. When you take what Alberta sends to Ottawa in personal and corporate tax -- $25.6 billion -- and subtract what we get back, we send nearly $3,000 a year per Albertan to the ROC that doesn't come back to us.
Ontario's a poor second at around $1,800 a year.
Every other province in Canada is like the shiftless brother-in-law living in the room over your garage, scraping by on pogey and raiding your fridge when you're not looking. And you're pretty sure he's been into your Scotch, too.
And you just know he feels good about freeloading and stealing from you because he somehow got it in his head that your success is some kind of accident and his failure is undeserved. And the first time you say to him: "Hey, why don't you pay for the coffee this time," in the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, he replies: "Geez. Can't you pay your own way?"
There's something wrong with this country and I don't see how it can be fixed.
But until the ROC figures out a way to rig the table against us completely, I guess all we can do is just keep on rolling the dice.
And winning.
By Ian Robinson
As if they didn't hate us enough already, the Rest of Canada just got another reason to resent Alberta.
If you haven't heard it from them yet, you will. Let's call it the Lotto 64-Whine.
Not only did a ticket sold in Alberta pick up the record $54-million prize, two other Alberta tickets earned six-figure wins.
Added salt in the ROC wound: The winning Camrose 17 are oil workers, a class of folks who rank up there with crack dealers in the estimation of the eastern media.
That Alberta-sold tickets did so well answers a question recently on everybody's lips: What are you gonna do with your $400 Ralphbucks rebate?
Apparently we're gonna blow it early on lottery tickets.
Albertans like to gamble. That so many of us live here who weren't born here is evidence of that.
A huge number of us are the ones who looked around us back East -- as my wife and I did while an NDP government was ravaging Ontario's public purse and sucking tax bucks out of us like a vampire with a heavy thirst -- hauled up stakes and headed West.
New Albertans roll the dice just by moving, from the Newfie drywaller to the doctor from Bombay to the cute waitress from Thailand who is just here for the snowboarding.
We gamble professionally and personally. And when we're done with that, apparently we just gamble for fun.
The ROC hates us for that, too.
Despite their smug superiority, characterized by the constant litany of insults in their public press characterizing us as redneck racists, I'm pretty sure their resentment of Alberta has a lot to do with a sense that they're kind of like the fat girl who wasn't invited to the prom.
We're at the party and they're not.
In his first term, U.S. President George W. Bush brought in an educational initiative called No Child Left Behind. Canada does the same thing on a national basis for the provinces, through so-called equalization grants, which ought to be called: No Loser Left Behind.
You'd think the losers, the ones who don't pay their own way, would harbour just a smidgen of gratitude for the ones who prop up their provinces. You'd be wrong.
A Quebec cabinet minister last week slammed the federal government for wanting to give Alberta more federal bucks to reduce the imaginary scourge of greenhouse gases under the insane Kyoto treaty. Quebec won't subsidize Alberta on Kyoto, its environment minister Thomas Mulcair warned.
Like me when I first read that, you're probably gritting your teeth about now. Le Hand-Out Province won't subsidize ALBERTA?
We took a shot on fiscal responsibility from an elected representative of the province whose contributions to this country appear limited to the ungodly caterwauling of Celine Dion and the notion it's somehow acceptable to melt cheese on fries?
Has there been a moment in the history of this Confederation when Quebec actually pulled its own weight?
It's officially a have-not province. When you take what Alberta sends to Ottawa in personal and corporate tax -- $25.6 billion -- and subtract what we get back, we send nearly $3,000 a year per Albertan to the ROC that doesn't come back to us.
Ontario's a poor second at around $1,800 a year.
Every other province in Canada is like the shiftless brother-in-law living in the room over your garage, scraping by on pogey and raiding your fridge when you're not looking. And you're pretty sure he's been into your Scotch, too.
And you just know he feels good about freeloading and stealing from you because he somehow got it in his head that your success is some kind of accident and his failure is undeserved. And the first time you say to him: "Hey, why don't you pay for the coffee this time," in the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, he replies: "Geez. Can't you pay your own way?"
There's something wrong with this country and I don't see how it can be fixed.
But until the ROC figures out a way to rig the table against us completely, I guess all we can do is just keep on rolling the dice.
And winning.
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