St. Albert's federal representative says the parade of trucks that passed through Nisku Wednesday afternoon is a sign of the deep displeasure Albertans have with the federal government.
Truckers from across the province formed a 22-kilometre-long truck convoy that started travelling through Nisku at around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday
Edmonton-St. Albert Conservative MP Michael Cooper was travelling down to Andrew Scheer's town hall at the time, but didn’t end up making it to the event. He left his office in St. Albert at 11:15 a.m. and sat in traffic for hours, eventually turning around and making it back to the city at 2:30 p.m.
Cooper said the display was an example of the “deep, deep frustration” Albertans have with the federal governments policies regarding the energy sector.
“It is illustrative of the fact that people are mad as hell, quite frankly, at Justin Trudeau. They are literally taking to the streets,” Cooper said.
“The level of anger has reached a level we just haven’t seen.”
The pro-energy-sector rally is the most recent in a string of rallies across the province. Last week, a rally was held in Grande Prairie with 600 trucks travelling through the northern city. A few weeks ago, a rally was held in Drayton Valley.
Wednesday’s rally was organized by Truckers for Pipelines and drew hundreds of trucks out.
Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock UCP MLA Glenn van Dijken said he has not seen this kind of frustration with Ottawa in many years. He said when he graduated high school, there were few jobs around and Albertans were frustrated with the National Energy Board.
Van Dijken noted those same frustrations are brewing again and said he has been hearing a lot of chatter in his riding around Alberta separating from the rest of the country, although he does not encourage that discussion.
Both men noted that while there is no organized Alberta separatist movement in Alberta right now, the sentiment is growing and is reflective of the level of frustration Alberta is feeling with the federal government.
“I don’t think it should be taken lightly,” Cooper said.
“I hear fairly regularly those sentiments being expressed. Prior to Justin Trudeau being elected, I almost never heard those sentiments expressed.”
Cooper noted the chatter is coming from people who do not hold extreme views, but rather from everyday people who would have never entertained the notion of separatism only three years ago.
The rally came just one day after the federal government announced $1.6 billion in mostly loans to Canada's energy sector after months of the province feuding with the feds over the oil and gas industry.
Premier Rachel Notley responded to that announcement by saying the funding was “absolutely not” what Alberta and the energy industry had been asking for.
“Hate to break it to you, but the whole world wants our product. The issue is not finding a market for our product. The issue is getting our product to those markets. We don’t need help finding new markets. We need help moving our product and I don’t know if we could have been much more clear about that,” Notley said.
The premier said the move will help some small producers but overall this is not what the province asked for.
“We didn’t ask for the opportunity to go further into debt as a means of addressing this problem. What we asked for was for them to remove the handcuffs,” she said.
