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Ah my apology I thought you were specifically talking about the northern resident credit. Wealth sharing between provinces is an extremely common habit world-wide, the US has loads of this and, most of the wealth sharing ends up coming from sources that aren't tied to natural resource exploitation like the financial markets in NYC. Quebec is a big beneficiary of these payments but Ontario and BC are both excluded from these benefits - losing the oil revenue likely means these payments (and nation wide standard of living) would suffer as a result but I don't think that's a surprise when it comes to considering any artificial economic action. We're talking trading some of our excess productive capacity for cleaner air or cleaner water or not being submerged due to global warming - free money won't ever emerge from regulation - but we might end up losing less "goodness" to externalities like pollution.

On the topic of BC's economy, it is unhealthy but the fact that BC's economy comes 17.4%[1] still only puts it 4.4% above Canada at large (13.01%)[2] - that compares to Alberta which derives 16.12% of it's economy from mineral/oil/gas extraction which is 7.9% above Canada at large (8.21%)[2].

BC absolutely has a real estate issue and it's quite concerning - but there is a lot more "natural" activity in that sector nation-wide compared with Alberta's oil dependency. I think it's also fair to view that while the 17.4% of BC's GDP covers pretty much all the economic activity related to real-estate the 16.12% in Alberta misses a lot of the knock-on benefits of the oil industry and dependent businesses... but that's an opinion.

1. (sourced 2018 - wikipedia) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_... I rounded up in the previous post

2. (sourced 2017 - wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industri...

3. (sourced 2019 - statistica whatever that is) https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-...




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