We're paying too much taxes to the wrong government. For illustration purposes, the average Alberta family has a total income of $172,000 (Fraser Institutes, 2025). Total tax bill: $65,000 (income taxes, GST, property taxes, payroll contributions like CPP & EI, fuel/excise taxes, etc.) How are those taxes distributed? Federal: $43,400 (~67%) Provincial: $17,000 (~26%) Municipal: $4,200 (–7%) Note: Municipal is mostly property tax; the education portion of your property tax bill goes to the province. GST and most of CPP/EI land in the federal column. Numbers are rounded for clarity and are not precise for any individual household. So the government that picks up your garbage, keeps your water running, maintains your roads, and shows up when your house is on fire gets about 7% of the average Alberta household’s total tax bill. On the other side, the one that decides how much of your money goes to other countries, how the equalization formula works, and what the national carbon policy looks like, gets roughly two-thirds. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the system working exactly as designed. Your local council has to balance its budget every year and answer for potholes and snow removal. Ottawa can run deficits for decades and still tell Alberta it’s “not paying its fair share” while collecting the largest slice of the pie. The province sits in the middle, running health care and education while also collecting education property tax on top of income tax. It’s backwards. The decisions that hit your driveway tomorrow are funded by the smallest share of you money. The decisions that hit your paycheque for the rest of your life are funded by the largest share, and those decisions are made the farthest away. An independent Alberta wouldn’t magically make every problem disappear. But it would at least put the biggest tax bill and the biggest decisions in the same place... closer to the people who actually live with the results. An independent Alberta is the only path forward.