Personally I have never agreed with the transfers from the so called rich provinces to the poor ones because.

1./ It keeps people locked in place in poverty instead of moving to a more prosperous location where they can work and provide for themselves. As you say the Albert Oil sands are a boon to the Newfoundlanders.

But as you point out, they're doing that already, despite transfer payments. Go to the Okanagan and see how many Canadians are there picking fruit. They're mostly from Quebec and Nfld. Same goes for the tobacco industry in southern Ontario.

2./ It creates hard feeling's and envy between the have and have not provinces.

Only to the degree that people buy into the sort of clap-trap presented by the Calgary Herald. People who base their opinions on their own study of the situation and/or who've had the benefit of living and working in different parts of Canada might take a different view.

3./ It allows the have not provinces to rely on the have provinces to develop their resources instead of doing more for themselves. All provinces in Canada are blessed with an abundance. Quebec for instance has a huge hydro electric resource.

Resource distribution is very uneven in Canada, and resource extraction is a limited source of employment anyway. It doesn't take many workers to run a mine, oil or forestry operation, compared to say manufacturing. The situation was already dire in the 70's as far as NFLD goes. I was there, and clearly recall huge trawlers from Poland, Russia, Portugal, etc stripping the Grand Banks clean. Nothing the NFLD govt. could do, except appeal to the Feds to intervene, which never happened. As for PQ, it once had a thriving textile industry. So, where were the federal tariffs or the "buy Canadian" policy to stop foreign competition from driving it under?