But the meaning of "people want" is very delicately depending on the geographical area and moment in time.

Yes, and here "Canadians want" is used to say "the people within 100km of the St. Lawrence want". (That's actually part of the problem.)

Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.

AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.

Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.

> AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development.

Not only that, but the Feds typically use their outsized tax revenue from Alberta to “invest” in Quebec to buy votes via propping up unviable businesses, subsidies, outsized proportion of public sector jobs, and federal spending in general.

Hey, the little old lie that Québec, which does get an outsized proportion of the political attention, gets an outsized proportion of the federal money, which it doesn’t.

You can find many examples of specific programs where Québec gets the federal government’s money in incredible amounts. But you add all these programs together and you still come up short per person compared to Ontario. Why?

The Southern Ontario car sector.

And tomorrow people in the rich half of AB don't want to subsidize the poorer half, and so on.