Such classic Ontario advice: Follow the prescribed path without question or deviation.
For anyone that doesn't buy into it, I suggest you head West. People are genuinely shocked at the difference in attitude when they get here. Almost everyone refers to it as Onterrible, for very good reason.
Alberta today is much like Ontario was in the 1960s. It has a relatively young population, it is economically driven by medium industry, is highly suburbanized, and wholly dependent upon cars for even the most basic of transportation.
While this can be a feasible lifestyle in the short term, it is not sustainable in the long term. Ontario started feeling the crunch from its similar lack of sustainability in the 1990s, and is still feeling it today. Alberta will likely run into the same situation in a decade or two.
It will be particularly severe if there's a large-scale movement away from gasoline-fueled vehicles at some point. With fossil fuel energy prices rising, it's becoming more and more likely that this will happen sooner rather than later. While there may be short term gains because of rising petroleum prices, they won't last. The economic harm caused by the province's nearly complete dependence upon its petroleum industry should be quite obvious. We've seen the devastation that even short downturns in the sector have caused in the past, and it's not pretty.
Without inexpensive personal transport, large swaths of Calgary will be nearly uninhabitable due to its high degree of sprawl. Edmonton will only be slightly better off. While a province like Quebec has ample and well-established hydroelectric facilities that would prove essential for a move toward electric vehicles, and dense major cities that pre-date the rise of automobiles, Alberta will not be in such a position.
In general, Alberta has nowhere near the economic, industrial and resource diversity of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. Agriculture and tourism are basically its only other options, and they're nowhere near sufficient to sustain the current way of life there.
Alberta's boom times may be better than those of the other provinces, but its busts have historically been far worse. When the next bust comes, it will likely be particularly painful, and the influx of people to Alberta will quickly reverse itself. Any prolonged downturn lasting more than a few years could very well see those remaining in Alberta revert back toward a mainly agrarian economy. It will be far more like Manitoba than it will be like British Columbia, and I don't think that many Albertans today (and especially ones who arrived more recently) would put up with that.
I'd be very hesitant about putting all of my eggs in the Alberta basket.
You may want to watch your terminology in the future. In central and eastern Canada, the term "West" exclusively means Alberta (although Saskatchewan is now sometimes included, too, due to its recent Alberta-like petroleum boom).
British Columbia, while geographically more to the west than Alberta, is typically just called "British Columbia". The Yukon is not considered to be "West", either. It's referred to as "up north" or "the territories".
It's funny you would give me a lecture about the terminology used for the place I live in.
What I'm saying is, if you want a life that isn't so rigid and formal and prone to the kind of reactions you've given me, head out to BC/Yukon. You'll be shocked, impressed and you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
I'm not lecturing you about anything. I'm merely telling you how the terminology you used is very ambiguous. Now, that may not be the case in the specific village that you may be from. But in general, when you're east of Manitoba, the term "West" specifically refers to Alberta, and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan. It does not refer to British Columbia, which, as I indicated earlier, is referred to as "British Columbia" or "B.C.".
For anyone that doesn't buy into it, I suggest you head West. People are genuinely shocked at the difference in attitude when they get here. Almost everyone refers to it as Onterrible, for very good reason.