No, people don't purchase their own infrastructure, for example, and they certainly don't do it when unemployment soars to double digits any time a sheikh does a shit in the middle east. I can't express to you enough how embarrassingly poorly planned and unliveable its two major cities are. The road that connects Calgary to Edmonton hasn't changed in my lifetime despite the cities on either side doubling in size.
It has the highest per capita GDP of any province, but GDP is measured in the price of units produced, which Alberta has next to no control over, not strictly productivity. I wouldn't call an endless cycle of booms and busts ''best in class.'' I call it fundamentally flawed, and based on what might actually turn out to be a stranded resource, for which they have nothing to show. When the party's over, everyone's going back to B.C., the Maritimes, Ontario.
Like, I get that you have an ideological commitment to ''I got mine, fuck everyone else'' but I am telling you it leads to places that suck to live in. It's not just social services for poor people. I was having dinner with my girlfriend (who is from Europe), and my good friend and his wife in Edmonton, and he turned to me and said ''...she knows that the rest of Canada isn't...'like this' doesn't she?''