>Income from Alberta workers gets taxed and sent to other provinces or citizens living in other provinces via various federal programs. If we were a separate country, all that money would stay in Alberta.

And you'd be incurring lots of new expenses like border controls, national security, etc. The last estimates I saw were that the total equalization payments attributable to Alberta were about a tenth of the cost of federal government services provided to Alberta.

That is to say Albertan taxpayers would be on the hook for an additional 25 billion dollars annually, or so.

>Splitting hairs over the precise "how" doesn't change the fact it's money siphoned out of Alberta to other provinces.

It's not pedantic, you're just factually incorrect. It's money that all Canadians already pay to the government (because it's money from federal income tax). There's no line item in the Alberta budget for "equalization payments".

If we deleted the entire Equalization Program tomorrow, we'd all still be paying the same taxes.