Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark!” This pithy phrase, coined for a bumper sticker by an enterprising Albertan in the early 1980s, crystallized public opinion in the province. It’s often falsely attributed to then-Calgary mayor (later Premier) Ralph Klein, who during his tenure memorably referred to “Eastern creeps and bums” when it turned out that a rise in city crime was due to, well, Easterners of a certain disposition and character. Around the same time, the Alberta Treasury Branches ran radio ads boasting that, if you opened an account with them, the money would “stay in Alberta.”
Quite the bracing experience for a young Montrealer away from home for the first time. But the money was good, and it was only for four months, right? Forty-plus years later, as a “born-again Albertan”, there’s much to reflect on. While in many ways Calgary and Alberta are unrecognizable compared to the early 1980s, the bubbling anger of that time has resurfaced, perhaps more profoundly than ever. The hundreds of thousands of Albertans transplanted from central Canada have experienced the obvious disparities in how different regions are treated. We understand central Canada, infuriating as it may be, and love the West on its own terms. We share the West’s current discontent and can help explain it.
Undeservedly-Rich Neanderthal Hillbillies
Central Canadian ignorance regarding the West is indeed vast. My own was a veritable Marianas Trench of stupidity. Why were Calgary’s main thoroughfares called “Trails”, why did chips get crispier when you left the bag open and why did it snow literally any month of the year? That kind of thing.
And where were all the signs? In Quebec, around the time of its first Referendum on separating from Canada, there were forests of big signs, around local hockey rinks, public parks, etc. Big blue signs in French read, “Your provincial government invests $250,000 on Grand Poutine Swimming Pool!” Even bigger red signs proclaimed, “Your federal government invests $450,000 in Cabane au Sucre park!” Alberta had no such signs. Or poutine. I eventually realized the money pouring into Quebec infrastructure was coming from somewhere. Hmmm, where might that be?
Adjusting to the eye-popping sunshine and postcard scenery, Eastern transplants discovered Alberta and the West as it was. For Quebeckers, used to a constant nationalist drumbeat, political strife and real terrorism, Western life was transformative. A beautiful calm, like stopping beating your head against the wall.
Calgary, at just under 600,000 inhabitants in 1980, was about one-fifth the size of Montreal. Its population was disproportionately young and highly educated; the oil and natural gas industry required unique skills. The mix of people – locals who’d survived Depression and Dustbowl, job-seekers from across the Prairies, Eastern transplants, Americans on work assignments, Europeans who filled key industry skill gaps, an increasing number of new Canadians – was energizing. Many self-selected by leaving home to find opportunity, creating an unusually enterprising, forward-looking citizenry. The absence of burdensome convention, bureaucracy and corruption, the lack of “this is how we’ve always done it,” was liberating.
Connection to the land, agriculture and the Indigenous presence was also greater than back East. The lay of the land reinforced the spirit of the population – limitless sky and horizon, broad vistas of the plains, foothills and forbidding Cordillera – all suggested that opportunity and achievement were limited only by one’s energy and imagination. It also fed a, if not classically conservative, at least free-market politics in the region and resentment of the arbitrary shackles of government. To newcomers, Albertans seemed practical, down-to-earth and welcoming – OK, unless you were a creep or bum. A place someone with few prospects back home could not only find a job but build a life. There’s a song by an Alberta rock band that delves into this, “All Hell for a Basement”.
Alberta and the Prairie provinces more broadly were a palpably “high trust” society – Calgarians leaving their houses unlocked into the early 1970s was no urban legend. Its echoes persist today. These various elements combined into what was later dubbed the “Alberta Advantage”. Far more than merely the lower taxes and other pro-business government policies to which this term is usually attached, it was Alberta’s rich social capital, with a younger, more dynamic population, and a hard-to-define but unmistakeable common “spirit”, that catalyzed opportunity and economic development.
Little if any of this was known beyond the region, so that a widening gap grew between this real West and central Canadians’ perceptions. Alberta’s economic clout after the 1973 Arab oil embargo was initially viewed with distant bemusement. Before the critical discovery of oil at Leduc (just south of Edmonton) in 1947, the region had been rural and agricultural. Besides the vagaries of weather and commodity prices, Westerners suffered at the whims of Eastern politicians, protectionist trade policies and the bankers of Montreal’s St. James Street, then Canada’s financial nexus.
Less than a decade after Leduc, gushing royalties and taxes from the thousands of oil and natural gas wells being drilled all over Alberta funded almost half the provincial government’s expenditures. The OPEC cartel’s actions then saw global oil prices more than triple to $12 per barrel (equivalent to almost $90 today), with Alberta’s royalties rising proportionately and reaching 60 percent of total provincial revenue in 1980. Central Canadian bemusement became envy and resentment. Yeah, so Alberta now had easy money. Weren’t they just “sitting on” all these resources that they just “dug up”?
This is what might be called the “Beverly Hillbillies” view of Alberta, after the eponymous Sixties sitcom. Albertans, while out hunting squirrels, could just shoot into the ground and up would come the bubblin’ crude. Of course, anyone who’s actually explored for or developed hydrocarbons will know that interpreting subtle seismic readings from 5,000 metres down, or landing a 3,000-metre horizontal wellbore in a 5-metre zone, isn’t like shooting squirrels. It’s a mix of hard science, vision and grit, capital-intensive and high-risk. The technical challenges are greater than, say, damming a river to generate electricity. After all, beavers build dams.
Here were the core activists of an upstart, populist party – all Westerners – rejoicing at the prospect of positively affecting their country, while a group of Québécois sat ambivalent or even contemptuous at the singing of Canada’s national anthem.
Still, their narrative of the West gelled in the minds of the Laurentians: a resource-rich hinterland of uncouth, increasingly uppity locals of which we know little and care less. How different from the story of another resource-endowed region – a contrast which helps explain Alberta’s current predicament.
The Quebec Model
Between April 5th and 7th, 1991 the Reform Party of Canada held a convention in Saskatoon. It was on the media’s radar by then; two years after its 1987 founding, Reform had elected its first MP, Deborah Grey, and Stan Waters had won Alberta’s first Senate election. Now, the major issue under consideration was whether the party should become truly national, running candidates right across Canada. Debate on the resolution was, if not heated, certainly spirited, but the resolution passed. The hall immediately rang with the strains of O Canada as the crowd rose to its feet and burst into song.
But not everyone. At the end of one table, the francophone journalists from Radio-Canada and sister networks were conspicuously sitting silent. In all likelihood, they’d have stood for the Uzbek anthem out of simple courtesy and frankly, they didn’t need to sing, just stand. Mais non merci. Here were the core activists of an upstart, populist party – all Westerners – rejoicing at the prospect of positively affecting their country, while a group of Québécois sat ambivalent or even contemptuous at the singing of their national anthem.
Such Quebec “distinctiveness” has bewildered, bewitched and often enraged Canadians for decades. Its chosen path in the constitutional, economic and social realms being, let’s say, markedly different from Western Canada’s.
Quebec is confident and comfortable with its entirely self-serving approach to Confederation, rarely deviating from the long-term goal of increased power. On the 150th anniversary of Confederation, the province produced a 200-page document describing its “way of being Canadian”, noteworthy for a couple of reasons. First, it was written by the ostensibly federalist government of Premier Phillippe Couillard, meaning its content is about as amenable to Canada as anything Quebec is likely to produce. Second, it lays out precisely under what conditions Quebec would “participate” in Canada.
These are instructive, if blunt and breathtakingly presumptuous. The “equality” between the two levels of government and the associated division of powers would have to be respected. Quebec would retain “fiscal autonomy”. Maintaining its “equality” within the federation would require “asymmetry” of policies, with Quebec cooperating (only) while upholding its interests. Quebec would conduct its own international relations to protect its jurisdictional independence.
But Quebec’s aspirations extend beyond provincial interests. It also announced it would use federal institutions to promote its “vision of Canada” and seek to “extend the Canadian Francophone space” (while, incidentally, eliminating Quebec’s “Anglophone space”). Intending to continue “leadership in Canada”, Quebec would exercise its responsibilities “without interference” and remain “free to make its own choices and…assume its own identity.” The rest of us would have no choice in the matter, as Canadians were called upon to “duly recognize” Quebec’s “affirmation” of its “strong national identity” and ensure that Quebeckers “see themselves better reflected in Canada.” Was any of this in the pre-nup?
These goals have been advanced through both constitutional and extra-constitutional means, namely Quebec separatism. They’ve worked in parallel since the 1960s, almost as “Plan A/Plan B” scenarios, with the separatist threat – including two unsuccessful referenda, the first in 1980, lost decisively, the second in 1995, which came within a whisker – providing leverage to extract concessions from Ottawa.
Quebec’s constitutional wranglings preoccupied and at times paralyzed the country for decades, from Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Victoria Conference (1971) to Meech Lake (1987) and the Charlottetown Accord (1992). The latter two were Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s attempt to bring Quebec “into the constitutional family” after Quebec Premier René Lévesque balked at signing Trudeau’s “patriated” constitution in 1982. Constitutional agreement or not, the federal government has continued to yield to Quebec’s demands.
The feds tend to view concessions as situational or even enduring, while separatists merely regard each additional power as yet another step toward inevitable separation. Quebec in this way has deftly accumulated special accommodations. The province receives a minimum number of seats in the House of Commons, regardless of its population growing more slowly, while massive imbalances favouring Quebec and other eastern provinces persist in the unelected Senate. Quebec’s government has argued these preferences must be maintained whatever future population shifts occur. Quebec is similarly granted three justices on the Supreme Court of Canada, greatly disproportionate to its share of Canada’s population (22 percent and dropping). The corporate headquarters of both CN Rail and Air Canada are required to be in Montreal even though both organizations do the vast majority of their business outside Quebec.
Special treatment and carve-outs for Quebec exist in myriad areas, notably immigration. In 1991 the feds granted the province exclusive choice in immigrants and refugees, plus an initial handout of $755 million (2025 dollars) for “integration of newcomers”. Ottawa has continued to lavish disproportionate benefits on Quebec with, for example, 56 percent of federal immigrant language training dollars in fiscal 2007, despite the province only welcoming 16.5 percent of newcomers. Nice deal.
Given Quebec’s goal to advance its “vision of Canada”, how does it run its own affairs? That la belle Province has a, shall we say, “ethically challenged” political culture is no secret. Even the golden Centennial year, 1967 (much enhanced by 60 years of rosy memory) was tainted. That is literally tainted: diseased or already dead and putrifying animals had been secretly turned into burgers, hot dogs and pizza ingredients for the tens of thousands of Canadian and foreign tourists who flocked to Montreal’s Expo ’67.
The “tainted meat scandal” erupted only in 1975, just one year before the city was to host the 1976 Summer Olympic Games, but the lingering odour was soon overpowered by the breathtakingly corrupt misspending for the coming games. Quebec taxpayers were stuck with a gargantuan bill not paid off until 30 years later. All for a half-built Olympic stadium that began falling apart before it was finished. Then there was the long-running Sponsorship Scandal, which brought down the Paul Martin government in 2004. More recently, the Charbonneau Commission discovered – wait for it – corruption in the Quebec construction industry. There was even suspicion of a “link between political financing and awarding of contracts.” Shocking.
Other aspects of Quebec’s “distinctiveness” include its approach to the economy; dirigisme is, after all, a French word. The public sector is 24 percent of total employment, several points higher than the Canadian average and 20 percent more than Alberta’s. Generous government programs abound, notably Quebec’s famous “$10/day daycare” and bargain-basement university tuition, frozen for the better part of 40 years.
Quebec also indulges its green sensibilities by blocking national energy corridors and not developing its substantial unconventional natural gas reservoirs. Similar shale reservoirs generate vast amounts of production and wealth in nearby Ohio and Pennsylvania and could supply the province or foreign markets for decades.
Meanwhile the province doggedly persists in extirpating the English language from the public square, with the recent Bill 96 now micro-managing even the lettering on retail packaging and signage. Previous discrimination and bullying cued the exodus of some 600,000 Anglo-Quebeckers, which the provincial immigration deal replaced with francophone immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. An energetic subset of these are now publicly “engaged” on the issue of Gaza and “Palestine”, with Montreal hosting numerous, often violent protests since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas pogrom.
Quebec’s transformation into a proud linguistic monoculture and distinctly second-tier economy over the last six decades was done consciously and deliberately. As fascinating as this social experiment is, it’s all underwritten by massive subsidies from other provinces, one in particular.
Grievances, Schmievances
“The West Wants In.” This slogan summed up the Reform Party’s political program: changing Canada’s political and constitutional structure to give the West its rightful place in Confederation. The opposite of separatism. Despite this explicitly positive, federalist statement, the media frequently sought to out Reform leader Preston Manning as a crypto-separatist. His response: “I don’t support secession, but if the West were separate, I wouldn’t advocate joining.” Touché.
Reform was a reaction to central Canada’s sudden interest in the West, or at least its perception of a windfall of loose cash floating around the region. Ballooning energy prices caused by the aforementioned Arab oil embargo brought the Trudeau Liberals’ West-crushing policy centrepiece, the National Energy Program, or NEP. Its sheer stupid rapacity has come to symbolize all the misguided federal policies directed at the region; its mention today can still trigger instant anger among those who lived through it.
Trudeau’s so-called “made-in-Canada” oil price, which actually meant government-mandated below-market costs for Eastern Canada at Alberta’s (and Saskatchewan’s) expense, plus numerous other statist interventions, combined with an inevitable oil price drop and recession to devastate the region. From its peak of around 60 percent in 1981, the percentage of provincial government revenue coming from oil and natural gas fell to just over 20 percent by mid-decade. Unemployment rose from about 3.5 percent in 1981 to over 11 percent in 1983. With rising interest rates and unemployment, tens of thousands lost their homes and businesses, while for hundreds of thousands more, the 80s became a lost decade even as Ontario (and the U.S.) boomed.
Robert Mansell, a University of Calgary economist, documented the vast transfers Alberta had sent to other provinces, mainly Quebec. Mansell’s latest work places the total amount at $611 billion in net transfers from 1961 to 2017, and $180 billion just in the 2010s.
The West’s initial political response was to elect 54 MPs into the caucus of Mulroney’s massive majority government in 1984. But the PCs’ glacial approach to reducing the huge debts accumulated by Trudeau (the largest peacetime per capita increase in Canadian history), their drawn-out unwinding of the National Energy Program and Mulroney’s relentless prioritization of Quebec soon soured Western opinion.
The PCs then enraged Westerners by awarding a giant fighter-jet servicing contract to Montreal’s Canadair in 1986, despite federal bureaucrats deeming Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg’s bid as cheaper and technically superior. Believe it or not, Manitoba had been a substantial aerospace centre. Now the small province was $4.1 billion (in today’s dollars) poorer and the West was stiffed again. The Reform Party was founded the following year – in Winnipeg.
Fiscal imbalances in the federation were also becoming clearer, explaining the public signage conundrum mentioned above. Robert Mansell, a University of Calgary economist, documented the vast transfers Alberta since the early 1960s had sent to other provinces, mainly Quebec. Mansell’s latest work places the total amount at $611 billion in net transfers from 1961 to 2017, and $180 billion just in the 2010s.
Despite its explicitly federalist approach, Reform was almost uniformly scorned by the central Canadian establishment (for more on that, see this C2C essay). Its members were portrayed by turns as too old, too white or too religious, and its leadership as unwashed rubes. Early on, Manning and his Chief Policy Officer, Stephen Harper, did the obligatory round of editorial board meetings in Toronto. A senior editor of a major financial publication later described the meeting to me this way: “I really expected them to show up with bits of straw sticking out of their hair, but they turned out to be quite intelligent and competent.”
With Reform’s success came Jean Chrétien’s majority government, which seemed to prove an axiom of Canadian politics: that the Liberals didn’t need Alberta to win. This had been summed up by Toronto native and longtime Liberal campaign organizer (later Senator) Keith Davey, who famously described the party’s strategy this way: “Screw the West, we’ll take the rest.” Not to be outdone, Toronto-born Liberal Ontario campaign chair (later Senator) David Smith gave this assessment of Canada’s regions: “Ontario is the least parochial part of the country. Ontarians don’t think in regional terms, they think in national terms.” Canada is Toronto, and thank God for that.
Alberta did grind its way through that lost decade, began to prosper again in the 90s and by the turn of the millennium was positively booming. But this was hardly a cause for joy in Laurentian Canada. Speaking to an Edmonton business audience in 2001, Chrétien mused that Alberta’s “fabulous wealth [was] making life difficult for other provinces” and that the province which nobody had helped in its hour of need could perhaps “spread its wealth across Canada.” This followed Chrétien’s juicier comments during the 2000 election campaign when he made clear his regional preferences. “I like to do politics with people from the East,” he said. “Joe Clark and Stockwell Day are from Alberta. They are a different type.” He added, “I’m joking,” (cue laughter), then, “I’m serious.” If Chrétien was familiar with Mansell’s numbers, they didn’t shake his bias.
More recently, the Globe and Mail criticized Alberta’s United Conservative Party Premier, Jason Kenney, for even mentioning Alberta’s huge equalization payments, saying that this fomented resentment and fuelled “talk of separation”. Barry McKenna speculated that what many Albertans really wanted was “the unfettered right to build pipelines and get the province’s oil and gas to global markets.” No kidding; but that’s not allowed either. In other news, the Globe recently learned that there are NHL teams outside of Toronto.
Predictably, Justin Trudeau further contributed to national unity by channeling Chrétien. After his election as Liberal leader in 2012 he observed that, “Canada is struggling right now because Albertans are controlling the…social democratic agenda.” By which he apparently meant Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had had the temerity to win a majority the year before. Asked whether Canada would be better off with more Quebecers in power than Albertans, Trudeau replied: “I’m a Liberal, so of course I think so.” It’s interesting that Trudeau didn’t say, “I’m a Quebecker, so…” but perhaps that’s just implicit – being a Liberal means identifying with Quebec first.
One can only marvel at such multi-generational consistency, from Trudeau Sr. asking farmers in Winnipeg, “Why should I sell your wheat?” to Chrétien and Trudeau Jr., the latter sacrificing Alberta’s economic development to an international environmentalist agenda. So far there’s little sign the Carney government will back away from, let alone abandon this.
In response to this relentless onslaught spanning over half a century, Albertans have continued to search for solutions. In the Chrétien era there was the 2001 “Firewall” Letter, signed by Harper and academics from the “Calgary School”. The open letter called upon Premier Klein to more vigorously protect Alberta against Ottawa’s encroachments by pulling out of the Canada Pension Plan, setting up a provincial police force and pursuing an independent health care policy, among several other recommendations. Then under Justin Trudeau there was Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel and the Free Alberta Strategy. All sought ways to unshackle Alberta from the arbitrary whims of the federal government.
Current Premier Danielle Smith passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in late 2022 to defend Alberta’s constitutional jurisdiction and push back against unconstitutional federal laws – and invoked the act the following year to counter Ottawa’s so-called “clean electricity” regulations. Recently Smith’s government launched the Alberta Next initiative, with similar objectives. Smith kicked things off by summarizing the multiple Liberal laws and policies crippling Alberta’s economy which she says have led to $500 billion in lost investment capital over the last 10 years. Add that to the outflow of funds tracked by Mansell and you have $1.1 trillion in economic punishment meted upon one province.
There’s no doubt the Laurentian Elite view Quebec’s possible separation as an existential threat. The West’s concerns are mere irritants or ‘grievances’. This is obvious in reactions to the current Alberta secession question. One response disputes that Ottawa has mistreated the West at all.
The enduring theme is that, for over 60 years, one federal party has imposed central Canadian politics on the entire country. A policy inimical to and specifically designed to smother the political culture, economy and growth of the West. The question facing Albertans, and Westerners more broadly, is whether they will tolerate this any longer.
Secession if Necessary but not Necessarily Secession
Will Albertans soon witness a massive, spontaneous unity rally? Or perhaps a mighty pan-Canadian caravan converging on Calgary or Edmonton? With the real likelihood of an Alberta sovereignty or separation referendum in the next couple of years, one might wonder.
After all, that’s what happened on October 27, 1995, when Quebeckers looked like they were about to vote to leave Canada. Thousands of Canadians flocked to Montreal’s Place du Canada in what became known as the “Great Love-in”. Ostensible Westerner and former PC Prime Minister Joe Clark cranked out a book exhorting Canadians to “get in your cars and drive to Quebec” to share the love and convince Quebeckers to stay.
There’s no doubt the Laurentian Elite view Quebec’s possible separation as an existential threat. The West’s concerns are mere irritants or “grievances”. This is obvious in reactions to the current Alberta secession question. One response disputes that Ottawa has mistreated the West at all. According to this argument, Alberta is “soaked in self-deception” and consumed by “dangerous myths” of a malign federal government. In reality, the ever-benevolent feds kickstarted the oil sands and furthered resource development.
The always-reliable Globe and Mail contends that this is an “Alberta problem”, that Smith should avoid placating local separatists and rather than “a clenched fist” extend a hand of cooperation to Ottawa. Veteran columnist Andrew Coyne similarly views those pondering secession as “a minority of malcontents in the richest province in the most blessed country on Earth,” ingrates “marinated in self-pity.” Smith, Coyne argues, is “odious” for using “that same minority of malcontents as a weapon to extract concessions from the rest of Canada.”
Good point! What province would ever employ threats to extract concessions from Ottawa? Coyne concludes that Canada is only responsible for Alberta secessionism in so far as Canadians have a “long history of indulging the pernicious idea that [separation] is a legitimate response to [complaints] of ill treatment, real or imagined.” This thinking culminates, or perhaps bottoms out, in the Toronto Star’s David Olive calling for Alberta to separate, citing our “incurable sense of grievance” and the “self-involved parochialism of [its] current political class and its followers.” No love-in here; but perhaps as a favour, Olive could lay out how Albertans might engineer their exit.
Elected scoffers like Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet maintain that Alberta’s complaints are mundanely economic, not part of a “national project” like Quebec. “I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture,” he recently sneered. As if decades of lost livelihoods and unrealized potential, of losing your home over a “few points” of raised interest rates, were trivial. And this while other regions are subsidized, none more than Blanchet’s.
This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of similar central Canadian opinion, so the probability that Alberta’s aspirations will be applauded on the banks of the mighty St. Lawrence is vanishingly small. Former Alberta finance minister Ted Morton, no advocate of separation, judges the West’s past efforts at institutional reform to have largely failed and the likelihood of success today to be even lower than when he signed the Firewall Letter in 2001.
By contrast, Ontario law professor Bruce Pardy supports separation. He echoes Manning by imagining an “alternate universe” where Alberta, already independent, understandably balks at joining a dysfunctional Canada. In Pardy’s view, provinces will know they have the upper hand when Ottawa comes to them with reform proposals. That’s of course what happened with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords. Pardy observes that, by contrast, “Alberta and the West have tried numerous times, over a long period of time, to introduce changes into the way we are organized…and every single time, the powers that be in central Canada have shown zero interest. So there’s no particular reason to think that that would change now.”
Setting aside economics, federal-provincial wrangling and verbal jousting with pundits, what patriotic ties are Albertans and Westerners to draw upon? What grand, unifying vision are Ottawa or the federal Liberals offering? Fortunately, they have been clear about this. The country was formed in a criminal act of imperialist theft which involved routinely genocidal acts against its original inhabitants. Canada’s founders, including our first Prime Minister, were largely reprehensible, and monuments to them must be removed or ideologically sanitized. It causes one to wonder, just what are “malcontented” Western separatists actually betraying?
Yet despite dating from such a heinous historical period, our 19th century federal institutions are absolutely fit for purpose today. We strive toward diversity and tolerance, welcoming millions of newcomers to our shores, but remain systemically racist, as stated by our former Prime Minister. We are either a post-national state and/or the most European of non-Europeans, as the case may be. While it would likely be better for Canada never to have been founded, we are still better than the Americans, especially whenever there’s a Republican in the White House. In that case, we must rise up to defend our sinful institutions and ill-begotten way of life. Surely Westerners will find this mix of economic entrapment and inverted jingoism plain irresistible.
All indications are that attitudes aren’t changing. The federal government is reportedly making legal preparations to combat Alberta secessionism. While the constitutional status of First Nations is progressively reevaluated and expanded, with many asserting an “Indigenous veto”, it’s out of the question for the West. Development of the West’s resources and economy will depend on the “national interest ” (as it previously depended on “social licence”) and subject to veto by – wait for it – Quebec.
That province, as per its 2017 document, must be “affirmed” and will “exercise leadership in Canada.” Former Quebec Premier Jean Charest added, “We need to always work toward building this country…Canada and its unity is not something that is set in stone forever, or that is solved.” Except of course for Alberta and the West, whose “leadership” is not considered, let alone welcomed, and whose subordinate place is frozen in perpetuity.
Changing Complexion, Enduring Spirit
Some time ago, columnist David Frum wrote that his entire life – then about 40 years – had seen Canada paralyzed by squabbling over Quebec and, further, he wished that his children be spared the same quagmire. Reed Scowen, a Quebec businessman and longtime member of the provincial (“national”) assembly, went further. His book, Time to say Goodbye (1999), advocated Canada separating from Quebec.
Given that “The West Wants In” was clearly less successful than “Quebec Wants Out,” will Alberta and others follow La Belle Province’s example? Several factors will influence this. On the side of division, to paraphrase former Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Canada now has both too much history and too much geography. All evidence points to the Laurentians doubling down on their errors of the last 60 years. It’s hard to imagine any event short of a near-death experience dislodging them from this mindset. Ironically, everything suggests that accommodating Alberta would actually help Canada and Canadian unity, whereas the same cannot be said for appeasing Quebec.
The West’s position remains unchanged. Many feared that importing “Eastern creeps and bums” would gradually dilute the regional polity, rouge-ing the region and turning Alberta into a Laurentian branch plant. This has not happened, despite Alberta’s population doubling in recent decades. Albertans as a whole certainly look different than when I arrived over 40 years ago, but relatively few are immune to the Alberta spirit. Newcomers seem much more inclined to “get” Western realities and understand that our “grievances” are real, not imagined. The geographic reality of living 1,000 miles west of the Lakehead, the West’s divergent economic interests and the Laurentians’ unwillingness to tolerate alternatives to their worldview will likely increase division and fuel secession.
It’s worth repeating that recent polling shows an overwhelming 90-10 provincial consensus that new energy pipelines are critical. Other polling suggests at least half of Albertans want Smith’s government to prepare a plan for exiting Canada should our reasonable demands again be rebuffed. Over one-third would separate right now. And if Easterners think separatists are just old, white, cranky males, there simply aren’t enough of us around to generate numbers like that.
Perhaps, somewhere in the multi-verse is a Canada that values the unique contribution of the West. We already have an Ontario – why have eight more? A Canada where provinces manage their finances, where Alberta is free to be the country’s economic engine and ‘what’s good for Alberta is good for Canada.’
The most recent demographic analysis of polling data showed that separatist sentiment amongst new Canadians and young people is significant. Almost a quarter of “non-whites” supported separation, while only Gen Z’s support for secession is below 30 percent (at 21 percent). Among Gen X, one-third are for getting out. More recent data place support for forming a country out of everyone west of Kenora even higher, at 35 percent.
Mitigating Alberta separatism is the residual niceness of the people here. Despite decades of open contempt and real economic damage from Ottawa, we keep coming back to the table. A mere “change in tone” from Liberal ministers is enough to spark hope among many that, maybe, this time will be different. Fortunately for Laurentian Canada, many Westerners remain unaware that the seemingly arbitrary federal edicts beating them down are no accident. A policy-generating Mordor in the dark towers of Gatineau was built for that express purpose.
That said, Premier Smith and federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre know this and have stated clearly that the status quo must end. Smith has already hinted that there are multiple avenues for change short of separation.
Perhaps, somewhere in the multi-verse is a Canada that values the unique contribution of the West. We already have an Ontario – why have eight more? A Canada where provinces manage their finances without equalization payments and appreciate what they do receive. Where provinces are incubators of new ideas and laboratories for different policies. Where Alberta is free to be the country’s economic engine and “what’s good for Alberta is good for Canada,” as even Chrétien once said. A Canadian economy where critical infrastructure and landmark projects proceed on their merits, built rapidly and enthusiastically.
Sadly, the odds of us being in that timeline are small. The next couple of years could be very rough.
John Weissenberger, a native of Montreal, is a Calgary geologist who has worked in industry as well as the federal and provincial public sectors.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
