Supporters carry boxes of signatures to submit for a separation referendum to Elections Alberta in Edmonton on May 4.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Tyler Dawson is an Edmonton-based editor for The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section. He is the author of The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away.
The moment for voting approaches on the Alberta referendum, and the separatists, having seemingly largely failed to convince a critical mass of Albertans to adopt their millenarian view of the province’s place within Confederation, are now putting an awful lot of weight in an alternate way to make their case – namely, that this is all about leverage.
Leverage, you see, holds a somewhat hallowed position in Alberta’s political culture. For those who see Albertans as beleaguered, beaten down by ravening political elites in Ottawa and Toronto, the idea that the province needs to find leverage to fight back against this is critical.
Just look at Quebec, they’ll say, and the generous terms of the equalization system. It has its own pension plan, it has its own police force, it has some control over its immigration and it’s allowed a system of scandalous institutionalized racism that persists with nary a peep from the political class, something that would be unthinkable anywhere else in the country.
Alberta, the argument goes, must find leverage of its own. Only then will it be able to protect itself from the supposed migrant hordes, defend the sacred oil and gas sector and gain its deserved political and constitutional clout.
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In the past, there have been a few varieties of this line of thinking, including not just finding ways to exert leverage, but ways to protect Alberta from the federal government. The Firewall Letter, penned in 2001 by, among others, future prime minister Stephen Harper, argued that Alberta could protect itself by wresting power from the federal government. This all came to its apex – or perhaps nadir – in the form of the Free Alberta Strategy, partly written by the man who is now Premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff, and its central concept, the Alberta Sovereignty Act. This, in turn, became Alberta legislation, which theoretically allows the province to decline to enforce federal rules and regulations.
Which brings us to the separatists.
Keith Wilson, an Edmonton-area lawyer, is the besuited front man of Let Alberta Decide, a pro-separatism group, and has made the case simply and clearly: “A lot of people assume Option 2 = vote for independence. That’s not how I see it. Option 2 is how Albertans reject the status quo and arm the premier for real negotiations.” Option 2 is the one in Ms. Smith’s double-barrelled referendum question that would compel the government to “commence the legal process” to hold an actual secession referendum.
Jason Stephan, a sitting UCP MLA, has said he voted by mail-in ballot for Option 2 “because I want Ottawa to be compelled to fix the things that are broken, and they will not change things unless they are compelled to do so.”
The idea is that if the Alberta government can go to the federal government with some variety of “well, see here Mr. Carney, we have a huge proportion of Albertans who want to make for the exits, you better hand over some concessions,” then Alberta, the reasoning goes, will secure those concessions. In other words, it’s the Quebec playbook – Quebec having made aborted dashes for la porte in 1980 and 1995.
What those concessions might be – what negotiations anyone’s even talking about – are less clear than the strategy itself. Besides, would the tactic even work? And would such blackmail even be a worthy strategy for a proud province? But more to the point, in this precise moment, is the question of whether or not Mr. Wilson and his fellow travellers are selling Albertans nonsense.
Because of course the vote for Option 2 is not about leverage. As is spelled out quite clearly in the text of the question noted above, it’s about next steps on secession. It is possible that leverage could be secured by means of a vote to move toward a secession question, it’s true, and an astute provincial government might just try to use it. But that’s not what the question is asking at all.
It’s saying: Should we hold another vote to leave?
The leverage pirouette, accordingly, is a potent rhetorical gambit for the separatists. But that’s all it is. A vote for Option 2 is a vote for allowing a largely far-right movement the institutional legitimacy to foist an even more divisive and damaging referendum process upon Albertans. Any assertion to the otherwise is simply dishonest. And nobody should buy it.