A lone pumpjack standing on rolling farmland near Longview, Alberta, is seen against a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.Amber Bracken/The New York Times
Stephen Marche’s latest book is On Writing and Failure.
If you want to make me angry, call me an Ontarian. Though I have lived in Toronto, off and on, for nearly 30 years, I remain an Albertan, an Albertan who doesn’t live there but an Albertan nonetheless. The next prime minister of Canada, whether it’s Chrystia Freeland or Mark Carney, will share my quasi-identity, which possesses not even a name: an ex-prov? A halfbertan?
The politics of Albertan identity can be confounding. Whichever candidate wins the Liberal leadership, he or she will not, almost certainly, receive the support of their home province, and it’s easy to forget how peculiar that inevitable rejection will be. In the United States, politicians, no matter where they happen to live – Washington, New York – or where they happen to be from – Minnesota, California, Arkansas – can expect approval from the residents of their home states on the strength of local association alone. Whatever you think of their policy ideas, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney are impressive individuals. Anywhere in the world ought to be proud to have produced them. Not Alberta.
The West never takes pride in its own, at least not if they’ve moved away. Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton. I didn’t discover that until I was 40. The most important cultural critic of the second half of the 20th century came from the West. Nobody in the West seemed to care or even to notice.
When the plane hits some turbulence, you’re maybe going to want a pilot to fly it
For both Ms. Freeland and Mr. Carney, the connection to the province is more than a matter of political convenience, too. Chrystia Freeland attended the same high school I did, Old Scona in Edmonton; as the daughter of a farmer, she has cleared land in the Peace River Valley, like a pioneer, like the people you read about in books. Mark Carney comes from Fort Smith, which is on the border with the Northwest Territories, so the true North. Alberta is their home, despite or maybe because they have lived such cosmopolitan lives, in the very centres of the political, financial and media world powers.
Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, once wrote that, “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” It is one of those superb literary lines that sounds great but turns out, on closer inspection, to be bunk. Home, to me, is where you escape from and then escape to and then escape from again. I have gone back to Alberta at least once a year, my entire life, and when I drive onto the prairie, that unique combination of green and gold on the fields, the sky where a storm and a rainbow and a sunset can manifest at the same time, it relaxes a peculiar muscle between my shoulders blades. That’s what home feels like to me.
But I spend my time in Alberta, almost exclusively, in Canmore, a town which does not represent ordinary existence in Alberta, or indeed anywhere else. Canmore is a flake fallen from the wintry corner of paradise, a flake that has drifted and landed between the Bow Valley, Kananaskis Country and the Rockies – more natural splendour than any place deserves. The real Albertans, the people building the province, I am well aware, are not the ones flying in to frolic in the wilderness, but the ones plugging their cars in at work and feeling the snot in their nose freeze in the time it takes to cross the street. In Ontario, I call myself an Albertan. In Alberta, I say that I live in Toronto.
That doubleness is not merely affectation on my part. My Albertanness has had real consequences on my life. I remember, early in my time in Toronto, an editor asked me: “So you’re from Alberta? That’s the westernmost province, right?” The ignorance was jarring but nobody knowing where you’re from can actually be an advantage. They cannot pigeonhole you, and they don’t know what you’re capable of. The origin of your perspective is camouflaged. People do not believe it when I tell them that, despite having lived in Brooklyn and Toronto, the suburban neighbourhood I grew up in Edmonton was the most multicultural place I have ever lived; the most diverse, the most open, the most integrated.
The sense of foreignness I have always felt in Ontario comes from the fact that I was raised in a place dedicated to openness. To this day, I find the elaborate Laurentian codes confusing. I will have meetings when I will realize three or four days later what they were saying. What I most love about Albertans can be condensed into a single phrase: They say what they mean. That’s why my back relaxes when I rejoin the prairie. Frankness and clarity are huge advantages that Mr. Carney and Ms. Freeland have carried with them to impressive places.
The candidate running from herself to get away from Trudeau
Albertans are permitted to be ambitious; they’re not embarrassed about it. That, too, is a marvellous difference. Much has been written about the productivity crisis in Canada, and whether its causes are underinvestment or tax structures or interprovincial trade barriers. The answer is cultural, which is why nobody’s willing to face it. Laurentian Canada possesses a deep loathing for ambition. Oh, they’ll have panels about how they need to innovate, to celebrate talent, but if actual talent wants to do something new, an inner revulsion manifests itself; they instinctively turn away from it like a rotten fish head on the street. We invented AI and handed it over, more or less for free, to a bunch of Californians while civil servants blathered endlessly about regulating a phenomenon they could not even faintly comprehend. Their instinct was, as it always is, to clamp down.
Northrop Frye once wrote that a Canadian is an American who rejects the revolution. An Albertan is a Canadian who rejects the garrison mentality and the family compact, the closed social structures that give Canadian life its often cloying coziness. “This Western life’s no paradise,” Stan Rogers sang in The Idiot, “but it’s better than lying down.” When I was going to university in Nova Scotia, I used to fly direct from Edmonton to Halifax, alongside the Cape Bretoners returning from the oil sands, literally with dirt on their hands. They were drunk as lords before they got on the flight, well earned from months of brutal physical labour and the loneliness of Fort McMurray. I didn’t see them past Halifax, but a Cape Breton buddy of mine told me he would see them all when they arrived at a Glace Bay bar, The Main Event, to thrash out, amongst one another, who had slept with whose wife while they were away working.
Traffic travels along the Trans Canada Highway past Mount Rundle of the Rocky Mountains near Canmore, Alberta.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
These, to me, are the Albertans: They will not stay in their cozy little villages, being nice and taking what they’re given. They want to build their own lives, at whatever cost. My parents, when they moved to Alberta from Ottawa, slept in a tent for the first couple of weeks. My mother can remember the sour smell of gas from the refineries when they woke up those mornings. Alberta gave them the opportunity to build, out of a tent, a middle-class life, complete with an effete, overeducated writer for a son.
With that self-fashioning comes pride. The pride, that pride in independence, has a political dimension. My father’s hero was Peter Lougheed, the premier of Alberta when I was born, and a highly forward-thinking, Alberta-first leader. No matter what anyone says or how anyone votes, Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland are the children of the late Mr. Lougheed. They are the Albertans that he imagined emerging from his province: Educated, common-sensical, ambitious, comfortable everywhere, intimidated by no one, world-beaters, “leaders” in the way that only an Albertan father in the 1970s could roll that word off his tongue. Their guaranteed rejection by their home province is a kind of contradiction to the frankness and ambition that Alberta embodies: It is as though, in overcoming the family compact and the garrison mentality, Alberta has had to double down on them. Be ambitious. Be frank about it. But if your ambitions take you elsewhere, you’re not one of them.
It’s easy to say that Ms. Freeland and Mr. Carney are Liberals, and Alberta is Conservative. But Pierre Poilievre, another Albertan-outside-Alberta, faces a similar doubleness. Last year, David Parker, once one of Premier Danielle Smith’s most important allies, directed quite vile, sexually explicit insults at Mr. Poilievre, his wife and his chief party strategist – not exactly how you treat a beloved son. Ms. Smith and Mr. Poilievre are also, more seriously, out of step on the most consequential political issue of the moment: how to deal with the threat of American tariffs. Mr. Poilievre knows that the explicitly nationalist conservatism of Ontario Premier Doug Ford is in direct conflict with Ms. Smith’s unique “cave to bullying and hope the bullying goes away” strategy. Meanwhile, the federal Conservative Party is seeing declining support, with the decline as high as 10 points in some polls, since Mr. Trump’s election. The political question Mr. Poilievre faces is an internal one, to himself and to his party: Can he bridge his Albertanness with his out-of-Albertanness?
Alberta is hard country, naturally resistant to sentimentality. It’s the place you break with attachments to make your own life; that’s the whole point. That lack of sentimentality is probably true of the Prairies as a whole. I remember once, in Winnipeg, I had to interview an immigration lawyer for a story about refugees, and he took me to an all-you-can-eat place, which happened to be full of West African families in traditional clothing, long flowing robes in vivid yellows and deep maroons and bright blues. The lawyer explained to me that families would show up in the afternoon, have a late lunch, drink coffee afterward for an hour or so, and then take an early dinner, getting two meals for the price of one. A brilliant plan. I felt I was witnessing my own ancestors: They, too, had exchanged villages halfway across the world for complete foreignness and brutal cold in search of an independent life and cheap calories. They reminded me of a line from the novel, Tay John, by Howard O’Hagan, still the best novel written about Alberta: “Your Westerner is not only the man born here, blind, unknowing, dropped by his mother upon the ground, but also one who came with his eyes open, passing other lands upon the way – give us new earth, we cry; new places, that we may see our shadows shaped in forms that man has never seen before.” Though my family’s first arrival in the West was by my great-grandfather, the immigrants in that restaurant were more Western than I. They were living it. The West’s identity belongs to those who live it. Which is beautiful.
In a sense it is exactly that kind of immediacy and unconcern with history that I cherish. The place where nobody matters more than another – that is my home; its mythlessness is its glorious myth. I cannot speak for Mr. Carney or Ms. Freeland or Mr. Poilievre, but I imagine they inhabit the same contradiction, nostalgic for a place free of nostalgia. The Albertans-out-of-Alberta, like the next prime minister, love what’s incapable of loving them back.