Alberta separatists rally outside the offices of Elections Alberta in Edmonton on May 4.Todd Korol/Reuters
John Ibbitson is a writer and journalist.
Central Canadian political elites are upset with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s decision to hold a referendum that might eventually lead to a sovereign Alberta.
While sovereigntist sentiment in Quebec has long been acknowledged and accommodated in English Canada, Western alienation is treated with who-do-they-think-they-are condescension.
That condescension led to the referendum. Decades of decisions made in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal have stoked the anger that led Ms. Smith to call this vote. The Laurentian elites are every bit as responsible for this situation as is the Premier or anyone else.
Central Canada’s colonizing attitude toward the Prairie provinces stretches back more than a century. In the early 1900s, Ottawa could have created one large prairie province out of the former North-West Territories. Instead, Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government established the two smaller provinces.
Alberta formalizes separation question ahead of October referendum
Moreover, Alberta and Saskatchewan entered Confederation in 1905 without the control over natural resources that Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia enjoyed.
Although the Prairie provinces were finally granted control over their own natural resources in 1930, central Canadian banks and federal bureaucrats continued to treat the West as something of a dependency. Prairie farmers were disadvantaged by federal tariffs and felt they lacked sufficient say in everything from freight rates to grain prices.
After oil was discovered in Leduc, Alta., in 1947, a portion of Alberta’s newfound wealth was channeled to other parts of Canada through federal equalization policies.
Yet while the political elites of Central Canada grappled with how to accommodate – read: placate – the nationalist aspirations of French Canada, they largely ignored demands from the West.
This colonizing attitude reached its apogee with the 1980 National Energy Program, in which Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government sought to redistribute wealth from the Prairie oil and gas sector to protect Central Canadian industry, devastating the Alberta economy.
Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government dismantled the NEP, but otherwise – at least in the opinion of many Westerners – continued to favour Central Canadian interests over Prairie ones, leading to the founding of Reform, a Western-based party of populist conservative protest.
Eventually, elements of the conservative movement united to create the Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper, which governed for a decade. On Mr. Harper’s watch, the federal government avoided intrusions into areas of provincial jurisdiction, while also rebalancing federal and provincial revenues. The result was 10 years of peace within the federation.
But the Liberals upended that peace when Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, convincing or coercing provincial governments to participate in new or expanded programs, especially in areas of health care and childcare. The Liberals also decided that the fight against climate change required a carbon tax on provinces that weren’t sufficiently cooperative, along with restrictions on expanding oil-and-gas development in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
In response, angry conservative governments in those two provinces passed so-called sovereignty acts attacking federal interference in provincial affairs and launched other protests, which will culminate in Alberta’s referendum-on-a-referendum on October 19.
There are a plethora of reasons to believe separation will never occur, not least being that polls show a healthy majority of Albertans oppose the notion.
And in replacing Justin Trudeau with Mark Carney as prime minister, the federal Liberals appear to have decided that economic diversification requires oil sands expansion and a national energy infrastructure that includes pipelines.
The memorandum of understanding signed by Mr. Carney and Ms. Smith states that Canada will seek to become “a global energy leader” by “unlocking the growth potential of Alberta’s oil, gas and other resources, including an oil pipeline to Canada’s west coast.”
As Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe put it, resentment toward an intrusive and uncomprehending Ottawa is “all in the rear-view mirror. And if we keep looking in the rear-view mirror, I think we’ll become increasingly frustrated.”
As well, any movement toward sovereignty for Alberta or any province must account for the interests of First Nations and other Indigenous peoples. Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro of the Mikisew Cree First Nation denounced the referendum question, saying it “is intended to be the beginning of the end of Treaty.”
Nonetheless the referendum is there and will be voted on. But central Canadian pundits and politicians who complain that Alberta is fomenting division, weakening investment and putting the future of the country at risk must grasp the essential truth: that they contributed to the circumstances that created this situation, too.
Unless and until they learn to respect the will of the West, the country will remain divided.