Stay Free Alberta, delivered the signature documentation to Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton on Monday afternoon, surrounded by a sea of supporters with Alberta flags. (Credit: Shaughn Butts/Postmedia)
I’m a lifelong central-Canadian, a Montrealer, in fact. In what is now a long life, I’m sorry to say I’ve spent only 30 or so days total in Alberta. On one visit I spoke at the western version of McGill University’s annual Leacock Lunch, where the post-meal entertainment is meant to be amusing. My first line did get a good laugh: “It’s very nice to be in Calgary again. We eastern-Canadians like to come out every once in a while to have a look at our oil.” I’m rolling, I thought, though it turned out where I was rolling was downhill, rapidly. The audience’s pretty much unanimous verdict on my career in stand-up? Sit down!
But despite being a central-Canadian and having spent so little time among Albertans, I cannot understand many of my co-regionalists’ almost violent antipathy to even the slightest hint of Alberta separatism.
Which is not to say separatism isn’t silly, in both its eastern and western variants.
What leads to that conclusion is classic conservative skepticism: you want me to believe the castles you propose to build in the air will raise the well-being of everyone, not just their builders and landlords? Humbug! As Burke wrote, “It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.”
If innate conservative caution is too bloodless for you, there is also in my anti-separatism a dash of Jean Chrétien-style sentimental affection for our own now almost 160-year-old edifice, which in fact has served our purposes rather successfully, as well as for the Rockies, prairie wheat fields, Peggy’s Cove, and yes, even the Laurentian Shield (despite its association with the Laurentian elite) — all of which we used to see in cinematic display every night when TV stations signed off for the broadcast day, back before they began to stay on 24/7.
But despite being misguided, separatists’ argument that things might be better if we split up hardly deserves the venomous contempt that is the reaction, for instance, of CBC’s At Issue panel (whose regulars are very central-Canadian: Montreal, Toronto, Toronto). We simply can’t operate as a country, they tell us, when people’s approach is that if we don’t get our pipeline, we’re gone.
Well, why not? For at least six decades Quebec has been saying that if you don’t answer our infinitely expandable list of “demands,” au revoir. The metaphor of the “knife to the throat” was introduced by an eminent Quebec establishment figure, political scientist Léon Dion, father of one of the province’s most famous federalists, former federal Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion. Yet as Quebec contemplates electing a separatist party that’s itching for round three of the knife fight, Albertans are being told they simply must not consider the same treasonous tactics. How is that fair?
I doubt any Alberta separatist is really in it for a pipeline but the unbuilt pipeline is a powerful symbol of … powerlessness. Though most Albertans would like to see a pipeline built, and though a pipeline would be good for Alberta’s economy, not to mention Canada’s, and though many friendly parts of the world would like to buy more of Alberta’s oil and gas, Ottawa, which is electorally beholden to anti-fossil fuel voters in hydro-rich and hydro-smug Quebec, writes the rules so a pipeline is almost impossible to get approved.
The severity of the regulatory gauntlet puts the lie, incidentally, to the now rote central-Canadian objection that pipelines are moot because there is at the moment no would-be private builder. Well of course there’s no private builder! The lawyers will have advised potential builders just how uninviting the regulations are. A politician might bet billions of dollars on a procedural flyer — one thinks of federal finance minister and EV entrepreneur François-Philippe Champagne — but no responsible private business can do that. Show us the regulatory streamlining, potential investors will say, and maybe we’ll show you the money.
Suppose in the 1970s Ottawa had told Quebec it must not build the James Bay hydro project because it would be too damaging to the elk, the forests, the Cree and the Inuit. What would Quebec’s reaction have been? Suppose today the prime minister mused about using the Clarity Act to vet the wording of Quebec’s next referendum, as he has mused about testing Alberta’s wording — even though all the samples offered so far are completely clear. Or what if Mr. Carney warned Quebec, as he has Alberta, that whether its referendum is allowed to go ahead may depend on what the courts say about First Nations’ lawsuits? What would Quebec’s reaction be?
Of course, the idea that a Liberal federal government would entertain the possibility of telling Quebec another referendum was unconstitutional is simply laughable. But how galling this glaring double standard must be to Albertans. Though all Canadians are equal, some clearly are more equal than others. As I say, I don’t believe separatism is the answer. But it’s not hard to understand where the question comes from.
Every influential member of the central-Canadian commentariat who fails to see that probably added 10,000 signatures to Alberta’s petition.