I’m not sure, as an Albertan, that the biggest Alberta political news of the week isn’t the official secession of
the Alberta New Democratic Party from the national NDP.
Last weekend members of the NDP-A voted at a general assembly to allow for separate provincial memberships in the party: no longer will the NDP be one and indivisible. It seems there is widespread agreement that Alberta’s economy and its political culture are so distinctive from Canada’s, and so permanently incompatible with it, that the two entities really needed to… what’s the word I’m looking for? “Separate”?
NDP-A leader Naheed Nenshi, who executed the NDP schism, also spent some of the weekend denouncing Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to allow and
a referendum on Alberta independence: maybe I’m being flippant, but I guess he’s a separatist only for his own gang. As a federalist Albertan, I’ve observed a lot of dread and anger both inside and outside the province about Smith’s openness to using the threat of separatism as an advanced Quebecois-style version of what are otherwise time-honoured anti-Ottawa tactics.
Smith insists she favours a united Canada: even (or especially) if you take her at her word, any conscious risk to the political unity of the country could be seen as playing Russian roulette. On the other hand, she has to hold together her own political governing coalition, which certainly has a separatist minority of significant size within it. I do not see any reason whatsoever to believe that a test of genuine public separatist sentiment in Alberta, a test with stakes on the table, would accomplish anything other than to instantly reveal the pathetic size and feeble calibre of that minority.
I say this having near-total sympathy with most of Alberta’s grievances against Canada. The very constitution of the country is explicitly rigged to diminish our electoral and senatorial power. Our heavy funding of the rest of Confederation seems to earn us nothing but contempt from central Canada. I don’t have major complaints about explicit fiscal equalization between provinces per se, apart from the unceasing ad-hoc updates, but equalization is just the questionably necessary top layer of a cake.
Other provinces’ economies are all to some degree engineered around employment insurance, and around contrived seasonal industries that wink in and out of existence to allow for the hoovering of implicit labour subsidies from the federation. And unlike most of what the species calls “insurance,” eligibility to collect is lowered for the regions that use EI inveterately, not raised. The long-term effects of this haven’t been good for anybody.
Alberta’s contributions to the Canada Pension Plan are also, as the recent controversy over a project for an Alberta Pension Plan showed, enormously disproportionate. The most important source of Alberta’s relative wealth is its oil and gas, and perhaps the rest of Confederation is now prepared to stop treating this industry as a despicable moral poison. But what the RoC certainly won’t stop doing is dismissing Alberta hydrocarbons as a lucky endowment from heaven to which the province has no legitimate moral entitlement — unlike, say, nickel mines, or ocean fisheries, or hydropower, or potash and uranium, or old-growth forests and coastlines.
I’m a federalist anyway — and I’m sure I’m speaking for most Albertans. (At any rate, I can speak for any Albertans who, like me, put in a decade working at Alberta Report.) Say what you want about Quebec separatism: before it could become a threat to Confederation, it had to build, despite its huge inherent ethnic, linguistic, and historic advantages, and this took a good long time.
Alberta separatist political parties are gnats, invisible to the naked eye. They haven’t come within an order of magnitude of passing any electoral test, despite lots of chances, since the National Energy Program crisis. Alberta separatists don’t have recognizable intellectual leadership — none that you’d use those words to describe, anyway. They haven’t either captured or formed any popular journals of opinion. They haven’t written catchy songs that Albertans bellow at each other in bars.
The Maple Leaf flag is as popular here as anywhere. Try applying
we Albertans cheer for Canada at the Olympics, and sing “O Canada” with incomparable gusto at hockey games. We don’t have an entire cultural vanguard that plays footsie with separatism. The separatists don’t have a permanent literature going back decades: there’s no ready-made Alberta pantheon, no list of Alberta sovereigntist classics.
And, of course, there’s the biggest problem of all. Who’s supposed to be the Alberta-separatist René Lévesque, the affable, stylish Alberta genius who routinely argues circles around federal ministers and Canada Council trough-feeders alike?
National Post
