National Pathways And The Two-Way Street: Taking Alberta Within Canada Seriously
Canada is currently beset with dissension from within and existential threats from abroad that are mutually reinforcing threats to the future for this nation as a whole. Moreover, they are inextricably linked one with the other. The results of the Quebec provincial election on October 5th now signal some positive relief for Canadian national unity. While the Parti Quebecois will form the next government, it will be a minority government commanding less than 30 percent of the popular vote, a record low. PQ leader Paul St. Pierre Plamondon had previously deferred his promised third referendum on Quebec sovereignty until after the second Trump presidency had run its course. However, a combined primarily Liberal and resurgent Conservative opposition opposed to a further referendum may also tie Plamondon’s hands for the balance of his mandate.
In Alberta, however, the separatist cause led by Mitch Sylvestre and Jeffrey Rath, continues in high-speed mode toward October 19th. Alarmingly, it is drawing sustenance bordering on what British Columbia premier, David Eby, previously characterized as high treason, from the current Trump administration; this, apparently in return for pledges of preferred access to Alberta’s natural resources in the event the separatists succeed. Thus far, separatist efforts in Alberta are only a footnote to President Trump’s global tariff war – with Canada in the crosshairs of that – and U.S. pretensions to economic domination and possible annexation of this country. Nevertheless, this is a pressingly relevant context for addressing Alberta separatism.
Aspirations to Alberta independence are of comparatively recent vintage even though western discontent has a long history. The fact remains, however, that Alberta separatism, unlike its Quebec counterpart is entirely devoid of any internal national or cultural cohesion. Nevertheless, despite cogent economic arguments dismissing the viability of a landlocked independent Alberta in thrall to the United States as something close to lunacy, the drive for separation within the province should be taken seriously. It is unfortunate and disrespectful of western alienation that it has not been taken more seriously elsewhere in Canada, especially since the costs of lunacy somehow succeeding would be disastrous for Canada as a whole.
Federal-provincial relations are a perennial two-way street. However, for many Albertans the street is not only in disrepair but overshadowed by issues beyond the control of their own provincial government. At this juncture, Alberta’s approaching internal reckoning will be substantially influenced by the perceived successes or failures of Canada’s foreign relations that purportedly speak for Canada as a whole, including Alberta.
While a potential trade rapprochement between Canada and the United States cratered with the Carney government’s 11th hour withdrawal from negotiations on 21 August, the Prime Minister is scoring economic, security and enhanced political relationships with many other nations, the capstone being the possibility of a potentially significant if somewhat amorphous invitation to Canada from the European Union to be its first “associate” member. All of this augurs against Alberta deserting the ship of state rather than staying on board.
On 19 October, Albertans will be presented with a series of questions by the government of Danielle Smith. Only one of them, the question on “Separation”, is receiving much play nationally: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?” Option one is “to remain” in Canada and option two is to authorize the Government of Alberta to commence a legal process toward a binding referendum on the direct question of separation from Canada.
The separation question is the principal prong of constitutional reform or divorce proposals the Smith government has tabled for referendum support within Alberta, the balance calling for a significant redistribution of certain federal jurisdictional and fiscal powers to the provinces. Separation aside, the other referendum questions seek to remake Canada, at least for Alberta, into more of a confederacy, not the federal state it has been from inception.
From a national standpoint, all these questions are deeply disturbing, whether or not they are viewed as likely political as well as constitutional non-starters for the rest of the nation. Perhaps more alarmingly still, these questions may be understood as in terrorem bargaining chips, the rejection of which could inform Albertans’ answer to that separation question, the elephant in the room. And let there be no doubt, the elephant is there.
How did the elephant gain admission? Much has been and is being written on that. The common answer is that the federal government doesn’t represent them – a byproduct of the first-past-the-post electoral system that currently and frequently has left Alberta with precious few voices within the central government of the day. And lest we forget: two generations of Prime Ministers with the name “Trudeau”, the elder’s National Energy Programme which sent Alberta’s economy into a tail-spin; and the younger’s war on pipelines and resource development generally, making Ottawa the perennial spoiler for Alberta’s route to more foreign markets and greater prosperity. The answer for a vocal minority within Alberta is the “Greater Prosperity Project’ of Messrs. Sylvestre and Rath, further informed by the “Black Hat Gang” that has published a constitutional blueprint for Alberta as an independent country, commented on below.
Legitimate grievances notwithstanding, Alberta independence threatening the survival of the Canadian experiment as a whole, appears nuclear in the extreme. The Carney government, despite the paucity of western representation in its ranks, has sent much more positive messaging to Edmonton on national economic policy, including the simplification of regulatory approvals for “big projects”, coupled with an MOU between the Prime Minister and Premier Danielle Smith on a new pipeline to the west coast. Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, is musing about another pipeline Ontario would support from the oil sands to Ontario oil refineries in Sarnia; perhaps even Quebec may be softening on its antipathy to pipeline connectivity of any kind. In short, a long overdue game is afoot focused on nation-building and national sovereignty that highlights new strength underlying at home and abroad both the desirability as well as the viability of the Canadian experiment.
The catalyst for Canada’s “new game” with the world is and remains the existential crisis created by the breakdown in Canada-U.S. relations fueled by a tariff focused U.S. administration. A historically -- for the most part – benign relationship of interdependence verging on Canadian dependence on the United States has heretofore provided a framework for Canadian economic prosperity that Canadian governments and the Canadian people have taken for granted. That relationship fostered an atmosphere of complacent dependency to the point that trading with the United States from any part of Canada became a far more attractive proposition for many Canadian businesses than pursuing domestic or other foreign markets. Provinces for their part were left alone to maintain locally attractive interprovincial barriers that have systemically balkanized the Canadian economy and correspondingly weakened its resilience to an American change of heart over the shared benefits of economic integration.
The Carney government is striving mightily to rebuild a robust domestic economy less dependent on our neighbour to the south. Ottawa has resiled from federally imposed internal barriers to trade and domestic markets for Canadian goods and services. The dismantling of provincial trade barriers is proceeding more slowly. Coming back to Alberta, here is the strange part. At the very time Alberta separation is rearing its head, aided and abetted by a premier desperate to appease a separatist hard core within her political base, that same premier also appears to be pinning Alberta’s economic future on Ottawa’s new game to distance Canada from current dependence on U.S. markets.
Premier Smith has played and continues to play a dangerous game both within Canada and abroad: having courted an aggressive U.S. president with little success; procedurally fanning the flames of the separatist referendum agenda while taking a relatively unconvincing personal stance against that result; yet embracing anything on offer from Ottawa. The fundamental contradictions are palpable, a chasm between two horses that cannot continue to run together. Astride both, Premier Smith may fall between them.
The history of Canada as a country, latterly a nation, eventually extending from sea to sea to sea was framed from the outset as a definitive answer to American encroachment and potential domination. Premier Smith appears to lack a basic understanding of what made Canada a national achievement across a vast continent of which Alberta is an integral part. Her mantra of a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada” is both historical and constitutional nonsense. The creation of the prairie provinces and their subsequent development was and remains a distinctly Canadian phenomenon, a product of the Founding Fathers “national dream” led initially by Sir John A. Macdonald. Alberta, as well as Saskatchewan and Manitoba were created by Ottawa out of a vast, sparsely populated and politically insecure Canadian west bequeathed by the late lamented Hudson Bay Company and populated by federally fueled immigration from central Canada and abroad. That reality is not an excuse for subsequent federal neglect or direct hurt to one part of the country, but it is something that both Albertans as Canadians across the country and our collective political leadership not only needs to remember but value, celebrate, and above all act upon, when the country is threatened from without.
In this, the history of our neighbour to the south holds important lessons for maintaining the Canadian alternative. In framing the Constitution of the United States, its principal author, James Madison, stated a fundamental postulate for the survival the new polity confronting foreign empires: “If we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations.” Canada sometimes struggles with that concept in the wake of inconsistent provincial voices projected abroad, even as Canadian Supreme Court decisions have strengthened Ottawa’s claim to a more coherent foreign affairs power over time despite that omission in Canada’s written constitution. That specific power was not part of Canada’s original constitutional blueprint. Canada was initially created as a domestically autonomous dominion within the British Empire and gradually evolved out of it, acquiring independent international personality recognized by the U.K. Parliament in the Statute of Westminster, 1930. A strong federal affirmation of such executive and parliamentary power is essential now more than ever.
Canada now searches for stronger “middle-power” alliances to counter potentially hostile hegemons. That was Prime Minister Carney’s galvanizing call to action at Davos: greater diversity in its trading partners and greater stability between its political and economic allies. The point remains that while the international order may change for better or worse, now, as before, Canada acting together is the only route to Canada surviving politically as well as economically.
It remains, however, that trite dismissals of Alberta going it alone are neither constructive nor are they likely to be well received by Albertans in general, not just the separatist rant. Rather, the message – and the reality behind it – must be that united, Canada will stand and that Alberta is an integral part of the national edifice. It should be a national priority to convey that message to Albertans as “Canadians” clearly and respectfully.
H. Scott Fairley is a Toronto-based lawyer in Cambridge LLP, and an adjunct professor of law at Queen’s University. His most recent book, FOREIGN AFFAIRS IN THE CANADIAN CONSTITUTION was published last October by the University of British Columbia Press.