What is this I hear about an Alberta separatist movement?
This piqued my interest morning when I read the online headline this morning. Would like to hear from my friends to the north about this.
I do understand some people in Alberta are upset with the federal government control over natural resources.
I get the impression when about 1/3 of our electricity and 60% of our oil imports come from Canada.
What does this all mean for us down south?
I do understand some people in Alberta are upset with the federal government control over natural resources.
I get the impression when about 1/3 of our electricity and 60% of our oil imports come from Canada.
What does this all mean for us down south?
Comments
The last high-point for Alberta separatism was 1982, at the height of anti-Ottawa resentment over the energy wars(see National Energy Program), when a right-wing(*) separatist party called the Western Canada Concept managed to win a by-election in a rural seat, which they subsequently lost in the general election a few months later. In that election, they did manage to get 11% of the vote, which sounds impressive, until you consider that the socialist NDP, supposedly even more antithetical to conservative "Alberta values" of the day, got over 18%.
I've so far been operating under the assumption that this latest eruption of separatist discontent is a re-hash of the early 1980s, with Trump's annexationist posturing and Danielle Smith's cynical footsying with the separatists adding some extra fuel to what passes for the fire. Though I just did the calculations, and this petition for a referendum apparently has about 6% of the population as signatories, which does sound like a large number.
But even if the referendum goes ahead, there's no way the pro-independence side is getting anywhere near a majority. However, a higher-than-predicted vote for separation will probably spook a lot of people, and might embolden Trump to make a few more ill-informed and ultimately pointless comments on the matter.
(*) In the modern era, western separatism has been almost entirely a right-wing affair. On a global spectrum, they're more comparable to the Lega Nord in Italy, rather than Sinn Fein in N. Ireland.
(*) In Canada, "federalist" is usually used in the context of "Someone supporting the federal government against the provinces", rather than "Someone favouring a federalist rather than a unitary state". Somewhat ironically, many of the most hardcore federalists(under the Canadian usage) are so supportive of the feds against the provinces that they secretly, with occassional public vocalization, yearn for Canada to be something far more akin to a unitary state. Granted, this hyper-trudeauite vision is now thin on the ground, and didn't even get fully embraced by Justin, who once implied that a politician had more obligation to use elective French(ie. when addressing people who could understand either language) in Quebec than in other provinces.
I was actually gonna name-check you and invite you over here to expound upon that your theory.
For the uninitiated, there have been basically four versions of Social Credit in Canada(geeks-only click)...
Alberta 1948 to 1971: non-douglasite, economically conservative and pro-business, officially anti-antisemitic, slightly less strenuously fundamentalist.
British Columbia 1952 to 1991: repeat of Alberta '48 to '71, but less religious.
Quebec 1962 to 1980: Even crazier version of Alberta '35 to '48, with reactionary Catholicism rather than fundamentalism as the prime religious orientation. Most successful at the federal level.
Social Credit itself was never separatist, but the pattern noticed by SPK is that separatism in Canada has been strongest in(chronological order) Quebec and then Alberta/BC(Alberta probably stronger than BC).
A slight snag in the theory is that separatism in Quebec was mostly a social-democratic affair, attracting venomous scorn from the creditiste. Though there is definitely a case to be made that the kind of people who supported Social Credit are the same kinds who later supported western separatism, and the more conservative sections of the Quebec independence movement.
Right. And the Liberals were originally the party of anti-centralization, economic continentalism, and, arguably, western alienation, in the sense of claiming the west was hard-done-by and promising to alleviate the injustice.
There's a formulation in American politics that the New Deal was Hamiltonian methods harnessed to advance Jeffersonian goals. I think Eugene Forsey was expressing a parallel idea when he remarked "I sit in the Senate as a Trudeau Liberal because I'm a Macdonald Conservative."
Not really. Macdonal's Constitution was locked into a hardware store in Milton, Ontario where it burned to ash in a case of insurance fraud in 1877, see Citizen's and The Queen Insurance Co's. v. Parsons, 1881 JCPC.
The decentralizing hands were Oliver Mowat's, the Liberal Premier of Ontario who paid to take Parson's case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Mowat used it to gut te Federal Trade and Commerce Power in favour of the Provincial Property & Civil Rights Power. See also the Rivers and Streams Act and the litany of Alocohol and Prohibition cases, one as late as 1946.
Ontario was ruled by the very decentralist Liberals from 1862 to 1905. Ontario has usually had a split personality at the federal and provincial levels and the centralist federal Tories were paired with the very decentralist Ontario Liberals. Oliver Mowat is called the Father if Provincial Rights for a reason.
And since this thread is consecrated to Princess Louise, I will read into the record that it was JE Brownlee who lured the country into accepting the hefty provincial control over resources exists to this day; control which, while accepted only begrudgingly among certain sections of the nation-building intelligentsia, will, due to popular support across regions and ideologies, remain part of the country's constitutional make-up as long as the country itself continues to exist.
(FWIW, Brownlee was United Farmers/Progressive, who at the time I think were functioning as a radical-agrarian wing of Canadian liberaldom. Despite the PC's stealing "Progressive" via John Bracken, in their heyday I think the closer electoral ally of the Progressives woulda been the Liberals.
The tour-guides at the Alberta legislature, when showing Brownlee's portrait, used to state explicitly that the United Farmers were ancestral to the NDP, but I don't know what actual institutional connections there woulda been. IOW, I don't if any of the Progressive groups formally merged into the CCF, or their members just kinda wandered in as individuals. The UFA still exists as a farmers' organization, but not as a political party.)
I'd never heard of that case before. Thanks!
I wouldn't credit Brownlea with that much, only the three provinces formed out of the .Northwest Territories did not have natural reasource control unti 1930; the others, most importantly Ontario (for Northern Ontario mining) had had it since 1867.
The United Farmers are a bit ancestral to the NDP but the links are exceedingly convoluted. The United Farmers of Ontario affiliated with the CCF but only for two years. Agnes McPhail as as a CCF MP after 1935.
Yeah. My knowledge of pre-Charter Canadian jurisprudence is a shamefully huge lacuna. I did know that Mowat was a champion of Ontario's rights against Ottawa, but that was mostly gleaned through osmosis.
So presumably, he established it for those three provinces, plus any who would join afterwards?
What years was that? And was it something like an electoral alliance, ie. they didn't run candidates in each other's strongholds, or an actual institutional merger?
First woman MP. Per wiki, of the Famous Five(of whom I had to be reminded McPhail was not a member) one(Irene Parlby) was UFA, and another(Lousie McKinney) was Non-Partisan League(basically Progressive) and later joined(without electoral success) the UFA. Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy were Liberal and Tory, respectively, and any political affiliation of Henrietta Edwards remains unwikified.
Thanks.
According to wiki, of the 9 UFA federal MPs elected in 1930, 8 later joined the CCF, but were all defeated by Socreds in 1935. The UFA abandoned politics two years later.
Back to the UFO, I did not know until tonight about the connection between their DOA public-grocery scheme and Loblaw's. Prob'ly mostly 'cuz, after 4 years in Ottawa and semi-regular visits to Loblaw's, the store still remains pretty peripheral to my frame of reference.
Here in the US, there have been a number of suggestions about carving the country into several smaller countries (Dixie, Texas, California, Deseret, Hawaii, New England, etc.). (I don't include Alaska as I figure it would promptly be absorbed by one of its neighbors>)
The difficulty with a question like this is...
An Alberta where separatists could get even a bare majority of the vote would(in my opinion) have to be one that's radically different from the Alberta that exists in real-life. And in a scenario in which Alberta was that different from real-life, the rest of Canada would likely be pretty different as well.
Put another way, your question might be a little like "If the USA decided to revert back to rule by the British monarch, would that encourage Ireland to do the same?" To answer the question, we'd need to know quite a few more details about this alternate-world that made a revived monarchial USA possible in the first place.
That being said, however it came about, a succesful Alberta independence movement, assuming it's along the same ideological lines as it is in real life, would probably appeal to similar elements in the rest of Canada, so how much nationwide success it had would depend on how many of those Alberta-type ideologues exist elsewhere. Though Quebec sovereigntists, who are now an odd mixture of social democrats and ethnonationalists, would take Alberta's success as a precedent for their endeavours, though I personally don't think the Quebec public at large would view it as a good model to emulate.
Well, I will re-read into the record that BC was governed by Social Credit, with only a three-year socialist interegnum, from 1952 to 1991, and they were likely to the right of the Lougheed PCs in the 1970s/1980s. Less significantly, I do recall in the late 1990s, dissatisfaction with the NDP government in Victoria leading to the brief emergence of a "Join Alberta" movement in the BC interior.
But, yeah. The NDP strongholds on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland infuse a more permanent left-wing character into the overall BC body politic, and I thus wouldn't expect the whole province to wanna unite with Alberta. Maybe a revived annexationism in the interior, but I doubt that would be popular in Alberta, since overall I think(not having studied the matter closely) that the interior of BC would be a beggar region, compared to oil-rich Alberta.
Interesting precedent fir Quebec
Nifty typo there. Kind of a jungian slip.
God, I hope not. That's a terrifying thought.
Fir trees? I'm not getting it... help!
A Canadian would understand.
Officially, yeah. But you can have more than one.
Yeah, sorry. Fir trees as symbols of Canada. Prob'ly a stretch, just for a typo.
Not precisely. And while I could happily go on with these sorta post-mortems forever, in the interests of a non-cluttered thread...
Anyway...
As I think was alluded to on the overall Canadian politics thread, if Quebec ends up in any sort of publically pursued alliance with the Lone Star Province to squash indigenous perogative over independence referenda, that's gonna be the stake through the heart of any residual affection for Quebec as "the social democratic conscience of Canada".
Indigenous hostility to the national aspirations of the Lower Canadians(or certain sections thereof) goes back at least to the Rebellions of 1837, and was institutionalized most recently by the Cree-organized counter-referendum in 1995. I believe Quebec Solidaire originally took the principled anti-colonialist stance that the indigenous have the exact same right of self-determination, up to and including independence, as the Quebecois, but the last I heard a few years ago was their co-spokesperson Nadeau-Dubois answering a question about that with "Not necessarily. We want to form an alliance with the indigenous people."
And I would assume that the other sovereigntist parties in Quebec are considerably less pro-indigenous autonomy than QS is. So I wouldn't see much room for reconciliation on that front.
For the overall long-term political reverberations, I will say...
...if(*) it gets to the point where the sovereigntist aspirations of one or more of the provinces are universally and eternally veto-ed by courts ruling on behalf of indigenous claims, that will NOT do a lot to foster communal goodwill between people who identify with those provinces(either as residents or external sympathizers) and indigenous-autonomy movements.
I will note note in this regard that, at least IME, it is not unheard-of to find people quite willing to casually cheer on "[outdated word for indigenous people]s" against "those crybabies in Quebec". Though some of that crowd in the "If Quebec wants to go, let 'em" faction might be mad that, as they see it, the indigenous are blocking a supposedly mutually beneficial divorce.
(*) I'm still pretty much of the opinion that Free Alberta 2026 is a jumped-up buncha resource-sector hangers-on, severely overestimating the powers of Donald J. Trump to bring their utopia into existence; and also that the desire to make Quebec a literally separate country is no longer, if it ever was, a strong motivating force in that province's politics.
In the 1980s, Alberta Report, that chesterbollocian rag I reference sometimes, published an article extolling the basic "Cascadian" geo-economic model, but with Alberta somehow smuggled onto the map.
I seem to recall I only skimmed the article, if that, but I think I can guess what it was saying. I don't know if they actually used the word "Cascadia", but I'm gonna surmise that the eco-hippie aspect of that national ideology was not among the things they admired.
(FWIW, I suspect even if the most progressive, decolonizing vision of Cascadia ever became a political force, it would by opposed by indigenous communities in Canada, just as much as Quebec or Alberta separatism is.)
I glanced at the decision on CanLII which is long and extremely complicated. The Court considered and rejected an argument in line with my gut instinct reaction upthread. Anyway, one of the many things not to like about secession is the legal mess it would be likely to create.
That's my understanding, yeah.
You mean this one...?
https://canlii.ca/t/kkx74
Hate to keep bringing these guys up, but I'm convinced that it was the Byfields who astroturfed that one. While I'm sure that the anti-lgbqt people calling up Klein's office in outrage were sincere, I doubt they all independently got the idea to specifically demand the Notwithstanding Clause. Whereas it was an ongoing theme in Alberta Report editorials.
For anyone who might have thought Air Canada's We Love You Quebec Rally in '95 was the zenith of tacky federalist schmaltz.
It apparently IS the name of the actual pro-federalist petition making the rounds, but that's not really gonna help much, even if the listener/reader is thinking about the petition.
Location is the portion of 99th Ave. that runs by the legislature, one of at least three such legislature-buildings of the, shall we say, "republican statehouse" visual variety gracing western Canada.
* Newfoundland 1948
** New Brunswick 1866, if anyone is wondering.
Far out. Wikipedia lists one death from a "riot".
Not sure if I can think of any post-1867 election/referendum with a body count, but I suspect you could find some if you looked hard enough.
Despite its generally milktoast political street culture, Edmonton was host to the first act of terrorism in protest against the Vietnam War, in 1965. A lone-wolf German marxist bombed two US warplanes at the downtown airport, then shot and killed a security guard.
Also saw anti-French/anti-Catholic bigotry on both sides, with pro-Responsible Govt. playing up the idea that joining would put Newfoundland under the domination of Quebec, and pro-Confederation doing a last-minute spree of postering with the status quo portrayed as a rampaging skeleton in bishop's garb, accompanied by the giant caption "THIS IS YOUR PAST!"