It’s Time To Correct The Distorted View Of Alberta Separatists

What have you done for me lately?

I am not sure why, but that phrase popped into my head a few weeks ago when I was reading something by an Alberta separatist online. There was a song with that title 40 years ago by Janet Jackson. I was never a big fan and nothing by her is on my phone or iPods or playlists, but I looked at the YouTube video of the song, and 1986 looked so dated. Janet turns 60 this year – that was a long time ago and any grievances that motivated that song are long forgotten.

Alberta separatists often list long series of complaints or gripes about how Alberta (or sometimes “The West”) has been mistreated, ignored, or taken for granted. Every day on X/Twitter is Festivus it seems, with another repeated airing of grievances. The list is one sided and distorted. Any relationship where someone asks for an accounting of “what have you done for me” will be incomplete, distorted, or short sighted, and will ignore the bigger picture of the past, along with the reality that things have to be two ways, and that what really matters is the uncertain future.

But we live in “transactional” times, and this idea of accounting the good and the bad also happened over the last six decades with Quebec separatism. The federal government has often been willing to bend over backwards to appease Quebec, particularly when it comes to financial or economic policies.

Throughout Canada’s history, my province of Ontario has usually been one of the few “have” provinces, often along with BC, until the 1970s when Alberta’s oil wealth and the rise of OPEC has turned it into a “have” province. The difference I see is that Ontarians (and BC) have tended to act with “noblesse oblige” – defined as “the inferred responsibility of privileged people to act with generosity and nobility toward those less privileged”.

Alberta alienation, or Western alienation, has been around forever it seems, even going back to Louis Riel, but I first recall it becoming an issue in the 1970s, after oil prices rose and while Pierre Trudeau was PM. But it comes in waves, including the early 1990s, when Preston Manning and the Reform Party rose to prominence – it was certainly not restricted to figures like Ralph Klein or Alberta provincial politicians.

I have often felt that part of the problem of Western alienation was that Canadians from outside of the Prairies were reluctant to stand up to those to people pushing the narratives that fed Western/Alberta alienation. It has been an overwhelmingly one sided debate. I cannot recall anyone in the media, or any major politician, presenting the counter-narrative that – overall – Alberta has had few real reasons to complain of ill treatment from the federal government or eastern Canada.

So, I am going to make a feeble stab at it myself. I am no historian or expert in federal-provincial relations over the last 70 years, but I do think there are some arguments that Albertan separatists conveniently ignore, if they even know of them.

Now, Colin Macleod is a Calgary-based “independence activist” and writer who wrote a book in 2024 titled “The Case For Alberta’s Independence”. I have yet to read it, but he did write a column on March 26th in the Globe & Mail titled “Alberta’s push for independence is the culmination of decades of poor treatment by Ottawa”, which seemed to me to indicate how weak the arguments were.

There are few attempts that I have seen or read that try to expose the problems with the Alberta separatist referendum movement, but an excellent one did appear in the left-leaning Tyee out of BC. An April 1st article titled “Among the Separatists: I wanted to learn the true target of their angry dreams. What I heard made me tremble for the Alberta I love” by Marcello Di Cintio is quite scathing, and the author was born and raised in Alberta, so it is not easily dismissed as coming from an easterner.

Di Cintio sees a lot of the movement as being driven by anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiments. Now, I have been a skeptic of Canadian immigration policy since 1993, when the three national political parties were each calling for immigration pegged at an annual rate of 1% of Canada’s population, despite a recession and high unemployment. The Reform Party was called racist, even though its founder and leader Preston Manning avoided anything overtly racist. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has shifted towards demanding more provincial control over immigration and adding the issue to any vote on separation, which seems meant to undermine or diffuse separatism and keep her party united and in power.

I am usually critical of both the extreme political left and the extreme right, and Alberta separation is exclusively a far right project and seems more about people on the far right being unhappy that in a united, democratic Canada their political agenda is doomed to remain on the fringes.

Polls show that only somewhere under 30% of Albertans will vote for separation, so the separatists are a vocal and well organized minority in Alberta, but my focus here is not really to deal with separatism but to argue against their separatist version of Canadian history and maybe argue that Alberta is only a rich and successful province because it has been inside of Canada, not independent or even part of the US.

To help me, I did a little extra reading centred around the Canadian oil industry in particular (even though Alberta’s economy includes forestry, mining, agriculture, ranching, tourism, and is becoming more diversified with industries like aerospace). Here is what I read:

• Pumped: Everyone’s Guide to the Oil Patch (Finch, David, 2007)
• The Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada (McKenzie-Brown, Peter, 1993)
• Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry From 1880 (Taylor, Graham D., 2019)

The unmentioned benefits of Confederation

All are interesting books worth reading, and actually, the history of Imperial Oil in Canada was particular interesting to me, as an economic nationalist.

Getting back to Macleod’s Globe article and the history of Alberta, Alberta would be quite different had Confederation never happened – and in particular, if BC had not joined Confederation in 1871.

Macleod goes so far as to complain that Alberta and Saskatchewan are not one big province: “Sir Frederick Haultain pushed for a unified Western entity to counter federal dominance”. It is hard to see how this would have made much of a difference. Saskatchewan has generally been poorer than Alberta, and Alberta would now have to share more of its oil wealth with more people.

BC would not have joined Confederation had eastern Canadians not paid $1.5 million in 1870 to buy Rupert’s Land from HBC, much like the US made the Louisiana Purchase decades earlier.

If we assume that Sir John A. MacDonald and the people of eastern Canada had not paid to buy the lands in Alberta, there would not have been the Canada Pacific line built through the Rockies to the Pacific (and also north of Lake Superior to the Atlantic), at least not for decades given the difficulties and the costs of undertaking the venture. Alberta and Saskatchewan would have been remote in terms of rail access, at the northern ends of the lines feeding into US transcontinental railroads.

Somewhere between 75% and 90% of Canada’s population lives within 100 miles of the US border. The US states to the south of Alberta and Saskatchewan are empty by comparison. Alberta’s population is now over five million, while Montana has less than 1.2 million, Wyoming less than 600,000, and North Dakota around 800,000.

If Alberta was part of the US now, it would account for less than 1.5% of the total US population, have about six representatives in Congress, less than 2% of Senators, as well as less than 2% of Electoral College votes – assuming it had five million people as it does now, rather than a much smaller population like the American states to its south.

And not only did Alberta get one transcontinental railroad. Because CP had a monopoly, PM Sir Wilfred Laurier went out of his way to essentially fund and create two more transcontinental railroads (though they mostly went bankrupt, and ended up being merged to create CN around 1919).

Laurier also imposed tariffs on US oil to encourage production in Canada, first in southwest Ontario, but also in the Turner Valley in Alberta. Generally, if Alberta was not in Canada, it would never had had the support for the oil and gas industries it has received. As part of the US, the abundant and cheap oil from Texas and other areas would have made Alberta oil uneconomic, on top of the transportation costs to US markets.

In the American West, the US federal government is the largest landowner, unlike Canada. Macleod notes that in the 1920s, Albertans fought for control of their natural resources – and in fact, our federal government passed the Natural Resource Acts in 1930 (under Bennett, who came from Alberta). This reform transferred control of Crown land and natural resources from the federal government to the praire provinces. In the US, no similar mass transfer of land and mineral/subsurface rights happened in US Western states. If the US had taken over, Alberta would not have the same control of oil and gas, and the accompanying royalties, that it now enjoys.

There is a cliched saying about people who have a sense of entitlement: “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple”. To me, that sounds a lot like Alberta separatists. Alberta’s oil wealth is pure luck, and the federal government gave the oil rights to Alberta in 1930 so that Alberta and Saskatchewan would not be at a disadvantage compared to provinces that had a legal existence separate from Canada before joining, and therefore already had these rights.

When the federal government bought the West from the Hudson’s Bay Company, my paternal great grandparents were alive and living in Ontario, paying tariffs and taxes to pay for buying the Canadian West. They also subsidized the railways, RCMP, treaty obligations, and other costs. Anyone who homesteaded in Alberta on land provided free of cost owes a huge debt to people in the eastern provinces and BC.

An alternative history of Alberta oil

In the US, John D. Rockefeller created the Standard Oil monopoly, which was broken up around 1900 under anti-trust laws, but the main part carved out of it that still dominated the US energy market was Standard Oil of New Jersey (referred to as “Jersey Standard” in Graham Taylor’s book referenced above). While Canadians started Imperial Oil, it ended up under Jersey Standard as a subsidiary. Some Canadian shareholders remained, but more importantly, it had its own management, budgets, and a degree of independence that was lacking in other Jersey Standard subsidiaries, or even in other Canadian companies owned by US multinationals such as GM or Ford’s Canadian branches.

Without Imperial Oil, the Leduc oil discovery would not have happened until decades later, and the tar sands and other projects would likely not have happened. Perhaps all that Alberta might be now is a path for pipelines from Alaska and the MacKenzie Valley to southern markets, without the tar sands projects that would have not happened as quickly, or even at all, if Alberta was part of the US.

Imperial Oil also built the Trans Mountain pipeline in the 1950s to supply Vancouver, when it had previously imported oil for BC from a South American subsidiary, which was sold off to pay for expanding investment in Canada.

That time Diefenbaker forced Ontarians to buy Alberta oil

In the mid-1950s, the Liberal government wanted to build a natural gas pipeline to sell western natural gas to Ontario and the East, which had no access to natural gas except from the US. Obviously, this would have meant more money for Alberta, and less gas being wasted by it being flared off. Ironically, it was a Westerner, John Diefenbaker, who tried to stop this project, forcing the Louis St. Laurent government to impose closure to force it through instead of it being delayed by years or decades.

When he came to power, Diefenbaker helped Alberta and the oil industry by imposing the “Ottawa Valley Line”. All refineries west of Ottawa were banned from importing foreign oil. In effect, Diefenbaker forced Ontario to buy far more expensive Alberta oil, while allowing Quebec and the Atlantic provinces to use cheaper imported oil, until OPEC raised prices in 1973. I doubt that many Ontarians know of this policy, and certainly Alberta separatists never concede that their province benefitted at Ontario’s expense in this case.

Pierre Trudeau’s wrongfully vilified National Energy Policy

Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy (NEP) is often wrongfully vilified – I will not go into the details, but it encouraged Canadian ownership and control of our oil and gas industry, while also setting a “made in Canada” oil price. Trudeau and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed eventually made peace and struck a five-year “Oil Accord“ agreement in 1981.

Some Albertans blame Pierre Trudeau’s NEP as the cause of Alberta’s economic woes, but the real problem was that world oil prices dropped from 1980 to 1986. The irony is that most major oil exporting countries charge less to domestic consumers, and the federal government had done a lot over the decades to help develop Alberta’s oil industry, including protective tariffs, tax breaks, infrastructure, and even creating a petrochemical industry in Sarnia for synthetic rubber and other products using oil.

Of course, Justin Trudeau got little credit for buying the existing Trans-Mountain Pipeline to Vancouver and expanding its export capacity when the private sector found the project to be too risky and uneconomic. Canadian taxpayers ended up paying $34 billion to expand it. The pipeline is still not running at full capacity, and expanding its capacity by incremental improvements is likely faster and more economically sensible than a new oil pipeline to the Pacific much farther north.

Here is a paragraph from Macleod’s Globe article:

“Over the years, there have been many strategies suggested to mollify westerners in general and Albertans in particular: Senate reform or the end of equalization, for example. But even Stephen Harper could not amend the Senate: his bid was blocked by the Supreme Court. Today, the “7/50” rule would effectively neutralize any Western-led constitutional changes. These disputes, and the seeming inability of the West to effect change, gave way to outright separatist sentiments, fuelled by policies that treated us as a revenue source without fair return or political influence.”

Well, Alberta dodged a bullet with the failure of Triple-E Senate reforms, which would have meant a powerful and undemocratically proportioned Senate (the four “have not” Atlantic provinces would have 40%) that could thwart Parliament. With five million people in a country of around 42 million people, Alberta would now be under-represented.

Alberta or BC could have asked for reforms to the Senate in 1982, when the Constitution was being patriated, to shift more power to the West, but did not. The US is rare in modern democracies in having a powerful second chamber that is not under the ethos of representation by population – and we see how dysfunctional it is, with its ability to block or thwart the House.

There is also the irony that Alberta separatists are claiming that a majority vote will lead to separation, but back in 1982, the four western provinces agreed that some amendments to the Constitution would require the support of seven provinces representing at least 50% of the population of Canada, and others would require unanimity. The separatist position makes it easier for provinces to break up Confederation by seceding, because the bar for separating is much lower than for staying and getting changes through the Constitution.

What about equalization?

Equalization is another sore spot for Alberta separatists, but it is part of the Constitution. When it was first introduced in 1957, Alberta was a net beneficiary, as was Saskatchewan. The program may need reform, but essentially, the federal government is there to spend money collected across the country on anything from foreign aid, defence, or whatever is in the interests of all Canadians, not to spend the exact same amount per capita in each province as it collects.

Equalization means that poor provinces can keep taxes reasonable, and provide adequate services, so that there is not a mass exodus of people to the richer provinces – where the richer province would have to pay for education, healthcare, infrastructure and so on, diluting the wealth of said province. If two million people from Atlantic Canada moved to Alberta because the Atlantic provincial governments went bankrupt, Albertans would be worse off. In this way, equalization has an indirect benefit for wealthier provinces, by disincentivizing unsustainable levels of interprovincial migration from poorer provinces.

Macleod writes:

“Social media amplifies it all, with threads on economic disparities, federal government environmental activism, the clear economic favouritism towards Quebec, not to mention the arrogance of those who criticize us as a “Maple MAGA” movement or, in the case of B.C. Premier David Eby, call us traitors…

The pattern is unmistakable: a federation that takes our wealth, ignores our voice, and imposes policies shaped thousands of kilometres away. We have tried every avenue of reform: Senate reform, Fair-Deal panels, a referendum on equalization, negotiations, Firewall Letters, MOUs, sovereignty legislation. Yet we still find ourselves treated as a very junior partner at best, a resource colony at worst.”

These complaints of Alberta separatists seem mostly to be right-wing ideological issues more than anything else, including opposition to environmental laws. People in Montana no doubt felt the same way under Obama and Biden, and policies shaped in Washington and New York instead of Ottawa and Toronto.

The challenges of reform

Canada is not perfect, and we do need reforms – though changing the Constitution is likely to only make Canada’s lack of unity worse because Quebec will make demands that will likely lead to major undemocratic asymmetrical powers, or massive decentralization, making it harder for Canada to function given we are already once of the most decentralized countries on earth.

Some of these reforms are difficult. Should tiny PEI have four MPs and four Senators? Should we rebalance the Senate? What other changes should we enact? Things like electoral reform, birthright citizenship, and other issues should be debated, but the ten Premiers, three Territorial Leaders, and the PM are politicians who have power and their own interests. Meetings between them rarely address what citizens actually think are the issues, and unfortunately, the 1982 Constitutional repatriation, Meech Lake Accord, and Charlottetown Accord processes were a handful of people meeting – often in secret rather than in a more inclusive and grass roots driven way – to deal with how we structure our government.

The Reform Party replaced the Progressive Conservative Party in the West in the 1993 election. This was because, even when a “conservative” government was elected, it seemed to many Westerners that their MPs were representing Ottawa to their constituents, not representing the views of their constituents in Ottawa. I think the problem is that Canada has become an “elected dictatorship”, with a PM who is too powerful, and with backbench MPs that are “whipped” and not free to express their views freely or vote against their party. Andrew Coyne’s recent book explains this way that our political system is dysfunctional, though his book was weak on coming up with solutions, and the main reform that parties on the left want, Proportional Representation, will only increase the need for partisanship and whipped votes, not reduce it.

The Globe & Mail has a comment section on many of its articles and opinion pieces, which other readers can “like” – these tend to skew to the political right and include a lot of Liberal bashing, but sometimes the top comments are excellent. This is the top comment to Macleod’s column, from another Albertan, which shows more common sense, and I hope expresses sentiments shared by the vast majority of Albertans:

“As an Albertan who has spent years exploring our province’s history and its complex ties to the rest of Canada…

As an Albertan (life long) with roots here before Alberta became a province, I have never understood some fellow citizens who seem to seek and revel in grievance. If you think being annexed by the US is going to increase our freedom and prosperity, you are dreaming. I love my province AND my country. Your advocacy to leave Canada is harming investment and our economy and creating division. And for what? To deepen divisions between Albertans and with other Canadians? What happens when this effort fails? Who will you blame then and how will that boulder be lifted into the bag of grievances some seem to want to carry?

Forever Canadian”

Ghost towns and gold rushes

But a final consideration should be this: nobody knows what Alberta’s fortunes will be in the future. If Alberta left Confederation, who knows what will happen to the rest of the country? Some or all of it could end up as part of the US.

More importantly, Alberta is currently the richest province in one of the richest and most successful countries, but Canada is littered with ghost towns or places where prosperity did not last – the Yukon Gold Rush, the Atlantic cod fishery, asbestos mines in Quebec, the oil industry in Ontario, and the tobacco industry as well. Alberta’s tar sands reserves might be huge, but compared to Saudi Arabia, this is expensive to turn into useable oil.

Eventually, demand will drop regardless because of the need to reduce greenhouse gases, or just simply because new energy technologies will replace oil – just as oil replaced coal, whale oil, and burning wood. Geothermal, hydrogen, thorium reactors, fusion, or something else might come along. Alberta likely is not doing enough to make sure it will not be stuck with the costs of cleaning up tar sands tailing ponds, let alone orphaned wells from conventional wells.

Albertans like to think of themselves as hard working and good managers, like the ant in the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. But in reality, Norway is an example of a petrostate that has been far better at saving for a rainy day with its sovereign wealth fund. By contrast, Alberta has underfunded its Heritage Fund, and instead used its oil wealth and royalties to avoid having a sales tax, something that every other province has. Who knows, it may be hard to imagine, but maybe one day in the future, Alberta will need the Equalization program that the separatists despise, in addition to getting the other benefits of being part of Confederation.