This ought to be interesting.
With my Calgary Road Show approaching on Sept. 28, I’ve been inviting some Albertans to write guest columns about the big event on the fall political agenda: the October referendums on, among other topics, whether to have a sovereignty referendum. The first was from Ken Boessenkool in February. Today’s is from Western Standard publisher Derek Fildebrandt. A former Wildrose Party MLA (the Calgary Herald quoted an NDP opponent to the effect that Fildebrandt had “a very fiery and short political career”), he might be the only pro-independence advocate a lot of my readers hear from before the October vote.
I have old-fashioned ideas about what’s come to be called “platforming.” Where I come from — Montreal in the early 1990s — letting readers hear from various sides of big public debates was part of our work. Since leaving Canada is on the ballot for Albertans in October, and Danielle Smith worked hard to put it there, I think it’s fair to hear from someone who thinks it’s a good idea.
Here’s Derek Fildebrandt.
Albertans love to gripe about Eastsplaining politicians, pundits, and media types lecturing them about just how good they’ve got it in Canada, and why they should simmer down. So let me take the opportunity to Bertasplain to our friends in the Rest of Canada (ROC).
Alberta has always had a regionalist streak, even before being granted provincehood in 1905. This was often driven by resentment toward Eastern-owned banks and railroads, and it manifested itself in a colourful succession of political innovations, including the Progressive Party, United Farmers, CCF, Social Credit, Reform, and Wildrose Party.
But independence has, for most of its history, been relegated to a relatively marginal minority that could be dismissed as rural cranks. It did briefly flash in the 1980s with Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, but was quickly subsumed with Brian Mulroney’s promise to bring them inside the winning team. That worked until it didn’t.
The anger of Albertans (and many other Westerners) stemmed from feeling betrayed by their own guy. Perhaps Preston Manning could have directed that anger towards a bona fide independence movement, but instead, his rallying cry was “The West Wants In.”
You know the history. And Stephen Harper was… okay. But none of the big structural prescriptions from the Reform Party were ever really enacted. And most of the small ones were undone quickly after Justin Trudeau took office.
Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. And Albertans accepted their lot on the outside looking in again, until sustained attacks on our economy became too much of a pattern to dismiss as mere incompetence or whimsical liberalism.
Easterners outraged at Donald Trump’s attacks on the Canadian economy and sovereignty should be able to sympathize. It is precisely how many Albertans felt about Trudeau’s attacks on our own economy and sovereignty. Perhaps even more so, since it was coming from our fellow Canadians.
But the regionalist-turned-independence movement transformed from one focused on underrepresentation and economic grievances into one with increasingly pronounced cultural-value differences during the Trudeau era.
A rural Albertan had largely the same values as a rural Ontarian and even a similar accent. Hosers all. We didn’t just start speaking another language. Well, perhaps not from a rural Ontarian, but it has felt as if we are speaking different languages from the cultural elites of Eastern Canada.
The “woke” movement’s high-water mark was lowest in Alberta, and most seriously resented here. It was mostly Eastern politicians who voted to change the lyrics of O Canada to a more politically correct (gender-neutral) version. It was not in Alberta that statues of Canada’s founding fathers were toppled and decapitated.
Canada’s political and cultural establishment routinely debased its own proud history and accomplishments. It felt like another Canada, not the one we loved.
This new Canada lowered its flag in self-flagellating shame for months to atone for a “mass graves” hoax. It opened the floodgates of third-world mass migration that is destroying the inheritance passed on to us by our ancestors and called us “racist” when we opposed it. It tried to confiscate our guns. It put tampons in the men’s washrooms at our airports and military bases. It used emergency war powers to unconstitutionally crush a peaceful protest of flag-waving Canadians who believed that COVID restrictions had gone too far for too long.
The archetypal Albertan prepared to cast a vote in favour of independence (or at least of starting toward that goal) on October 19 would have been found cheering the maple-leaf-waving Freedom Convoy truckers in the winter of 2022. But many a federalist waving the maple leaf today quacked with fear that that same flag was a symbol of hillbilly racists yesterday.
The same people who hate their own country’s heritage are the fiercest voices for keeping us in it.
The way many of us see it, independence is our best chance of saving the Canada we love from suicide — at least our part of it.
Most independence supporters would rather reform Canada than leave it. We just don’t believe reform is politically or socially feasible. Reopening the constitution is a non-starter with all parties in Ottawa. Even after a decade of Trudeau, the ROC voted Liberal yet again in the last election. Rapid mass migration dilutes our voting power.
Canada appears to have lost its survival instinct.
If the polls are correct, we are not expected to win. Maybe that is because we did not follow Lucien Bouchard’s dictum of creating winning conditions. Maybe we just never had a chance. Maybe the polls are wrong.
But the independence movement has been normalized and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
If our friends in the ROC want it to go away, the answer is simple. Give us our country back.
Derek Fildebrandt is Publisher of the Western Standard.
This issue reliably provokes emotional reactions, but I still expect people to be courteous to one another. I'll shut this thread right down if people can't do that.
Update: We actually did better than I expected. Thanks all!
I was expecting a far more fulsome argument for independence, one that perhaps provided evidence of the supposed economic ruin that Alberta has faced over the last decade, or the specific policy alternatives that Mark Carney and his government should be pursuing in this day and age. But instead, all I read was a rehashed redux of Western Standard click-bait headlines that read like a series of grumpy Facebook posts.
I’m happy to read the arguments for separation with a critical lens, but my God if this is the crux of the argument?