Colby Cosh: If Alberta separatists can’t convince me, they have no hope

The Alberta separation referendum will happen on Monday, and I am very much looking forward to Tuesday, when I can go back to being my usual Albertan-chauvinist self. Perhaps I ought to say a word or two to my own tribe in advance of the vote. I was born in Alberta, in late Social Credit Alberta. I’ve never lived anywhere outside Alberta. Readers know I espouse weird anarcho-capitalist politics, all of which I learned growing up in Alberta, and some of which I got directly from an education at the University of Alberta.

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I then worked in the boiler room of Alberta Report (AR) for the better part of 10 years, as writer and senior editor (a job title only ever given to young people). I was friends with, and an admirer of, both Ted and Link Byfield. Alberta separatists who do not recognize these names should die of shame. Neither of those gentlemen were originally from Alberta, but they loved and advocated for Alberta, so that didn’t come between us.

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It would be understating matters to say I had a front-row seat for the rise of the Reform party. Even before my time at AR, helping the Byfields terrify and confuse Central Canada as a full-time job, I happened to live in the Beaver River riding where the amazing Deb Grey made her meteoric impact in a 1989 byelection. (I was a couple months short of being eligible to vote.) Later, while at AR, I was on the outer rim of Reform social circles, and I was privy to important editorial-board bull sessions about, among other things, the emergent 2000 Clarity Act and the leadership candidacy of Stephen Harper. I may carry molecules of personal blame for some of subsequent Canadian history; only God could know.

I will add to this that I grew up in a working-class Alberta household and was shaped by the economic precarity of the National Energy Program. My father is a retired heavy-duty mechanic who was adjacent to the oilpatch when not directly inside of it, and I even accompanied him to work a few times. Although I am bookish and lazy to the point of pathology, I am probably the only Canadian newspaper columnist who has greased a Cat D8K on a pipeline site with his own hands. Feel free to come at me if I am mistaken. I have an enormous extended family that slopped over into Alberta in the 1960s and ’70s from Saskatchewan, and much of it has been oilpatch-dependent much of the time. Certainly every fragment of formal education I ever got was bought with oil and gas money.

And, as a matter of political belief, I do have extremely broad streaks of Alberta exceptionalism. Like most Albertans, I do believe that Confederation has a Laurentian-conspiracy aspect, and that it nakedly rips us off in some ways while absent-mindedly harming us in others. My account of this is a little idiosyncratic, and I think federal equalization should be condemned more for its harm to the recipients than for its costs to us. (With that said, how can anyone love a mandatory insurance scheme that makes it almost impossible in principle for one payer to ever make a claim against?)

The design of employment insurance is a bigger deal for me: it has evolved into a system for fertilizing seasonal economies in other provinces at Alberta’s expense. (A factor that, of course, goes on to interact with the equalization program.) I also have a snobbish regard for Alberta’s education system, and, like other Alberta writers, I regard every peer from elsewhere in English Canada as having been hobbled at life’s starting gate. I didn’t much like former premier Ralph Klein as a person, but I regard him in retrospect as a blessing.

Anyway, sorry about the long recitation of personal bona fides; I honestly didn’t know it would add up to so much. The point of it is that I ought to be the very easiest person for an ad-hoc separatist movement to convince, indeed, to include. They haven’t come close on their best day. I share lots of policy objectives and attitudes and life experiences with the separatists, and I’ve watched them choose intrigue over persuasion every chance they get. I’ve watched them scream and beg for a shot at a referendum, because they get eaten alive in every actual election they contest; and now, like you, I am watching them try to talk you into believing the vote is rigged before it happens.

The separatists complain that interest groups that separation would injure or destroy are all in concert against them, apparently finding this to be a surprise and an injustice. They boast of their behind-the-scenes control over the United Conservative Party while constantly threatening to annihilate it. They sneak around with leftover clowns and monkeys from the Trump family circus. With a few exceptions, they seem to make a point of being unpleasant and bigoted as well as historically and economically half-literate. They rain conspiracy theories and unfounded complaints down upon social media, making it all but impossible for even a sympathetic audience to find the strong points in the separatist case.

And it’s not just me: these jokers couldn’t win over Brett Wilson, or Ted Morton. We ought to be the easiest pickings on the tree. I am a Canadian patriot after all, more of one at 55 than I thought I would be at 25, but these bunglers will probably not even do as well in the referendum as I might like — not even well enough to be useful as a strategic wedge against Ottawa. I will go vote “No” to separation, but the separatists are my people in a way most of my Edmonton neighbours are not, and part of me will regret their deserved humiliation. This must be how the pro-union southerners felt watching the U.S. Civil War.

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