The Buffalo revolution is far from complete

Alberta cry for justice borrows socialist rhetoric,

I read last week’s “Buffalo Declaration” signed by four Alberta Members of Parliament with the serious and consuming interest natural to an Albertan. I see, however, that the revolution it is intended to provoke in my mind, and in the minds of my compatriots, is not yet complete. I am still instinctively using the outdated terminology imposed upon me by the black iron prison that is the Laurentian empire.

The declaration commences with a long explanation of how “Alberta” was created by central Canadian Liberals against the expressed political will of the residents. The territorial government would have preferred one great province called Buffalo to have been created on the soil which the Canadian wolf decided to cleave into “Alberta” and “Saskatchewan.” Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook!

The natural conclusion would seem to be that to make any use of “Alberta” as a conceptual category is to play the game by the empire’s rules. And, in fact, the third of the 17 (!) demands in the declaration is that prospective adherents “recognize Alberta — or Buffalo — as a culturally distinct region within Confederation.”

Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism.

It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands.

“Still others came to Alberta driven by the desire for freedom from government oppression,” the declaration adds, naming “African-americans, Jews, Mennonites and Mormons.” This diverse swarm of humanity has “formed a culture of self-sufficiency, respect for rule of law, and equality of opportunity.” The explanation of how a similar mixture of peoples formed and upheld an explicitly socialist republic for decades next door, in Saskatch — I mean, East Buffalo — has been omitted.

It turns out that the people who came from the corners of the Earth to dwell in West Buffalo were sailing into a trap. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren now find themselves once again bled white by a tsardom’s cold and distant bureaucracy.

“The economic and social challenges faced by Canada,” we are told, “... are the symptom of the colonial power structures from which Alberta and Saskatchewan were born.” Many Buffalonians “are disconnected from, and feel disrespected by, the power class of the Laurentian consensus.” Alberta faces “systemic inequities.” Confederation

cannot be “sustainable” without “structural change within its institutions of power.”

Is this the sort of language that you would expect to hear from a band of self-reliant classical-liberal pluralists who believe in equality of opportunity rather than redistributive egalitarianism? It savours more of postwar post-marxism to me; Wexit with a sprinkling of Frantz Fanon, or Pamela Palmater.

But perhaps the main task is to train the Buffalo audience in an unfamiliar and unnatural argot of victimhood, one in which injustices are always “systemic” and change must always be “structural” and you get a failing grade if you go a hundred words without mentioning undifferentiated “power.” If you feel “disrespected,” as we Albertans surely often do, you should immediately take that to be evidence of a conspiracy against your ambitions. And if it should occur to you that one of the signatories of the Buffalo Declaration now protesting perpetual Albertan exclusion from government was a minister of the federal Crown 52 months ago, well, maybe that’s your false consciousness talking.