ALBERTA HAS A NEW WAY OF DEALING WITH CANADA
Fed up with being Ottawa’s afterthought, province saying no more Mr. Nice Guy
Alienated Albertans are now using a carrot and a stick to push the province’s agenda.
The carrot is the idea of shared prosperity, that if Alberta thrives, Canada also thrives. The stick is that if Canada thwarts Alberta, our response will be to raise hell. No more Mr. Nice Province. Jason Kenney’s United Conservative government was elected with a carrot-and-stick mandate. The new Fair Deal report is its first big move to raise a little hell.
Not every one of the 25 recommendations in the Fair Deal report — everything from possibly replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force to replacing the Canada Pension Plan with a provincial one — will be, should be, or can be acted upon. But across-the-board reform isn’t the main point. The goal is to shake up Canadian politics, give it a jolt.
Where could this disruptive approach go wrong? The biggest stumbling block is Alberta’s own notable tone-deafness. The Fair Deal report itself comes across as sober and balanced. But Albertans, and in particular conservative Albertans, are prone to overlooking the valid concerns of vulnerable groups, as happened for decades with Indigenous groups, which are only now getting a fairer share of oil and gas profits and jobs.
But one crucial point — if you think it’s only conservatives in Alberta who are angry about our deal in Confederation, here’s a sample of what then Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley said in Ottawa in April 2019. Notley was speaking to the Senate about Bill C-48, the outrageously discriminatory tanker ban on Alberta oil. The law makes it perfectly OK to tanker American, Saudi, Algerian or Norwegian oil into Quebec or New Brunswick, and to tanker Newfoundland oil for export, but illegal to tanker Alberta oilsands crude from the northwest B.C. coast.
“Toss C-48 in the garbage,” Notley said. “It’s where it belongs.”
And: “No country produces its energy resources as safely and with the kind of attention to the climate as we do in Alberta. This is not a tanker ban, it is an Alberta ban.”
And: “It is a policy that is effectively very divisive. … Ultimately what you’re going to do is hurt our country and its sense of unity. Those are the stakes.”
In that final comment, Notley spelled out the plain facts about Alberta alienation. A huge number of us are despairing about our place in Confederation, wondering if there is any way we can succeed, if there’s any reasonable path ahead.
The UCP plan is to channel that widespread alienation into the constructive goal of a better deal for Alberta and Canada. Of course, this effort won’t go over well with the many Trudeau loyalists who favour the status quo and especially with activists intent on throttling our oil and gas industry.
In the coming months, they’ll argue there’s nothing amiss with the current federal deal, that it’s only right that wealthy Canadians, namely fat cat Albertans, should pay for the social services of poorer Canadians. They’ll downplay and minimize Alberta’s valid legislative grievances. They’ll give barely a thought to the many unemployed Alberta workers and failed Alberta businesses. Finally, they’ll dictate from afar what we Albertans must do to solve our problems, then be appalled when we reject their ill-conceived ideas.
No doubt, we’ll also again be hit with the ultimate insult from a Quebec provincial leader, who will pronounce that Alberta oil and pipelines are “socially unacceptable” in Quebec.
It strikes me that other Canadians don’t quite grasp just how incendiary this overall approach and that particular comment are.
Consider this: Albertans have paid more into the federal equalization program than all other Canadians combined, putting
$240 billion into the program from 2007 to 2018 alone, with Quebec collecting $171 billion in that same period. Can’t Quebecers support the very industry that enriches them? Is it not the height of arrogant ingratitude to lash out at it?
The strength of Kenney’s Fair Deal push is that it singles out the equalization fiasco as its main priority. The panel strongly advocates for Albertans to vote on whether they support this federal program.
It’s hard to know what, if any, lasting effect such a non-binding referendum will have. Maybe it changes nothing. Maybe other Canadians will do all in their power to denigrate the vote and ignore the outcome, unless of course the vote supports equalization.
But I like the self-confident approach of staging a referendum. The act of voting, of declaring what we want on a crucial issue, will fuel the conviction that we should have far more control of our own future, not folks in Ottawa, Montreal or Toronto.
David Staples is a columnist for the Edmonton Journal
No country produces its energy resources as safely and with the kind of attention to the climate as we do in Alberta. This is … an Alberta ban.