WESTERN ALIENATION MAY HAVE A NEW VOICE. BUT WHAT IS THE ‘BUFFALO PROJECT,’ WHY IS BRAD WALL INVOLVED, WHO IS FINANCING IT AND WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN FOR CONFEDERATION?
Brad Wall claims he is “done with politics.”
“I’m interested in politics but I’m just not going to run for anything,” the former Saskatchewan premier said, as he focuses on his new job as special adviser for law firm Oslers in Calgary.
But there is a Hotel California effect to the political game — you can check out but you never really leave.
Hence Wall’s involvement with something called the “Buffalo Project,” a nascent initiative that includes what one source called “serious financial backers,” aimed at offering an unapologetic voice for western Canadian interests.
The name itself is provocative. Buffalo was the name of the prairie “super-province” combining modern-day Alberta and Saskatchewan that Frederick Haultain, the first premier of the Northwest Territories, hoped to create in 1905. The Liberal prime minister at the time, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, decided against creating what would have been a large, conservative Western counterweight to central Canada, and instead designated them two separate provinces.
Buffalo appears to be the equivalent of a U.s.-style political action committee, an organization that pools contributions and donates the funds to specific campaigns. Wall denies it is a vehicle for his ambitions. He has no formal standing with the group, he said, though he has helped them by speaking at a fundraising dinner. But he is involved because he is as incensed as many other westerners about the impact of federal legislation on the energy and agricultural sectors.
“There are some things the federal government could do — first, hoist C-69 (the environmental assessment bill) and the tanker ban that applies only to one coast,” he said. “The government uses the defence that nationalizing the (Trans Mountain) pipeline underscores their support for the energy sector. But they moved the goalposts on Energy East, killing that, and withdrew from Northern Gateway. The ‘I feel your pain’ thing is getting old. I don’t think you do feel our pain.”
Derek Robinson, a spokesman for the Buffalo Project, said its advisory committee is still figuring out where it is going as an organization. But he said it is not promoting Western separatism. Buffalo will “stand up for the West, but within a united Canada,” he said.
What is not yet clear is who constitutes the group’s actual membership. Repeated questions about who sits on the advisory committee were met with hesitancy from Robinson.
“There is a reluctance,” he admitted, when asked if business leaders were uneasy about making their involvement public.
He said the Buffalo Project will disclose the appropriate information, in accordance with federal and provincial regulations, in due course. But he revealed that Dallas Howe, the former chair of Potash Corp.; Brad Gustafson, a Calgary-based portfolio manager; Grant Fagerheim, a veteran oilpatch executive; Stan Grad, a rancher, oil executive and philanthropist; and Bill Turnbull, a Calgary businessman and former CFL defensive back, are all involved with the organizing committee.
“Western Canadians are beyond frustration and we are simply another group that has decided it’s time to take action,” said Howe.
Robinson said the project was inspired by senior business people becoming exasperated with the direction of the country and deciding to build a fund to fight in favour of pipelines and modern agriculture, and against a carbon tax.
“At the moment, they’re trying to figure out how to have an influence,” said Robinson.
But he said Buffalo will likely support existing organizations such as Canada Action, which organized a pro-pipeline rally in Calgary on Monday; Suits and Boots, a pro-natural-resource-sector body founded by former Conservative leadership candidate Rick Peterson; and Alberta Proud, a western answer to the Ontario Proud conservative advocacy group that claimed an influential role in Ontario’s last election.
Robinson pointed out that while left-leaning groups like Leadnow have been around for years — some funded by foreign organizations such as the Tides Foundation — digital-media third parties are in their infancy on the right of the political spectrum.
He said he has no idea how much money has been raised so far but pointed out there are new limits on what third parties can spend in and out of the campaign period. (The new federal election law passed last week limits third parties to spending $500,000 in the writ period and not more than $1 million in the months before the official campaign. It also bans foreign donations.)
Ottawa is hoping that a pre-election giveaway in the shape of a $1.6-billion federal financial support package for the oilpatch, unveiled by ministers Amarjeet Sohi and Jim Carr in Edmonton on Tuesday, will cool the anger that is bubbling in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
It remains to be seen whether it has the desired effect of calming tempers. Westerners see themselves on the receiving end of a sustained assault by Ottawa on their interests at the same time as more politically favoured parts of the country are benefiting.
The news that Quebec will receive increased equalization payments came at the same time as Justin Trudeau effectively vetoed the revival of the Energy East pipeline project. “There is no support for a pipeline through Quebec,” he told CTV.
As Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid noted, talk of Alberta separatism is out in the open again, after a lull of 40 years. Trudeau appears to have provoked an almost identical response in the West as the rage that greeted his father’s National Energy Program in the 1980s.
Celebrity investor W. Brett Wilson told Braid that he feels Alberta is being pushed out of Confederation. “I’m not a separatist, I’m a frustrated nationalist,” he said.
Turnbull, a member of the Buffalo Project organizing committee, reiterated that it is not pushing for a separate “super-province.”
“It’s not about breaking the country up, but fixing the problems and keeping the country together,” he said.
But it is a volatile situation, and it seems it wouldn’t take much more provocation to persuade people it is time for the prairie provinces to head for the exit.