Alberta’s separation threats mostly an elitist game
The angry Albertan has struck again. And he sounds like this. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.” “The rest of Canada owes us big time.” “Trudeau is deliberately wrecking our province.”
Not exactly the smartest way to win hearts and minds across the country, but anger has a way of blotting out intelligence.
Regardless, there certainly is a lot of explosive anger in Alberta these days. And a lot of people who should know better are willing to throw a match at it.
The anger stems from frustration over stalled oil pipeline construction; pipelines that were supposed to ship Alberta’s plentiful oil supplies to the United States and other export markets. They are in limbo mainly because of objections from environmental and Indigenous activists, which have been upheld by the courts.
When combined with other complications in the U.S oil market, it means Alberta’s oil is fetching next to nothing compared to the usual benchmark prices. Understandably, this makes a lot of people mad because so many of them depend on a thriving oil industry for well-paying work. So it’s not surprising that we have seen large protest rallies, especially when Liberal politicians are in the vicinity (always a handy target in Alberta), and noisy truck convoys in rural regions where the petroleum industry is the only game in town.
And, of course, we are hearing more from the separation bogey man who always seems to pop up at times like this. But this time we have the elite, our so-called leading lights, leading the separation band wagon.
First there was Brett Wilson, who raked in millions of dollars selling equities in oil and gas companies and went on to become a celebrity with CBC’s Dragons’ Den. Wilson took up the separation cudgel by tweeting that although he wasn’t a separatist, the Liberal party “was collaborating to push Alberta and Saskatchewan out of confederation.” In other words: Alberta is so alienated and oppressed we might as well separate. Wilson has also absurdly tweeted that Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation are guilty of treason because of their opposition to pipelines.
And then Jack Mintz chimed in with an op-ed in the Financial Post in which he declared that Alberta had a better case for exiting Canada than Britain does for exiting the EU.
Mintz was the president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute at one time and then went on to become director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. He is also sits on the board of Imperial Oil. That would be the same Imperial Oil that is a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the giant multinational that deliberately buried early evidence of global warming due to carbon emissions. “Whatever negatives Alberta would face are easily swamped by the positives that would come with separation,” Mintz wrote.
Jason Kenney, one-time federal Conservative cabinet minister and now leader of Alberta’s official opposition, doesn’t endorse separation. But he’s happy to stoke the flames. Within days of the court ruling in August that put the brakes on construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline, Kenney told a national TV audience that he had never heard so many people in Alberta talk about separation.
Like Wilson, Kenney also has it in for environmentalists and has pledged to set up a “war room” to deal with them should he be elected premier.
Wilson, Mintz and Kenney never explain how separation or threatening to withdraw Alberta’s contribution to equalization payments would hasten pipeline construction. Thankfully, a recent opinion poll indicates that the majority of Albertans don’t buy into separation, which, if it were to happen, would leave most Albertans swamped while people like Wilson, Mintz and Kenney would remain high and dry.
Like many other people, they have all done well by Alberta.
Surely they could come up with a better solution for its current predicament than threats of separation. Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based writer and freelance columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @GillianSteward