Hey, Alberta, here’s how to stop being a national doormat

Election day is shaping up to be the most disunifying event in Canada in recent history, but it doesn’t have to be. It could also be the moment where Alberta finally decides to stop acting like a national doormat and take charge of its future.

If Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer does not win a majority government, he will never get a chance to govern as a minority because none of the fringe parties will let him. The NDP, the Greens and the Bloc have all made it clear that the price of their co-operation is sacrificing Alberta and cancelling the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, no matter how punishing it will be to the entire country or how damaging it will be to national unity.

If Premier Jason Kenney wants to stem the tide of Alberta separation, he’s going to have to act quickly. Here are three things he could do right away:

First, Alberta should announce we will hold an immediate referendum on equalization rather than wait until the 2021 municipal elections. If Quebec has no interest in supporting Alberta’s aspirations to grow our economy, they can also do without an equalization program that relies on federal over-taxation of Alberta to fund it.

Second, Alberta must begin pushing our own political agenda. We need to resurrect the “firewall” proposals from a letter authored by academics in 2001. If we are going to become a nation within a nation, as Quebec effectively has done, we need to collect our own money, pay for our own programs, take charge of our own policing and have our own border control.

That means establishing a tax department so we can collect our own taxes and make it completely transparent how much we collect for our own provincial needs and how much we send to Ottawa. It means creating our own Alberta Provincial Police that answers to our political authorities, not Ottawa. It means creating our own immigration protocols so we can better meet the needs of our own employers for qualified labour. It means serving notice that we are leaving the Canada Pension Plan and developing our own Alberta Pension Plan. We have a young population with a high workforce participation rate and a relatively low number of retirees. By offering our own pension, we can reduce premiums for workers and maintain equivalent (or better) benefits for seniors. Most importantly, we can stop the skimming of other provinces. If they want enriched benefits, they can pay for it themselves.

And it means demanding an end to federal meddling in provincial jurisdiction. We need to reject the Canada Health Transfer and Canada Social Transfer and tell Ottawa to transfer tax points to us instead, so we can generate our own money to pay for our own social programs and run them our way.

Finally, Kenney needs to get our industries clear access to tidewater. If we wanted to be really bold, we would ask for a do-over on drawing our provincial boundaries.

What if we could go back in time to the boundaries that existed in 1903, a single jurisdiction that encompassed Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, full access to tidewater off several points on the northern coast, not to mention rich deposits of uranium, gold, zinc, copper, diamonds and myriad other metals and minerals for international export? Just imagine the combined strength of our three jurisdictions acting as one unified force, approving our projects within our borders with our regulatory bodies? I’d like a referendum on that.

If that’s too much of a pipe dream, let’s at least begin with establishing a couple of dedicated rights-of-way to deepwater ports. For more than a decade, we have heard various proposals for economic utility corridors. What are we waiting for? Let’s take the lead to identify an appropriate route with our friendly neighbours in the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and just buy the land ourselves.

These corridors should be at least a kilometre wide so they contain all the infrastructure we could ever need in the future: a new highway, a rail line, transmission lines, pipelines, fibre-optic cables and other utility infrastructure ending in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., and Churchill, Man.

Let’s be clear: No one holds veto power over our right to develop our resources. If B.C. and Quebec don’t want to work with us for mutual benefit, then fine. Let’s stop moaning about it and partner with those who will and tell Ottawa to stay out of our way.