Ultimatum from West: Fairness or exit
Four federal Conservative MPS from Alberta issued a manifesto for the province on Thursday, warning against the rising threat of western alienation and separatism and calling for clear efforts from Ottawa that they say would constitute a “concerted effort to repair our national bonds.”
Unless the perceived inequalities within Confederation outlined in the document are remedied, they caution, the strain between Alberta and the rest of the country will push the province to seek separation as its only recourse.
“One way or another, Albertans will have equality,” the letter concludes.
It was signed by four Alberta MPS: Arnold Viersen, Blake Richards, Glen Motz and Michelle Rempel Garner. Viersen, Richards and Motz did not respond by press time.
The 13-page “Buffalo Declaration” — named in homage to Sir Frederick Haultain’s original vision of Alberta and Saskatchewan as a united province called Buffalo — was released Thursday online and in the conservative Alberta-based publication The Western Standard.
The document has some echoes of the so-called “firewall letter,” the Alberta agenda published in the National Post in January 2001.
It also identifies structural imbalances in the country that Albertans believe perennially shortchange the province’s interests. But while that earlier document outlined a policy plan for Alberta to strengthen its powers within Confederation, and was addressed to then premier Ralph Klein, the Buffalo Declaration aims its demands directly at the federal government and the rest of Canada.
The Buffalo Declaration lists four distinct challenges that the signatories believe the province faces. Among them, the belief that Alberta has always been an unequal member of Canada; that Alberta has a distinct culture that has gone unacknowledged; and that Alberta has been treated as a colony within Confederation to be exploited for the benefit of the east rather than a partner.
The declaration calls for the House of Commons to publicly acknowledge the devastation of the National Energy Program on Alberta, and that acknowledgment would help tamp down some of the frustrations currently plaguing the federation.
“When you acknowledge something happened, that’s a starting point to fixing it,” Calgary Nose Hill MP Rempel Garner said.
It calls for reform of the equalization system and demands fairer political representation for the West, such as could be achieved with a different Senate arrangement. It also calls for arts and culture funding to be spread more equally to the west, and for Ottawa to “Ensure Western art is prominently displayed in national museums,” as well as “greater access for Western-based journalists to the Parliamentary Press Gallery to ensure widespread coverage of issues facing Alberta within the national news narrative.”
In an interview Thursday evening, Rempel Garner said the intention of many of these points was to broaden the discussion about Alberta; it’s not just a province that has an oil and gas industry, even though alienation is most often expressed via economic concerns.
“We spent a lot of time talking about cultural distinction, because there is cultural distinction,” Rempel Garner said. “And when there’s cultural distinction, art and a reflection of that culture is important to recognize.”
Much of the document reiterates what many inside and outside Alberta have been saying over the past several years: Federal insouciance towards Alberta’s recent economic troubles and federal policies and national attitudes seen as increasingly hostile to Alberta’s oil and gas sector have led to crisis-levels of alienation.
In February 2019, the Angus Reid Institute published polling that said 50 per cent of Albertans believed separation was a real possibility and 60 per cent would either strongly or moderately support the province joining a Western separatist movement.
In October’s federal election, the Liberals were driven out of every seat in both Alberta and Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe suggested alienation in the west was the highest he’d seen in his lifetime.
In a video posted online on Thursday, Rempel Garner said the “devastation” in her community compelled her to take more action. “I realize very intimately now that the problem — yes, there are problems with policies and yes, there’s a deep problem with this Liberal government — but the reality is there are structural inequities in Confederation that disadvantage people that I represent,” she said. “It’s not fair. And I would not be doing my job, on behalf of the people in my riding, if I didn’t seek to push the envelope and start a conversation on these issues.
“Something has to change. The declaration that we put forward contains many deep and concrete and provocative solutions to address the structural inequities in Confederation,” she said. “A line in the sand has to be drawn, and it’s being drawn today.”
The declaration comes in another moment of crisis as nationwide protests related to a British Columbia natural gas pipeline have brought portions of Canada’s rail industry to a grinding halt.
And, it also comes as the United Conservative government in the province is attempting to find its own ways to assert Alberta’s power within Confederation. The province had recently instituted a “Fair Deal” panel that toured the province, seeking input from Albertans on how best to realign Alberta’s relationship with the rest of Confederation.
Some of the ideas on the “Fair Deal” panel’s table were the same ideas promoted in the 2001 “firewall letter” co-authored by Stephen Harper (before he was prime minister) and several academics and conservative thinkers. The authors of Thursday’s declaration said things must go “much further” than what the “fair deal” panel is designed to do.
It also called upon leadership candidates for the Conservative party to address the issues it raises. In a statement, the current leader, Andrew Scheer, said his party had long advocated for democratic reform to “ensure Western Canadians have an equal voice in Canadian politics” while saying he would stay out of it, given the leadership contest.
Erin O’toole, who’s running for the leadership of the party, said in a statement that “the country is more divided than it has been in decades.”
Although similar in name to the Buffalo Project, another western group working on ideas to address alienation, the two are not connected said Brad Wall, the former Saskatchewan premier who has been involved with the pre-existing Buffalo Project. “However, having read the declaration and canvassed the history of Buffalo in speeches on many occasions over the last decade, I welcome this development and applaud these MPS for the effort to focus national attention on the abiding need for greater fairness for the west,” Wall told National Post on Thursday.