How Quebec could help to sell Western separatism.
ALBERTA SEPARATISTS SEEK BLOC’S TIME-TESTED INSPIRATION
IT DIDN’T REALLY MATTER WHO WE VOTED FOR IN THE PARTY, IT JUST SEEMED LIKE THEY GOT MIXED UP WITH THE EASTERN ELITES. THE BIGGEST THING RIGHT NOW IS EQUALIZATION. — MURRAY WILLIAMSON, 83-YEAR-ID REAL ESTATE AGENT SELLING FARM LAND IN THE REGION
Western separatists, dismayed by the direction of Erin O’toole’s Conservative Party this election, are drawing inspiration from an unlikely source: the Bloc Québécois.
“We can learn from Quebec,” said Jay Hill, interim leader of the Maverick Party, formerly known as Wexit Canada.
Resentments among some in the West toward Ottawa continue to run high in Western provinces, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where frustrations are mounting over a perceived lack of appreciation for its oil and gas industry and a federal transfer system that has starved the West of much-needed revenues.
In response, prairie separatists are seeking to establish a party that, similar to the Bloc, would act exclusively in the interests of the West as a way to elevate its profile within the federation and push for policies more supportive of a fossil fuel-based economy. Their bid comes as Liberal leader Justin Trudeau seeks to re-establish a majority government on election day Sept. 20, and as support among right-leaning voters for the Conservative Party of Canada has waned.
To ensure a purely Western orientation, the Maverick Party’s 27 candidates are running solely in prairie provinces and northern territories. Their pitch is simple: for decades, voters in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and mainland B.C. have almost uniformly supported a common vision, only to stand by as Ottawa crafts policies that appease the desires of Quebec and Ontario. The only antidote, they say, is true regional representation.
“Wrapping ourselves in the Maple Leaf Flag only ensures, as patriots, that we will continue to be abused by central and eastern Canada,” said Hill, a former member of Parliament for the Conservatives for 17 years.
Hill, a self-proclaimed “slow learner,” said he has since changed his tune on Canada’s parliamentary system, and is now seeking to consolidate a disgruntled Western voter base that has come to question its place in confederation. That involves proposing a softer version of separation, something like "separation-lite” that favours gradually shaving down Ottawa’s centralized power base and establishing a more distinct Western region.
It could prove a steep climb. Even in Alberta, where separatist sentiment is most prominent, alternative candidates are polling well below mainstream parties. Even so, their numbers are already high enough to influence races at the riding level.
In a recent Leger poll, nine per cent of Alberta respondents said they intended to vote for alternative parties, roughly split between the separatist Maverick Party and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC), which offers a more bare-knuckled populism than strict Western-first policy. Conservative support in the province, meanwhile, sits at 47 per cent, followed by the Liberals (24 per cent) and NDP (17 per cent).
Still, Western-oriented parties see opportunities to make major gains this election, as conservative voters’ grudging support for O’toole remains low. According to the same Leger poll, just 24 per cent of Albertans thought O’toole would make the best prime minister of all leaders, compared with 16 per cent for Justin Trudeau. That actually marked a substantial improvement from a separate Leger poll two weeks earlier, where just 15 per cent of voters chose O’toole as best potential prime minister, several points behind both Jagmeet Singh and Trudeau.
“Even though a lot of people are voting for Mr. O’toole, there’s not necessarily a bunch of enthusiasm for him,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president at Leger.
Western separatists, for their part, say O’toole in particular has gone too far to appeal to the East, causing the Conservatives to adopt policies that they view as directly opposed to their interests or at best represent a watered-down conservatism that is hard to distinguish from the Liberals.
“That’s the difference between the Maverick Party and the Conservative Party of Canada: we have one stakeholder, and that’s Western Canada,” Josh Wylie, the Maverick Party’s candidate in the Foothills riding of southern Alberta, said during a recent rally in Cayley, Alta. “There is no conflict, there is no confusion. We can be very clear about who we represent and how we represent them.”
At that rally, about 60 attendees packed into the small community hall in Cayley, a hamlet south of Calgary situated in the middle of a sea of canola and barley.
The event, which perplexingly begins with the singing of Canada’s national anthem, exhibits a deep distaste for Ottawa’s treatment of other provinces, most notably Quebec. A mix of ranchers, farmers, and other blue-collar workers in attendance audibly groan as the Maverick candidate references Trudeau’s recent decision to transfer $6 billion to Quebec without conditions, ostensibly to cover childcare costs.
Wylie, a square-jawed oilpatch consultant and former Conservative voter, tells his supporters that these sorts of policies have continued even after nearly every seat in
Alberta and Saskatchewan went in support of Andrew Scheer following the 2019 election.
“We swept Alberta and Saskatchewan, we did what we were supposed to do at the time,” he says. “And in return for that loyalty that we showed to that party, we got Erin O’toole and a carbon tax in their policy platform.”
Their frustrations extend beyond the energy sector. One cattle farmer in attendance says severe drought this season has obliterated his hay harvest, reducing his total output from 1,208 bales last year to just 67. While Western farmers in Canada have not been able to access government supports to make up the losses, he says, U.S. officials have offered payouts to farmers in Montana and elsewhere, who have in turn bought up the already-dwindling hay supplies in Canada and in turn caused a further spike in prices.
Among those in attendance, there is a common and repeated sense that a similar neglect would not take place under a more Western-oriented government.
At the root of their broader distaste around how wealth is distributed within the Canadian federation — most notably through transfer
programs like equalization — that have remained unchanged even in times of Conservative rule.
“It didn’t really matter who we voted in for the party, it just seemed like they got mixed up with Eastern elites,” said Murray Williamson, an 83-year-old real estate agent selling farm land in the region. “The biggest thing right now is equalization.”
Angered voters often take particular umbrage with the federal equalization program, established after the Second World War as a way to ensure a more equitable fiscal balance among provinces. The Fiscal Stabilization Program, a much smaller transfer program designed to counteract provincial revenue losses, has also become a target of Western leaders, most notably Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.
Alberta pays an average of about $20 billion into equalization each year, a number regularly cited by frustrated Western voters. According to Fairness Alberta, an activist group, the province has contributed $324 billion more to Ottawa than it received in return during the two decades between 2000 and 2020.
Kenney commissioned a “Fair Deal Panel” that, in its final report last July, recommended Alberta “press strenuously” to reverse recent changes to fiscal stabilization, and push ahead with a referendum on equalization.
Many observers have said the referendum amounts to nothing more than political theatre, while economists, for their part, largely argue that frustrations over equalization are misplaced.
Alberta has a higher proportion of wealthy people than other provinces, so it contributes more under the program’s per-capita formula. Its relative young population also means that it receives a smaller chunk of major transfers like elderly benefits.
Despite all the angst over equalization and carbon taxes, separatist feelings in the West are lower today than they were following the 2019 election, according to Duane Bratt, professor at Mount Royal University.
Western resentments were running high when First Nations groups blockaded a number of major railway crossings in early 2020 in protest of the building of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline through traditional Wet’suwet’en lands. At the same time, Vancouver-based mining giant Teck Resources had shelved its $20-billion Frontier oilsands mine, raising fresh doubts over the Liberals’ updated regulatory regime for oil and gas projects.
But the COVID-19 pandemic, Bratt said, put a damper on those resentments and rearranged voter priorities.
“It’s not as powerful a force as it was then, and it sure hasn’t gained momentum,” he said.
Still, there is widespread exasperation over Alberta’s battered oil industry, often reflected in its inability over the last 20 years to build major export pipelines, which have depressed prices for Canadian crude and sapped the province of tens of billions in foregone revenue. New federal environmental policies only layer on new restrictions, according to some.
The Maverick Party and People’s Party of Canada have been railing against Ottawa’s carbon tax, now set to rise to $170 per tonne by 2030, saying it raises household costs in Canada while failing to curb pollution from some of the world’s largest emitters, like China. Supporters of the tax, meanwhile, say it’s the most efficient way to lower emissions in a world where sea levels are rapidly rising and atmospheric temperatures are gradually ticking upward.
The Liberal government’s Bill C-69, which updated the regulatory review process for major projects, and C-48, which banned oil tankers from docking at ports along the northern half of the B.C. coast, are also viewed as explicit attacks on the West.
O’toole has promised to repeal both bills and has voiced support for Canada’s oil and gas industry. He has been decidedly more cautious about his position toward the separatist elements of the Conservative’s Western base.
Just one day after the Maverick Party’s rally in Cayley, O’toole was in Quebec City presenting voters with a 10-point promise to Quebec nationals, who he said would be fully supported within a Conservative government.
“All Quebec nationalists are welcome in the Conservative party,” he said. “It is your home.”
His promises largely mirrored some of the requests that have been tabled in the west, including a pledge to give Quebec more control over immigration, a single tax return, and a commitment to stay out of provincial policies like its secularism bill, which outlaws government workers from wearing religious symbols.
Western separatists, if given the chance, say they would potentially create a Western-specific police force, similar to the Sûreté du Québec, or push for looser gun restrictions through a provincial Chief Firearms Officer.
It remains unclear whether Albertans, angry as they may be, will be wiling to support a pair of parties currently polling at around five per cent, and who held no seats in the House of Commons during the last parliamentary session.
The Mavericks have also sought to distinguish themselves from the PPC by steering away from more sensitive social issues like immigration and abortion, and have proposed a softer approach to separatism than its most hardcore supporters might desire.
Rather than outright separation, the party proposes a so-called “two track” system, under which it would first put forward a series of smaller policy positions that would weaken Ottawa’s influence over the region and, according to the party, allow more autonomy for the West.
“Of course, there’s no procedure or mechanism to allow us to leave right now even if the majority supported that. So, somehow we have to bring along the majority of Westerners to the idea that we’ve tried everything possible to convince the rest of Canada to change.”
The Mavericks and PPC together represent a conservative movement that has thus far struggled to establish itself in Canada’s parliamentary system. And seeing its own shortcomings, Hill said, they are now trying to model themselves after their sworn enemy: the Bloc Québécois and the province of Quebec.
“Who can realistically argue that the Bloc hasn’t been successful for the last 30 years?”