On Oct. 19, Albertans will vote in a referendum on whether they want to remain a province of Canada or take part in another referendum on whether to separate from the rest of the country.
The full referendum question reads, “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding referendum on whether or not to separate from Canada?”
How did we get here? And where could this lead?
Those are some of the questions explored in The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away, a new book by Tyler Dawson, a former Alberta correspondent for The National Post and currently an opinion editor for The Globe and Mail.
The slim volume is the latest in a series of essays published by Sutherland House, available individually as books or by annual subscription.
Dawson says one of the jobs of journalism in recent years is to try and moderate discussions between different factions in society — in this case, those on either side of the Alberta separation question.
“This is something that I’ve been covering, on and off, for the better part of the last decade,” he said.
“And so, this was an opportunity, I felt, to give it a long-form serious treatment and hopefully help people on all sides of the issue understand each other a little bit better,” he said.
While Dawson is a journalist by trade, for large parts of this book, he is more of a historian, giving context to issues between Alberta and Ottawa that have festered for decades.
“One of the original sins, I guess you could say, was in 1905 when Alberta became a province, and Saskatchewan as well, those provinces did not get control over their natural resources.
“And there were examples way back of that in the beginning, you know, the National Policy under Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, which forced east-west trade as opposed to maybe more natural north-south trade on the prairies.”
“Those powers remained with the federal government in Ottawa until 1930, when there was a transfer of that power over to the provinces, and Alberta and Saskatchewan gained the full powers that the other provinces had,” he said.
Dawson says many of the same issues from back then are still problems today.
“Control over natural resources, the power to control your own destiny without Ottawa sort of dictating some of these things.”
“But it really isn’t until the 1980s when you have the National Energy Program that really the dynamic changes, permanently alters, I think, the political relationship between Alberta and Ottawa.”
The National Energy Program, among other things, famously redistributed oil wealth from the Western provinces to the rest of the country before it was dismantled in 1985. However, the damage was done, especially in Alberta.
Repairing the federal-provincial relationship has been the goal of both current Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney. Both hope another bitumen pipeline to the West Coast will go a long way to doing just that. The Alberta government is expected to unveil its proposal on Thursday.
But Dawson wants to stress to readers that the current moment is many decades in the making, and no single project can extinguish separatist sentiment.
“This has deep roots, and they fit within this tradition of grievance politics. And I also hope they come away with an understanding of why Alberta has not done this in the past, why Alberta has stayed in Canada, what benefits the province accrues for being in Canada, and things like that.”
Above all, he wants the reader to take the subject seriously, to realize what is at stake here.
“I hope they take away the sense that this is not just sort of fringe lunatics and conspiracy theorists, that there are people who really, truly, genuinely believe that their lives, the lives of their people they love, the lives of their neighbors are going to be better in an independent Alberta.”
The Republic of Alberta is an important and timely book and a good introduction to the issue. As Dawson writes in the conclusion, “If there’s anything the last hundred years in general and the last ten in particular have shown, there’s a cost in Canada’s regions when concerns go unaddressed.”
It seems those concerns are being addressed now. But will it be too late? We shall see.
The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away is published by Sutherland House.