Today, my good friend and colleague Loleen Berdahl and I published a piece in Policy Options putting Saskatchewan and Alberta’s latest constitutional legislation in historical perspective.
Up to a point, it tells a story similar to the one in the video Minister Nicolaides shared earlier this week. Unlike his video, though, we see the efforts to equip Saskatchewan and Alberta to fight off federal action on greenhouse gas emissions as a departure from the historical narrative. It’s difficult to see Ottawa’s proposed actions as enriching central Canada at Alberta/Saskatchewan’s expense.
I think it’s important that we see the video as part of a concerted effort to use the narrative of alienation and exploitation to frame the coming fight over GHG emissions. It’s certainly easier to rally supporters to that banner than to the defense of unrelenting carbon emissions.
The Minister’s video has offered us what we in the post-secondary sector like to call a “teachable moment.” David Toews quickly pointed out that the video relied heavily on a book, Home Rule for Alberta, that was explicitly white supremacist. I found the book and skimmed bits of it. It includes gems like “Admission of coloured people, yellow or black, constitutes a possible menace to the supremacy of the white race, and can rightly be objected to under the law of self-preservation.” OK, then.
But here’s the thing. It’s not just that the Minister picked the wrong book, or that the staffer who wrote the script didn’t actually read it, though that’s certainly the case. The thing is that the very notion of “the West” or “Alberta” as it’s conceived in these narratives of alienation are fundamentally based in white supremacy. Jared Wesley and Sylvia Wong have written an excellent piece looking at “how the Government of Canada helped cultivate values of settler colonialism, populism, individualism, frontier masculinity, and moral traditionalism among the settler population” that shape Alberta’s political culture to this day.
The government of Canada negotiated treaties to clear the way to settle the territory that would soon become Alberta and Saskatchewan. It displaced Indigenous people to create space for immigrants from Europe and the United States. The notion of the West that those settlers formed was very much shaped by the racist ideas expressed in Home Rule.
The video talks about the injustice of Saskatchewan and Alberta not being given authority over their natural resources when they were founded, and the campaign to remedy the situation. What it leaves out (as did we in our IRPP piece) is that the transfer of jurisdiction included agreements between the provinces and the federal government regarding Indigenous hunting rights. According to one legal scholar “the NRTA has been interpreted as having unilaterally altered the treaty hunting rights that Prairie Indians insisted upon during treaty negotiations to secure their land-based livelihoods into the future.”
Here we are, almost a century later, and the provinces are mobilizing to fight to protect a perceived threat to their jurisdiction and yet again doing so without any meaningful consultation with Indigenous leaders.
As we point out in the Policy Options piece, the demographics of these provinces are changing, and political leaders cannot expect narratives of alienation that are not inclusive to go unchallenged.
The narrative of western alienation is a narrative of victimhood: of industrious settlers denied authority, exploited economically and disrespected culturally. Some of the narrators — including Premier Smith, in her remarks in question period — are so blinded by their sense of victimhood that they can’t see the false equivalency between their troubles and the experiences of those whose language, culture and wellbeing have been systematically attacked by the Canadian state.
postscript: Thanks to Nate Pike for getting me thinking about this today. We had a great chat, which will be on his podcast sometime soon.
Thank you for this informative blog! I think after events in the Legislature today, you can do a part 2. I’m tired of the UCP and their leader’s non-apologies. There is certainly no bottom to the cesspool this incarnation of the UCP can tap. Keep on writing, Lisa!
I’ve come to believe that Danielle Smith has become a sock puppet for Barry Cooper and the Free Alberta Fantasists; now joined by fellow-conspiracists Take Back Alberta (To The 18th Century). The (un)constitutional blather has been joined by NRA-style gun nuttery. Yay.
I dunno, they sound to me like either concrete-tower intellectuals (I doubt the U of C could ever afford ivory sheathing) or perhaps 2-year-old boys refusing to eat their vegetables. Whichever; the snark and snippery are making Alberta look like Oilberduhstan. Has François Legault said anything nice about the UCP? After all, Quebec separatists are supposedly the inspiration for the FAF, and maybe TBA(18th C). Are they all fellow-travellers? Or is Legault annoyed when Oilberduhstan copycats steal his thunder?
Western alienation (or “pitching a hissy fit”) gets a lot of press attention, but it doesn’t get a lot of support. Polls don’t show anything like a plurality for Alberta leaving Confederation. There’s talk of a referendum if Canada doesn’t rewrite the Constitution to Barry Cooper’s satisfaction. I say, bring it! Let’s drag this into the open and find out how many want to break loose. It’s way less than the “30 to 40%” Rob Anderson recently claimed.
What could possibly be the endgame for Smith & the Utter Chaos Party? The childish “blame Trudeau” rants have worn very, very thin. So are Smith’s foolish “we’re victims like you” statements and non-apologies to First Nations people. How about instead, Smith et al concentrate on real problems—like rising food prices and failing health care? (Oh, that’s right…Smith wants Medicare to fail so she can privatize it. But that’s for another day.)