A note to readers: I promised my newsletter posts would be longer than a Twitter thread, but shorter than an op ed. Seems I misspoke. This is a long one. I’m headed up the QEII on Wednesday for this panel, and I wrote this to get myself prepared. Next newsletter, I promise I’ll go back to short and snappy.
Alberta alienation has been around more or less since the province was formed in 1905. Agrarian populism has morphed into extractive populism; anger about the federally-regulated banks has morphed into anger about equalization; rejection of the central Canadian narrative of the country has been a constant.
While there is much continuity in the presence and expression of Alberta’s alienation, I would argue that the movement that fuels support for the Sovereignty Act isn’t your grandpa’s Alberta alienation.
As I’ve written elsewhere, “what has developed over the past three decades is an overt effort to cultivate a regional identity grounded in a shared political ideology. What is distinctive about Alberta, in this view, is its conservatism. And when Canada rejects conservatism, it rejects Alberta.” And this conservatism can’t be disentangled from the oil industry.
Reform or Retreat?
Until relatively recently, the core impulse of alienated Albertans was to fix Canada, either by making it more responsive to western concerns (by establishing new political parties or suggesting institutional reform like a triple-E Senate) or by installing a Conservative government in Ottawa. We can think of this as the reformist impulse.
But the 2001 Firewall Letter marked the start of a different impulse: to retreat into Alberta as a conservative homeland. Written just after Chrétien’s second re-election, it called for an Alberta pension plan, tax collection agency, provincial police force (sound familiar?) as well as an assertion of provincial authority over health care and a provincial referendum to force Senate reform back onto the provincial agenda.
What was the goal of the firewall? To keep tax dollars in Alberta, so that “only our imagination will limit the prospects for extending the reform agenda that [the Klein] government undertook eight years ago. … lower taxes will unleash the energies of the private sector, easing conditions for Charter Schools, [and] will help individual freedom and improve public education.” A conservative homeland, if you will.
After the re-election of the Trudeau government in 2019, Alberta alienation flared again. The Kenney government appointed the Fair Deal panel, which issued a report reprising the Firewall Letter recommendations, substituting a referendum on equalization for the referendum on Senate reform. A group of MPs penned the Buffalo Declaration, prominent Albertans (including Danielle Smith) took part in a conference hosted by Alberta Proud, focused on the question“Does Alberta have viable options and a credible case to go it alone if necessary?” and two lawyers and a political theorist got together to write the Free Alberta Strategy, with a proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act as its centerpiece.
The thing about the impulse to retreat is that most Albertans — including the Firewall authors — don’t really want to retreat from Canada. They’re frustrated reformers: they want to fix Canada, but Canada keeps resisting. And so the policy suggestions they make stay within the constitution and probably hurt Alberta more than they hurt the rest of Canada. (If Alberta pulls out of the Canada pension plan, or replaces the RCMP, would the rest of the Canada notice? or care?)
Upping the Ante: The Free Alberta Strategy
And so, knowing this, the Free Alberta Strategy (FAS) ups the ante. And the difference is that the Free Alberta authors might not be nearly as committed to remaining in Canada as the Firewall guys were. I don’t know where the two lawyers - Anderson and From - stand on the question of Alberta’s separation. But the political theorist - Cooper - is pretty clear in his views: “The position of the American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 is the position of many Alberta Patriots today.” (This language of Patriots has me thinking about Nelson Wiseman’s argument about the influence of American settlers on Alberta political culture).
The justification for the FAS is familiar, if articulated in a new way. Alberta has been “economically terrorized” (p. 13) by the Government of Canada, through (1) the equalization system and other transfers and (2) the deliberate strategy to phase out oil and gas. It goes on to argue that provinces are ‘voluntary’ members of confederation, “predicated upon the federal government abiding by its constitutional commitments to its members” (p. 21). [Some constitutional scholars may disagree with this interpretation…]. The federal government, the Strategy claims, has “relentlessly intruded” on provincial jurisdiction. And how has it done this? “They have used their own appointed and controlled federal courts to give these intrusions legal legitimacy.” So, never mind rule of law, because the courts are compromised.
The Sovereignty Act, as it’s described in the Strategy document would “would provide Alberta’s Legislature with the authority to refuse enforcement of any specific Act of Parliament or federal court ruling that Alberta’s elected body deemed to be a federal intrusion into an area of provincial jurisdiction, or unfairly prejudicial to the interests of Albertans.” The document goes deep into the need for a provincial police force that could be directed not to enforce offending federal legislation, a banking act that would try to push Albertans into provincially-regulated financial institutions to avoid enforcement of orders through the federal Banking Act, and a tax collection agency that would collect Albertans’ federal taxes owing, but not send them on to Ottawa. In other words, the full strategy would ensure that all Albertans were in violation of federal laws, but under the protection of the provincial government. (Trust me, it’s a wild read. And I left out the part where anyone working in the public sector would have their federal taxes held by the Alberta government).
The concluding paragraph claims that “in the end, the federal government will have to negotiate if they want to resolve the situation” — in other words, this would be a hostage-taking, and we’re all sitting on the floor of the bank with our wrists tied together.
To be perfectly clear, what Smith is proposing does not endorse this whole scheme. Her version is this: “to refuse provincial enforcement of specific Federal laws or policies that violate the jurisdictional rights of Alberta under Sections 92 – 95 of the Constitution or that breaches the Charter Rights of Albertans.” The legislation she proposes would set out a process by which the provincial legislature would make a special motion to not enforce a federal law or court ruling. Less ornate, still unconstitutional.
Where the Sovereignty Act Fits
How should we situate the Sovereignty Act in the narrative of Alberta alienation? Clearly, it is less reformist than it is retreatist. It comes short of pulling Alberta out of confederation, but imagines Alberta enjoying some kind of Confederation Lite: only as much part of Canada as it feels like. (But we have to recall that underlying all the retreatist proposals is a reformist idea: if only the rest of Canada takes Alberta’s alienation seriously, it will reform itself, and things will be better).
It is entirely consistent with the idea of Alberta as a conservative homeland. Last week’s announcement that Alberta would try to avoid having the federal firearms buyback program enforced in the province was a perfect illustration, trying to set the province up as a haven for those who value “property rights” over public safety.
Like last fall’s equalization referendum, it falls into the category of fantasy federalism, “proposals informed by wishful thinking rather than sound constitutional analysis, designed to excite conservative supporters but with no realistic chance of achieving their intended objectives.”
Where the Sovereignty Act diverges from the other proposals is in its blatant unconstitutionality. The Firewall guys were careful to colour inside the constitutional lines. The equalization referendum was fantasy, but it didn’t try to give the legislature the power to overrule courts. The Sovereignty Act, as one of its inventors has pointed out, is unconstitutional on purpose.
Why this? Why now?
I think there are two reasons we’ve seen this escalation from constitutional to unconstitutional proposal.
The first is that, as some observers predicted, the equalization referendum and other ‘stand up to Ottawa’ activities of the Kenney government promised a lot and delivered little. As you might expect, this was frustrating for Albertans alienated from the federal government. The Sovereignty Act promises to up the ante by taking actions the federal government can’t ignore.
The second reason is that we are in a new, and frankly terrifying, era. People are free to find the facts they want and act on them. In my reality, the Accountability Act is unconstitutional and COVID-19 vaccines are effective. In Danielle Smith’s reality, the Accountability Act is perfectly constitutional and COVID-19 vaccines are largely unnecessary except for the elderly. Trust in mainstream media, experts (ahem), and institutions is in freefall, particularly among those who have fallen prey to misinformation and disinformation. Norms are passé. The sovereign citizen movement — folks who think that laws just don’t apply to them — are in ascendance, and active in the Freedom Convoy.
Where does this leave us?
At this point, it’s tempting to catastrophize. On one hand, I take some comfort in the moderating effect of parliamentary government. If a newly-elected Premier Smith wants to hold her caucus together, she will have to water down her Sovereignty Act significantly. Even though the UCP members supporting Smith are willing to believe her assertion that the Act is constitutional, there are many in caucus who know better and are on the record saying they couldn’t support such an Act. And so the pressure is on Smith to find some kind of compromise.
On the other hand, once you’ve violated a norm, it’s easy to violate another. We need only look south of the border to see how quickly norms erode and democracy is in danger. The top takeaway from the Trump years is that the rule of law is essential to democracy. And so, any deliberate effort to erode it is highly problematic.
Hi Lisa,
I would push back on your characterization of the Firewall Letter. Almost all of its provisions are things that Ontario and/or Quebec have taken advantage of. And not necessarily by “Conservative Homeland” types in those jurisdictions. The Firewall letter (of which I was a signatory) was merely Alberta doing what the “Big Boys and Girls” of confederation were already doing. It contained proposals legislatively or constitutionally available to Alberta without requiring the permission or approval of any other jurisdiction (as you note). I would say it was profoundly Canadian, if you believe in a Canada composed of strong provinces and a weak federal government, as Firewall Authors all do!
Best,
Ken
Blaming Ottawa is a shtick that has served the Conservative movement going back to the 1930’s. Preston Manning made Ralph Klein’s miracle on the prairies possible by blaming Mulroney and resulted in the entire federal PC party being tossed out of Alberta; saving Alberta provincial conservatives. Then Harper was PM for 10 years and Alberta conservatives had to shut up about Ottawa. The result, Jim Prentice was defeated. The worst thing for Alberta conservatives is a conservative PM.
This year Alberta conservatives simultaneously complain about Trudeau killing the oil patch while the oil patch has record profits. Blaming Ottawa gets louder when the world wide price of oil drops. Alberta runs deficits and whines about Ottawa. It really exposes that we are a poorly managed petro province.
Lastly, the biggest whine conservatives have is about equalization. They never ask why Harper/Kenney did nothing about it. The current formula is the Harper formula. But we endlessly hear bleating about Lousy Trudeau.