We wasted 60 years indulging secessionist fantasies in Quebec. Must we make the same mistake in Alberta?
Yes, it’s absurd that a minority of malcontents in the richest province in the most blessed country on Earth could be so marinated in self-pity as to persuade themselves that an adverse election result is sufficient cause to pitch the province and the country into the madness of secession.
Yes, it’s odious that the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, should now be attempting to use that same minority of malcontents as a weapon to extract concessions from the rest of Canada – even as she pretends to disavow their cause.
But if we are honest with ourselves we will concede that the blame for this situation rests mostly with us, the Canadian majority. The fault is ours not because Canada has treated Alberta particularly unfairly: though every province can complain about this or that federal policy, the notion that Alberta is systematically victimized is a bit of statistical sleight of hand, a matter of substituting “province” for “income” and “age” as the explanatory variables in calculations of fiscal incidence.
Albertans, that is, pay exactly the same federal income tax rates as other Canadians, in the same way that they pay exactly the same CPP levies. There is no discrimination. The only reason they pay more, on average, in federal taxes, or receive less, on average, in CPP benefits, is because they are a) richer and b) younger, on average, than their cousins in other provinces.
Albertans have more legitimate reason to complain about misbegotten federal policies toward the energy sector, from the National Energy Program to Bill C-69 and the emissions cap. But these policies were and are not just bad for Alberta: they’re bad for the country as a whole. The whole country was made poorer by the NEP, which is why a federal government with most of its seats in central Canada, the Mulroney Conservatives, abolished it.
So no, the rest of Canada is not to blame for Alberta separatism, in the sense of having provoked it. It is, rather, our long history of indulging the pernicious idea that it is a legitimate response to a complaint of ill-treatment, real or imagined, to blow up the country – or to threaten to.
We first went down this road, of course, with regard to Quebec, and have paid the price for it, in decades of pointless arguments, wasted effort and economic decline – especially in Quebec. Now it seems we are condemned to repeat exactly the same mistakes, and to learn exactly the same painful lessons, with regard to Alberta.
Let’s not, shall we? Let us instead remind ourselves that there is no legitimate moral basis, outside of a state of colonial oppression, to secession, and no reason to treat it as if there were. You have, of course, the right to leave the country if you wish. You do not have the right to take a piece of it with you. You can’t just help yourself to the territory of Canada, even if you hold a vote on it.
There would be at least the pretense of a case if the territory in question had predated the country as a sovereign, self-governing state. But neither Alberta nor Quebec meets that test. Alberta was created by federal legislation. Most of the present-day territory of Quebec was added after 1867; the remainder was carved out of the Province of Canada at Confederation, by an act of the British Parliament.
Neither is there any legal right to secede. The Constitution, like those of most federations, makes no mention of it (several expressly forbid it), and whatever murky “duty to negotiate” on the part of the rest of Canada the Supreme Court may have conjured out of the 1998 Secession Reference, it does not necessarily imply a duty to negotiate secession.
The court was clear, however, that secession could only be legal if it were enabled by the necessary constitutional amendments. Which means it would have to be negotiated. Which means it would never happen. The negotiations – a series of zero-sum games involving at least 11 players, not counting the Indigenous groups, with no ground rules or timetable and probably requiring referendums in multiple jurisdictions both before and after – would lead rapidly nowhere.
That leaves a unilateral, i.e., unlawful secession as the alternative. Which will also never happen – the guarantor of which is not, as every halfwit instantly objects, the army, but the well-documented desire of Quebeckers, or Albertans, or people in bourgeois, mortgage-holding democracies the world over, to live in a state based on law.
Those other halfwits who object, even today, that “this is an entirely political process,” as if politics were not everywhere informed by the law, only show how little they have learned from the last 60 years. Which may explain why we are revisiting this nonsense once again.
Gifted article: theglobeandmail.com |
