Attending a recent independence rally in Edmonton, Alberta, Calgary-based management consultant James Albers found that “One could scarcely miss the parallels between the plight of Alberta today and that of the American colonies before 1776—only now the offending party is Ottawa, not Westminster.” Albers compares the Stamp Act of 1765 to Canada’s infamous National Energy Program that eviscerated Alberta’s economy, and the Tea Act of 1773 to Bill C-69 (the No Pipelines Act). As for the four Coercive Acts of 1774, we have the Emissions Cap, Equalization (the redistribution of wealth from the West to the East), the Net Zero fantasy, and the Tanker Ban.
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What all this means should be obvious to any sentient person. “Our freedoms—of speech, of enterprise, of provincial autonomy—are being strangled under a national bureaucracy.” Canada no longer works for Alberta and the West. “Injustice by Ottawa,” Albers concludes, “has long since moved from aberration to institution,” as it did for the American colonies in the 1770s.
Though diehard loyalists will disagree, it is now time for Western Canada, in particular Alberta, to get its revolutionary act together. There is no longer any doubt that Canada is a broken, dysfunctional country, a disjointed collection of ten semi-independent provinces and three sparsely populated northern territories, superposed upon a chasm-wide divide between the East-Central “Laurentian” elite of bankers, Crown corporations, government agencies, media Jacobins and powerful political families on one side and the agricultural and energy-producing, partially rural-based, Texan-like, hardworking and self-reliant prairie West on the other. The West was never fully integrated into the Confederation as an equal partner, being consistently exploited by the Upper Canadian Anglo-Presbyterians, Québécois grandees, and their descendants who still rule the upper tier of Canadian politics.
In his 1954 book “Social Credit and Federal Power in Canada,” political scientist James Mallory described the Prairie additions to the nation as “provinces in the Roman sense.” The Prairie provinces were regions dominated by the administrative center in the East to whom they owed fealty and paid tribute. Similarly, in his recent C2C essay on Alberta’s future, University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper explains: “Ottawa acted as a new Rome on the Rideau.” The Western provinces “existed to strengthen and benefit Laurentian Canada by analogy with Roman Italy, and to enrich its leading citizens.”
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It is appropriate in this connection to recall the policy recommendations of Clifford Sifton, a cabinet member in Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government from 1896 to 1905. As J.W. Dafoe writes in his biography, “CLIFFORD SIFTON in Relation to HIS TIMES,” Sifton was responsible for immigration to the Prairie, what he called the Last Best West, and defended the “stalwart peasants in sheep-skin coats” who were turning some of the most difficult areas of the West into productive farms.
Yet he plainly had a change of heart, unless his real intentions were covert. In a speech to Parliament, quoted by the Alberta Prosperity Project, Sifton said: “We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire, that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work.” The fact is not in dispute.
In the immortal words of the late, Liberal “rainmaker” Keith Davey, “Screw the West. We’ll take the rest,”—which makes neither economic nor practical sense. In any event, Alberta and the Prairie West, Canada’s food and energy breadbasket, have gotten a raw deal from the central establishment since their inception as part of the Dominion.
Tensions are now about to reach a boiling point. No demon that was ever foaled is or was as perilous for Canadian unity as Mark Carney, except perhaps for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whose 1980 National Energy Program (NEP), as noted, critically depressed Alberta’s economy. Carney is demonstrably bad news for the prairie West, and the spirit of independence is now circulating in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
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As Preston Manning, one of Canada’s most influential public figures and a force for good, wrote, “Voters, particularly in central and Atlantic Canada, need to recognize that a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession—a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it.” Unfortunately, it’s rather too late now. The people have misspoken.
Carney’s plans are well known, as touched on above: caps on oil and gas emissions, a phased-in fossil fuel ban, a hidden tax on heavy industry, no more pipelines (Bill C-69), increased investment in failed renewables, a continued Tanker Ban, and more. He makes this clear in his 500-page globalist manual for national destruction, “Values.” A meme making the rounds these days has to do with Justin Trudeau rhetorically asking the country: “Miss me now?”
Of course, Trudeau was merely Carney’s stooge, a wavy-haired soyboy the country took to its bosom. His non-telegenic master is now in full control, his aura as a cosmopolitan banker proving irresistible to the average Canadian voter. As things now stand, and as they have stood since the incorporation of Alberta and Saskatchewan into the Confederation in 1905, the federal state will persist in feeding parasitically off the West while paradoxically hampering the very infrastructure that supports it.
Western resentment will continue to fester, and an eventual break-up is a distinct possibility. It could happen more quickly than expected. One thinks of the famous quote from Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (sometimes attributed to Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald)—How did you go bankrupt?—Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. In a significant development, the various Albertan independence movements have now coalesced, thanks in part to Bill 54 Election Statutes Amendment Act, which makes it easier to organize a successful independence referendum.
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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has just announced the formation of an upcoming ‘Alberta Next Panel,’ which she will chair, “to engage in town halls and discuss Alberta’s future within Canada, focusing on protecting the province from ‘hostile’ federal policies.” Smith envisions a provincial referendum by 2026, respecting a citizen-led petition with sufficient signatures to include such a question on the ballot. It will be a project pitted with obstacles, but a brave one, nonetheless.
The pot is being stirred. It is becoming common knowledge in much of Western Canada that Prairie stalwarts and Laurentian elites had entered into an incompatible marriage, much like the relation between the American colonies and the British Crown, in which a “senior” partner exploits a “junior” associate. The original slogan of the Western provinces lobbying for their share of political authority and economic substance, coined by Manning, was “The West Wants In.” Now it sounds a lot more like “The West Wants Out.”
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