Chris Selley: Central Canadians are practically goading Alberta to consider separation
Of all the problems Canada faces in 2025, the prospect of Alberta sovereigntists winning a referendum and plunging the country into constitutional hell does not appear to be one of them. A Postmedia-Leger poll released last week, found just 29 per cent of Albertans supported the province 'becoming a country independent of Canada,' which is what the straightforward referendum question recently proposed by the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) would ask. That's even fewer than the 36 per cent of Quebecers who would vote Yes in their own sovereignty referendum, according to a Leger poll released before last month's federal election.
But good grief, Central Canada could hardly be doing more to try to pump the APP's tires. Ironically, that includes some Quebec separatists.
Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has offered support, in principle: 'I totally agree with provinces that stand up, that are loyal to their own parliament, that are capable of showing a strong hand,' he said earlier this month. This seems like the only logical strategic position for Quebec sovereigntists to take if — like the PQ, which is in pole position to win the next provincial election — they're actually planning on holding and winning a referendum and commencing divorce proceedings with Ottawa, the other provinces and First Nations.
Others in the Quebec sovereignty movement, however, haven't been able to resist broadcasting their contempt for Alberta. Legalities aside, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet averred earlier this month, a proper sovereignty-seeking entity 'has to have a culture of their own.'
'I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture,' he added disdainfully.
'In Quebec, we have a nation, a language, a culture, a distinct history,' Marie-Anne Alepin, president of the arch-nationalist Société St-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, told The Canadian Press earlier this month. 'They want an oil-based future. We have no common goals. We're not alike.'
Alepin and Blanchet appear to be offside Quebec popular opinion on the oil-and-gas question: 61 per cent of Quebec respondents to a SOM poll for La Presse, conducted in February, said they supported resuscitating a liquified natural gas project in the province, and 59 per cent said they supported resuscitating the Energy East pipeline, which would have sent oil from Western Canada through Quebec to Irving's Canaport facility in Saint John, N.B.
But in this respect, we're almost seeing a national-unity moment among Central Canadian elites — sovereigntist and federalist, Upper and Lower Canadian alike — with respect to Alberta.
'Perhaps it's time Alberta does go it alone and says goodbye to Canada,' a recent Toronto Star headline proposed. 'The province stands alone in its incurable sense of grievance with the rest of the federation,' columnist David Olive wrote — which is an altogether astonishing thing to say about a country that includes Quebec.
'Absent Alberta, Canada could confront Trumpism as a more united front,' Olive argued. 'And Canadian taxpayers would no longer have to subsidize Alberta's oilpatch, its increased housing supply, and its university research projects.'
In February, the Star declined to run an idiotic editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis that proposed Canada swap Alberta for California. But Moudakis posted it on X anyway, with 'Toronto Star' included in his signature. This mirrored Justin Trudeau's idiotic claimed remark to President Donald Trump that Canada might negotiate 'a trade for Vermont or California.' Joke or not, Trudeau didn't need to say what he was thinking of 'trading.'
(California is very much in the oil-and-gas industry, incidentally. And Vermont has some of the looser gun laws in the United States. But facts have little purchase when anglophone Central Canadian nationalism — which is to say anti-Americanism — kicks in.)
'I can assure you. No Canadian passport, no citizenship, no pension, and no future if you want to leave Canada,' Senator Kristopher Wells wrote Monday in an extraordinary missive on social media. It has been a common topic of dumb online conversation: Could Albertans keep their Canadian citizenship, as the separatist camp promises?
The answer is, of course they could. We allow dual citizenship. We don't revoke citizenship when people move away from Canada, even if it's forever. We grant citizenship to people who have never set foot on Canadian soil, and to anyone who's born on it — even if their parents are just here for a couple of weeks for that exact purpose.
Dumb online conversation usually doesn't matter. But Wells is a Trudeau-appointed senator … for Alberta. Not only does Central Canada hate us, the separatists can argue, but the people Central Canada appoints to represent us hate us. These are precisely the sort of comments Quebec separatists try to leverage to convince Quebecers that the Rest of Canada hates them — except, of course, Central Canadian elites would never say such things about Quebecers.
It hasn't worked for Quebec separatists. It doesn't seem to be working for Alberta separatists. But all this sneering could do an awful lot of damage to national unity along the way.
National Post cselley@postmedia.com
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