The New Solitudes: Never The Twain Shall Meet
One of the great benefits of Alberta’s place in Confederation is the amount of free advice the province receives from other provinces on how to comport itself. The well-meaning suggestions flow like a river. Grateful? You don’t know the half of it.
While Ontario has virtually nothing to say to Quebec about its loyalty oaths for immigrants or bans on religious symbols in public, the Trillium province has abundant opinions on how Alberta should not exploit its natural resources. A favourite Toronto trope is Albertans were just lucky to be born on a gold mine, so don’t go thinking you’re anything special.
The Toronto Star has a posse of columnists whose appointed duty seems to be advising Alberta to buck up and fall in line.
Québec offers helpful opinions on why “rich-as-Midas” Alberta should be honoured to shovel $12 billion a year into the Je Me Souviens coffers for cheap daycare, in vitro fertilization and festivals du festivals. Even as they demonize the safe transmission of Alberta bitumen through its sewage-clogged territory.
To the West, a Globe & Mail columnist offers Alberta the sober advice to just create a provincial sales tax and wean itself off of the cash cow of fossil fuels (playing the dummy hand on B.C.’s abundant coal resources). While ignoring the despoiling of B.C.’s natural beauty with its own sewage addiction.
The common denominator in all this guidance is that Alberta wants something it shouldn’t have because… well, look at its per-capita income etc. “They’re rolling in it on the Prairies, and now they don’t want to share as much?” Oh yes… those rednecks are always whining about something. As previously stated, very helpful message being punished for their success. And so well received in the West.
The torrent of instruction is a constitutional version of cancel culture. Provinces marinated in SJW mantras just can’t get their heads around why Alberta wouldn’t want to join the Enlightenment. Seen from the perspective of Queen & Spadina, Albertans are a clinger culture, unwilling to embrace the truths so self-evident in a city where they can’t get homeless off the streets and the subway to function in cold weather.
Or as author Douglas Murray writes in The Madness Of Crowds: “The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the Cold War at creating a new ideology.” C’mon, get on board like everyone else
But Alberta doesn’t “want” something from the Rest of Canada. Yes, there are cranks talking about separation and independence. And there is ample discussion about how Alberta wants to stop being the eternal backstop for Québec’s balance sheet.
The bien pensants to the East needn’t worry about anything that’s theirs— hydro, auto manufacturing, Great Lakes shipping— being curtailed to suit Albertans. Even though that’s what they’ve done in offering up Alberta’s energy industry on a platter to outsiders. Alberta’s offer to the Laurentian elite is simple. Stop telling us how to do business, and we’ll continue to let you run your own shop.
Albertans, who have funded the prosperity of so many who now resent them, are telling Canada that it has lost the Grand Narrative of the nation. Its complaints about the behaviour of its partners are a signpost that, as currently constructed, Canada is being held together by Equalization, hockey and binder twine.
What Alberta is suggesting is a return to a vision of what unites Canadians, not the reluctant acceptance of partners who’d rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Seen from the perspective of Alberta— and Saskatchewan— the current equation is a cynical plot device that freely cashes the cheques from Alberta while simultaneously reserving the right to carp about the province’s bookkeeping.
What Alberta and Saskatchewan ARE asking is that there not be two classes of citizenship in the federation. That any equalization schemes be seen as what they were intended for— help to the needy, not a permanent welfare cheque. By most reckoning, Quebec falls short of the category of destitute state. Its premier extolls the attractions of his province for immigrants choosing where to settle. Montreal’s downtown has been gentrified and reborn.
In the absence of a fair hearing, Alberta premier Jason Kenny has made it clear that the West will seek equity within the current framework by assuming files such as a provincial pension, a provincial police force and immigration controls. Hearings will determine the shape of that ask.
How will the East respond? Lecturing the West on being more like Toronto and Montreal is likely to pick a fight where everyone loses more than just the oil patch.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.