National Post
July 13, 2005
By Dr. Roger Gibbins
Alberta is somewhat of a puzzle for most Canadians. How can a province be so chronically unhappy with its place in Confederation when it is so prosperous, so blessed with natural resource wealth and has just posted a $5-billion surplus for 2004/05? What is it with those guys, anyway? For Albertans themselves, however, there is little mystery. Western alienation reflects the history of a province that spent its first 70 years on the margins of Canadian life, and then found itself with the financial capacity to play a major role in Confederation. Albertans responded to this opportunity with enthusiasm, but their efforts to come in from the cold met with little success. They were the principal architects of a Western Canadian strategy of national inclusion — "the West wants in" --but today that strategy is in tatters. Thus the central question for Albertans as they enter their second century as a Canadian province is this: If the "West wants in" strategy has been unsuccessful, what should take its place? How can Albertans come in from the cold, and is there still any reason to do so? For Canadians at large, the central question is how the national political community should deal with the disparities of wealth that are likely to characterize Alberta's second century. These questions are two sides of a complex and difficult coin. Alberta's outsider status in Confederation is deeply rooted in the province's early history. By the time Alberta and Saskatchewan were carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1905, the basic architecture of the Canadian federal state was already in place. A rough and ready English-French partnership had been forged, as had a rudimentary party system and an East-West economy in which the newly settled West was to be to central Canada what Canada had been to Britain — an economic hinterland feeding a distant commercial heartland. As a consequence, the national model that had emerged earlier in central Canada and the Maritimes was not replicated in Alberta, or indeed anywhere in the West. There was no demographic and hence no political balance in Alberta between the two national linguistic communities; French Canadians in the province, and across most of the West, were seen as just another linguistic minority in a polyglot sea, and a small one at that compared to the Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Swedes that populated Alberta. Moreover, the national political parties that had been born and nurtured in central Canada failed to put down deep roots in the alien and often hostile prairie soil. In effect, the new province was like an awkward in-law at the Canadian family table, not sure how to dress and act, uncultured and rough at the edges, just tolerated by the older family members who sensed, perhaps dimly, that Canada's long-term economic future might depend more on the West than they would like to admit. The Great Depression further isolated, even stigmatized Alberta. Per capita incomes in the province fell by 61% between 1929 and 1933 (compared to 44% in Ontario) as drought, grasshoppers and the collapse of world markets devastated the prairie grain economy. It left a legacy of abandoned farms and dust bowl images that did little to attract new migration or immigration when the Second World War finally brought an end to the Depression. When a new urban Canada emerged in the post-war years, fuelled by industrial development and new waves of immigration, Alberta drifted even more to the margins of Canadian life. The grain elevators in the rural countryside and the fall wheat harvest had been replaced as national icons by the skylines of Toronto and Montreal. It was the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, rather than something happening in Canada, that finally brought Alberta onto the national stage. Although oil and natural gas had been discovered before the Second World War in Turner Valley, and although Leduc No. 1 gushed forth in 1947, Alberta's oil was relatively expensive to produce. Indeed, oil from the Middle East could be shipped all the way to Edmonton for less than it cost to produce it in Leduc, just 30 kilometres down the highway. This all changed in the mid 1970s when the OPEC cartel drove up the international price of oil. Suddenly Canadian reserves became competitive, and most of the readily available reserves were in Alberta. The new "blue-eyed sheiks" from Alberta, with a chip on their shoulder and a willingness to throw around their economic weight, were now in the game. Alberta was no longer a rural hinterland, but rather a heavily urbanized and industrialized province with the most highly educated labour force in the country. Canadians, moreover, were moving west by the thousands. It was against this backdrop of burgeoning wealth and population growth that Albertans launched their drive for national political power. Although the phrase "the West wants in" was not coined until 1986, this was the creed that drove the governments of Peter Lougheed from the early 1970s. Albertans were determined to play a national role that fully reflected their new prosperity and economic clout. So what went wrong? Why did Albertans fail to come in from the cold? Why do levels of discontent within the province today rival those of the more distant past? Why hasn't prosperity brought (or bought) satisfaction with the Canadian federal state? Although there are many possible explanations, three in particular stand out. The first is that Alberta's strategy — "the West wants in" --was brought into play during an intense and ongoing national preoccupation with the threat to Canadian unity posed by the Quebec sovereignty movement. Not surprisingly, the latter was the focus of consecutive federal governments led by a string of Quebec prime ministers, a string broken for little more than a few months at a time by Joe Clark, John Turner and Kim Campbell. The greater inclusion of the West in the Canadian body politic was not a high priority for a national leadership drawn almost exclusively from Quebec. As long as Albertans wanted in rather than out, they could be ignored. The second explanation for lack of traction for the "West wants in" strategy comes from the fact that it was linked to an institutional reform agenda that found little support outside the West, and at times little outside Alberta. In a 2004 survey (Western Directions: An Analysis of the Looking West 2004 Survey) conducted by the Canada West Foundation, 87% of Alberta respondents agreed with the statement that "Canada should replace the existing Senate with an elected Senate with equal representation from each province." However, the crusade for Senate reform has made no headway in central Canada, where an institution poorly designed for the 19th century — much less the 21st — is happily ensconced. The reality is that Senate reform fails the litmus test of Canadian politics — would it win seats away from the Bloc in Quebec? If significant institutional reform is the marker for Alberta's success on the national political stage, success will be a long time coming. The third explanation for the failure of "the West wants in" is that Albertans refused, and continue to refuse, to play the right partisan cards. They have remained steadfastly Conservative — or, more accurately, Progressive Conservative, then Reform, then Canadian Alliance and then Conservative — in a country dominated by the Liberal party. For better or for worse, they have refused to leap aboard the Liberal bandwagon. In this sense, it can be argued that Albertans are the architects of their own misfortune, although it is dangerous to assume that Canadians would be best served by a single national party to which all regions would swear allegiance. Underlying all the above is an important economic transformation that has occurred across the country, but that has particular relevance for understanding Alberta's place within the federation. The economic relevance of the federal government has declined in the face of globalization and continental free trade; powers once wielded by Ottawa have passed to international treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement or to markets. At the same time, north-south trade has increased dramatically while interprovincial trade has flat-lined in constant dollars and declined substantially in relative terms. This transformation, in turn, has substantial implications for "the West wants in." In the past, when the government of Canada set tariffs, regulated financial markets and both regulated and invested heavily in a national transportation system, then getting into the national government and having influence in Ottawa were seen as important determinants of Western prosperity. Today, however, there is less to get in to: having a seat at the national table means much less when the decisions are of less consequence. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that many Albertans are coming to the conclusion that "the West wants in" speaks to a national economic order that is no longer with us. Today, Albertans are forced to admit that the quest for national power has largely failed. Institutional reform is not about to happen, and the odds of Western Canada wresting power away from the centre are remote, despite population growth in the region. Quebec will continue to dominate the national political agenda even as its population continues to fall. Admittedly, there was a glimmer of hope prior to the 2004 general election when Paul Martin promised to address Western Canadian discontent, but that promise was quickly abandoned as the Prime Minister turned to the more pressing national priority of rebuilding the federal Liberal party in Quebec. Where does this leave Alberta, and its troubled relationship with the national political community? For a start, very few Albertans want out of the country; successive public opinion polls show that well under 10% support the idea of an independent Alberta, or for that matter an independent West. Many more, however, may support some significant distancing from the federal government. Here, the proponents of the Alberta "firewall" recommend that Alberta withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan, collect its own personal income taxes, create its own provincial police force to replace the RCMP and use its improved fiscal capacity to ignore the financial constraints of the Canada Health Act. In effect, the argument goes, Albertans should give up trying to influence the national government and abandon trying to achieve a stronger voice in Canada, and instead bring as many policy files as possible home to the provincial government they control. This, they would argue, has been the traditional strategy of Quebec, one that has been pursued without any loss of federal largesse. For those uneasy with the firewall strategy, and at present this appears to be the majority, the only option left may be to exert national leadership by example. The province, for example, could use the financial capacity that comes from being free of debt, and from natural resource wealth to help put into place the country's best urban communities, the most well-designed environmental policies, the country's best public school system and the most supportive social policies. In short, Albertans could strive to be the very best they can be within their own backyard, thereby setting the standard for the rest of the country. Rather than complaining about their lot in Canada, Albertans could just get on with the job of building the best place to live and prosper in North America.