Hey Canada, how’s it going? I see y’all looking at Alberta these days. Totally understandable. It is a big deal when one province actually formally puts the separation question to its citizens. Or, asks them if they would like to take that next step. Maybe Quebec is used to the attention, but as a first timer I can say it is odd, as I am sure it is for most Canadians. My wonderful network spans the country, from which come the comments, the consternation, the concern, the anger, the sympathy…it’s all there.
As an adoptive Albertan, it doesn’t feel right to be even commenting on this issue, but adoptive Albertans will move the needle so here is the view from this particular stump.
My own view on ‘what is best’ is irrelevant, but as a life-long westerner I can help shed some light for the rest of the country on how we arrived at this place. Because we live in an instant-feedback social media world, it is understandable that people, particularly across the country, might be viewing this through today’s lens, through the current event of the day. They might be saying Hey, what more do you want, you have the federal government trying to build pipelines. And that is true. But the old saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” is relevant here, and what about if the “fool me” chain has been going on for a hundred years? Because it has, one way or another, in the form of western alienation, and as it happens, Alberta is, in a sense, the first entity to do something about it due to the massive economic clout the province has.
The point here isn’t to change any hard opinions, those are generally cast in stone and do what you gotta do. But a lot of people have questions, so here we go. The airing of the grievances. Well, not quite, but context helps.
For example, take the quote in the title: “Why should I sell your wheat?” This famous soundbite was provided by a character most readers will only know about through legend, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, political titan of the seventies, father to a son tragically killed in an avalanche, another son that is a filmmaker and author, and a third son that you might have heard of that reshaped Canada like a tire iron reshapes a head.
In the first of this series of “did you know that” ’s, Trudeau senior uttered that famous sentence, “Why should I sell your wheat?” Over disputes about Canadian farmers’ options for selling their grain. At the time, western farmers were required to sell wheat through a single entity, the Canadian Wheat Board, under the rationale that a single marketer had greater global clout and could get better prices than if farmers were allowed to market their grain directly to whomever.
From what I can tell, support for or opposition to this scheme split neatly, surprise surprise, along ideological lines, with free marketers squaring off against government control aficionados. Aka, the irreconcilable conundrum.
What is relevant here is the context of the times. The act that required western farmers to sell their grain through a singular government monopoly was specifically aimed only at prairie grain producers – famers east of Manitoba and in most of BC were exempt from this requirement.
Strike one.
It may not have sounded like a big deal, but it was to a lot of farmers. The whole thing might have been sorted out with some top-notch diplomatic efforts between Ottawa and the provinces, but instead, Trudeau Senior chose to offer up that sneering comment that lit a fire under every single person that felt Ottawa dismissed not just western concerns, but some very specific western concerns – the prairies. Alberta was and is a significant producer of grains that fell under the CWB mandate, so Trudeau’s comments added fuel to the western alienation fire, which is the precursor of today’s situation. (There are many more examples dating back earlier, such as when Alberta and Saskatchewan were made provinces but were not immediately granted control of their resources while other provinces were, which were the true ground fires that burned for decades.)
That’s nothing, hold my beer, Trudeau senior shouted, and enacted the National Energy Program. The program sought to shield eastern Canadians from rising global oil prices by capping the inter-Canadian price, meaning producers were forced to sell at an arbitrarily low rate compared to global prices. The program also sought to increase the federal government’s take of oil production revenue through new taxes and export duties. The program cost Alberta billions. Anger boiled over.
Strike two.
I can hear you, Gen Z, millennials; thanks for the stories Grandpa, we live in a new world. Which is sort of true, but there is (at a minimum) one more chapter to tell.
Trudeau junior’s tour of duty, as prime minister for a decade, enthusiastically adopted policy after policy that were designed to diminish and ultimately deconstruct the Canadian hydrocarbon sector. That might sound like hyperbole, but it is what they actually said, that government policy would be in line with global/UN targets to phase out fossil fuels from the economy.
It would take a very long time to catalogue these, but the next step-change in western/Alberta alienation can be encapsulated in Trudeau junior’s accommodation and encouragement of the one and only Stephen Guilbeault. Guilbeault was a former Greenpeace activist that had been arrested for scaling the CN Tower in Toronto to stage an environmental protest. He was at the forefront of aggressive anti-hydrocarbon activism. Again, that might sound like hyperbole, but these oddballs had the odd habit if stating their aims explicitly; Guilbeault, in an interview with the New York Times (why do all of Canada’s ruling elite give more in-depth interviews with US publications than Canadian ones?) In which he made it clear that he was still an environmental activist just as he always had been, except that he was trying a new method by unleashing his activism from within government. Trudeau junior elevated him to the position of Minister of Environment and Climate Change, which in one of those disturbing hallmarks of state-control enthusiasts meant significant (near total) power over other sectors like natural resources. It is a really sneaky maneuver: Oh sure, we fully recognize provincial right to resource development…but oh look at that we came up with laws that in effect prevent resource development under different names.
Strike three.
As noted above, some will look at today’s enthusiastic, near-rabid, push for resource development, pipeline building, etc., and conclude that whatever grounds Alberta separatists had to complain about is now washed away, with great gusto.
Maybe. It could be a brand new world. Maybe a hundred years of tension are over. Just like that.
And it would be ‘just like that’, because it was only 3.4 years ago that the current prime minister was most actively seeking the demise of hydrocarbons as well. What Guilbeault was doing so effectively in Canada, Carney was striving to accomplish across the globe. Carney even wrote a book about his work on this front.
So he has completely changed his spots? Or is it “fool me…for the fourth time?”
And part of this is on the dear voters of Canada, who in 2025 welcomed back the majority of Trudeau’s inner circle on the grounds that they simply had a new leader. Many, like Guilbeault, have moved on, but many have not.
This separatism stew has been on slow boil for a very, very long time. Just saying. And it is also a bit more of a regional issue; Trudeau senior’s machinations created as much or more fury in other provinces as here. Alberta is simply a province with the financial wherewithal to make it an issue.
And before everyone freaks out once the results are out, if they show any significant support for a separation referendum, it is also worth noting that a good many people think that a positive vote this week, to move towards a binding referendum, is a vote to show Ottawa that it is serious, and nothing more. A dangerous, destabilizing game? Perhaps. Label it whatever you wish. The fact is that we got here as a culmination of a very long series of events. Maybe if we all of a sudden build a lot of infrastructure, like we are really serious as a nation, the matter will fade away. Until then…nothing is easy in the world today.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)