To listen to politicians like Alberta’s and Saskatchewan’s premiers, the recent rise in Western separatist sentiment has nothing to do with them, it is rather an inescapable by-product of Ottawa’s longstanding neglect of the west and its (energy) interests.
But such Western Canadian politicians have not been mere spectators sitting idly by with mouths agape as the flames of western discontent have gathered strength.
No, they are the arsonists.
And while neither of them are responsible for starting these fires, they have sought to fuel them by stoking anger and distrust of the federal government at every opportunity. If western alienation is the kindling, these politicians and their rhetoric have been the propellent.
There is no argument that western alienation is built upon real and justified historic grievances against the political and economic power of central Canada.
From the tariff regime of the original national policy designed to serve eastern manufacturers to the detriment of western farmers, to the battle over natural resources culminating in the National Energy Program, to the dismantling of the Crow Rate, westerners have long felt that their interests were often sacrificed for those of Ontario or Quebec.
Suffice to say, there is fertile ground for planting seeds of doubt about the intentions of Eastern politicians. But while suspicion of the motives of Ottawa is well-ingrained in the Western Canadian consciousness, the rhetoric of the Alberta and Saskatchewan premiers rises to another level. They portray Ottawa not as an equally representative level of government with which we may have (sometimes major) disagreements, but as a malign actor, with sinister designs to destroy the western economy and even its way of life.
While Premier Scott Moe is probably best known to Monitor readers for his more high-profile efforts to snub the federal government, such as his refusal to collect the carbon tax and the largely symbolic Saskatchewan First Act, he is equally adept at finding malevolent motives in even the smallest of federal actions. Responding to news of a Natural Resources Canada request to study how electrification could assist in reducing or eliminating fossil fuels in certain sectors of the economy, Premier Moe’s X (Twitter) account raged:
There’s their real agenda: the federal government is going to study the complete elimination of our oil and gas industry…What kind of government studies wiping out one of the nation’s most important industries & killing tens of thousands of Canadian jobs?
When rumours of federal government scientists supposedly trespassing on private farmland to test water reached the premier’s ears, his government’s immediate reaction was to suggest a link between the testing and a recent disinformation campaign telling farmers the feds were going to force them to drastically curb fertilizer use.
A month earlier, Moe had took to X (Twitter) once again to misrepresent the proposed federal government plans to reduce emissions from agriculture via sustainable farming practices:
The same federal government who alienated our oil and gas industry is now putting global food security at risk by attacking the hard working agriculture producers across western Canada with an arbitrary goal to reduce fertilizer usage.
The fact that the federal proposal had no mandatory restrictions whatsoever on fertilizer use did not dissuade the premier from, once again, portraying Ottawa as an ill-intentioned enemy hostile to the province.
Similarly, while Alberta Premier Danielle Smith may be most well-known for her grander gestures against Ottawa, like suggesting oil companies no longer need to follow federal law, she has been equally prone to seeing federal conspiracies to undermine the Alberta economy behind almost any federal action.
For example, a federal government memo on “just transition” into a low-carbon economy was greeted by Smith as “a plot to eliminate 2.7 million jobs.” While Smith had either intentionally or mistakenly confused total employment with job losses in the memo, she characterized the memo as an effort to eliminate “entire sectors of our economy and hundreds of thousands of good Alberta jobs that Ottawa believes are too ‘dirty’ to be tolerated.”
Both premiers have grossly misrepresented or exaggerated federal actions in order to cast Ottawa as the villain in their respective political narratives. Smith herself neatly summed up this narrative as she announced the formation of her “Alberta Next” panel.
“You know what Ottawa can’t help but be fixated on?…Punishing our energy sector and layering on policies to keep it in the ground.” It’s not so much the West wants in” Smith added, “It’s the West wants Ottawa out of its hair.”
This is the crux of the premiers’ battle with Ottawa, to allow oil and gas extraction with no political, economic or especially environmental interference from any other level of government. Having created what Angela Carter and Emily Eaton call a “regulatory Wild West” to allow for the unfettered exploitation of oil and gas resources at the provincial level, federal environmental regulations are often the sole, real constraint left on industry.
Yet despite this narrative of federal interference, the Canadian oil industry appears to be doing just fine. For all the sound and fury against the former Trudeau government being hell bent on destroying the oil and gas sector, oil production hit record highs year over year during much of Trudeau’s tenure. Moreover, last year, exports of Canadian crude oil and equivalents rose by five per cent, reaching an annual record, partly due to the increased export capacity provided by the Trans-Mountain pipeline, a pipeline bought and paid for by the federal government.
While we can argue over the Trudeau government’s strategy of trying to appease both climate-conscious voters via a carbon tax and energy sector, proponents through the Trans-Mountain purchase, what cannot be denied is that, however we characterize Prime Minister Trudeau’s energy and climate policies, they do not appear to have had the disastrous effect that both premiers regularly claim.
What the regular misrepresentation and demonization of federal policy does, in the words of Jared Wesley, is chip away at the “legitimacy of the federal government as an institution.”
When the leader of your province regularly portrays the federal government as a hostile entity, looking to undermine your economy and prosperity, what are voters to think? Is it all surprising that some of them would see separation as a viable choice?
Premiers Moe and Smith can try all they like to distance themselves from responsibility for the rise in western separatism, but their incendiary rhetoric and blatant misrepresentations have allowed these sentiments to burn hotter and longer than they ever would have without them.
