“The first idea is to define oneself as a nation—therefore it requires a culture of their own,” said Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, speaking to journalists at a media scrum. A reporter had asked him if he, as the leader of a sovereignist party, had any advice for Alberta’s burgeoning separatist movement.
“I am not sure,” he continued, “that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture.”
Casual observers may have expected that Blanchet, an ardent believer in Quebec independence who has referred to Canada as “artificial” may support the idea of Alberta’s independence from the Canadian federation. Canada, he said in those same remarks, is a country with “very little meaning” with a “foreign parliament.” Why, then, the hostility towards a fellow believer in breaking it up?
Really, Blanchet’s glib remarks were less about delegitimizing Alberta’s claims to nationhood than they were about reinforcing Quebec’s. For Blanchet, like many in Quebec’s sovereignist movement, Quebec’s claims to independence stem from its status as a distinct society—a place that is culturally, historically, linguistically, and politically distinct from the rest of Canada. These distinctions, he argued, Alberta does not have.
The people behind Alberta’s fledging independence movement, for their part, don’t make their arguments primarily based on cultural distinctness. Rather, they tap into grievances in Western Canada over control of resources and perceived federal meddling into the capacity of the West (Alberta, in particular) to extract them—hence Blanchet’s quip about oil and gas.
Quebec nationalism and Western alienation have been, since at least the 1960s and 70s—but really, even longer—some of the defining malaises of Canadian confederation. Both have had major impacts on the structure of Canadian confederation. Both, too, have called into question what it means to “be” a Canadian. Canada is, after all, a relatively young political project. What does national identity mean?
The wretched of the earth on the St. Laurent
If you asked a French-speaking person in Montreal to describe their national identity in the 1940s, they would probably tell you they were French Canadian. In fact, self-identifying as Canadien—a term borrowed from kanata, a Huron-Iroquois word that roughly translates into “village” or “settlement”—was, originally, a Francophone phenomenon, replaced by Canadien-Francais only when a significant number of anglophones began adopting the “Canadian” moniker rather than describing themselves as British. Up until the 1960s, only a minority of francophones in Quebec would refer to themselves as Québécois.
The 1760 English conquest of New France placed a small English-speaking ruling class in control of a territory overwhelmingly populated by francophones and Indigenous Peoples, further complicated by the arrival of a wave of English-speaking loyalists to the British crown after the American War of Independence.
By the early 1960s, around two thirds of Montrealers were Canadiens-Francais, but in the glittering skyscrapers downtown and the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, English was the near-exclusive language. The poor neighbourhoods—the slums, as longtime Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau called them—were overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) francophone. Montreal was Canada’s largest city and economic powerhouse, and Canada’s ruling class was formed in its three anglophone universities (compared to only one francophone university). They met in clouds of cigar smoke in small halls like the St. James Club. In those halls of power, located on streets named after British conquerors, they spoke English.
It is this context which, in the 1960s, birthed the modern Quebec nationalist movement—and when the Quebecois national identity as something distinct from Canadiens-Francais became dominant. No longer were francophones in Quebec simply a type of Canadian—French Canadians—they were now something different, with a fully separate national identity. The politicized actors of the era viewed Quebecois as an oppressed people, and their liberation as part of a global movement of decolonization.
As the historian Sean Mill covers in The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, activists and intellectuals of the era theorized this new nationalism in the context of global upheaval, when colonized people across the Global South—from Cuba to Algeria to India to Vietnam—were winning independence from their colonial masters. Quebecois’ nascent nationalist movement placed itself solidly on the side of these anti-colonial movements.
Aime Cesaire, the Martinique-born anti-colonial author, was famously baffled and amused when he learned that Quebecois radicals were applying his concept of negritude to their own situation. While he found the claim to be “somewhat exaggerated,” he admitted that they had not misunderstood the concept.
In the decades since Quebecois nationalism became a major force in Canada, its nature has shifted. As the deep inequality between francophones and anglophones faded away—through the actions of Quebec’s muscular regulatory and redistributive state—the focus of Quebec nationalists progressively shifted towards cultural demands, which has increasingly taken the form of anti-religious and anti-migrant sentiment. Such cultural chauvinism co-exists in a tense balance with the desire to preserve and expand the social-democratic wins of the early Quebec nationalists.
Today, Quebec’s nationalists struggle to define Quebecois identity based on this tension. Is modern Quebec nationalism ethnic, or civic? Is Quebecois identity only accessible by birth, to people descended from early French settlers, or is it accessible to anyone who decides to participate in the national project?
The idea of an independent Quebec is less popular than it has been since the genesis of Quebec nationalism during the Quiet Revolution. Many of today’s nationalists have accepted a truce with Canadian federalism, at least temporarily. But they still call themselves Québécois, not Canadiens-Francais.
Cowboys and carbon
“If my voice is trembling, it’s because I am terribly angry,” the caller told the radio host, “to the point where I would be happy to fight for our freedom and I literally mean with a rifle.”
It was 1980, and tensions between Alberta and the federal government had never been higher. With the National Energy Program (NEP) in effect, Ottawa had implemented an export tax on Alberta oil, created Petro-Canada as a state-owned oil company, and implemented price controls on the fossil fuel industry in the context of skyrocketing oil prices due to crises in the Middle East in the 1970s.
The program did not go over well in Alberta. Premier Peter Lougheed went to bat against the program, threatening to significantly cut Alberta’s oil production. Alberta’s economy faltered, the cost of real estate collapsed, and the modern Conservative dominance of the Western provinces began.
While the NEP is often referred to as the origin point of Canada’s other great federal malaise, Western alienation, the phenomenon goes back much farther. When the British crown purchased Rupert’s Land—the vast expanse of land that covers most of the territory of the modern Prairie provinces, as well as the area around Hudson’s Bay—for $1.5 million from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1870, it initially declared the land the North West Territories.
Ottawa passed the Dominion Lands Act, giving away large plots of land, essentially free-of-charge, to men who would settle the Prairies. Those settlers, with the backing of nascent federal organizations like the North-West Mounted Police (the precursor to the RCMP) made war on the land’s Indigenous inhabitants and spread Canadian sovereignty across the Prairies.
As its settler population grew, Alberta became a province (alongside Saskatchewan) in 1905. But unlike other provinces, Ottawa retained control of the new provinces’ natural resources. The federal government, in Alberta, argued that the sum of money it paid to HBC to purchase the land meant that it should retain control over the natural resources—and the money made from selling them.
As Mary Janigan details in Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, this created the first wave of what we now recognize as Western alienation. After years of conflict and tension between the Prairie provinces and the federal government, the two sides eventually signed the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement in 1930, which gave Alberta control over its own resources.
It barely made a dent in anti-Ottawa sentiment in Alberta, though. Just four years later, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart rode to power in the province, ushering in decades of single-party rule by the Social Credit Party. In The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta, Alvin Finket outlines how that party’s initially populist (if incoherent) positions against financiers during the Great Depression morphed into a vehement religious conservatism, opposed to the growing welfare-state consensus it viewed Ottawa as imposing. Throughout the transformation, Ottawa provided a convenient scapegoat for the province’s problems, even as it outspent other provinces on things like roads and infrastructure due to resource revenues.
Today’s Western alienation fits squarely into that tradition and is primarily aimed at preventing any type of environmental regulation that could slow down the province’s drive to extract as much carbon as possible from the ground. Just as Lougheed, Aberhart, and others have done over the years, current Premier Danielle Smith’s version of Western alienation is a regional segment of capitalists pitted against those of the central government.
Nationalism and its discontents
In 2015, a newly elected Justin Trudeau was speaking to a journalist from the New York Times. He had been sworn in as prime minister just weeks ago.
“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,’’ Trudeau told the journalist. ‘‘There are shared values—openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.
“Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.’’
Today, of course, Trudeau’s prediction of post-nationality appears particularly absurd, as Canadians around the country rally around the flag in response to the threats and dangers from the United States. But, despite the awkward phrasing, he did touch on something real about the difficulty of defining Canadian identity, and national identity more broadly.
Writing in his 1983 master work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, the political theorist Benedict Anderson could have been responding directly to Trudeau when he wrote that “the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”
Defining a “nation,” though, is a notoriously slippery task. Typically, a nation is a political unit—a group of people with some combination of common histories, cultures, ethnicities, languages, territory, and political traditions. A nation does not necessarily require an independent state—meaning that any group of people can, in theory, make a claim to nationhood, and conjure nations into existence through the act of collective belief.
Anderson, whose work is among the most important histories of nationalism as an idea, describes the nation as an “imagined political community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” It is imagined, he says, because even in the smallest nation, not all members can know each other. It is limited because no nation aspires to being universal—beyond the limits of one nation, there are always others.
Defining a nation becomes even more complicated when we understand that conception of the nation is a relatively recent social invention. The concept first began to gain prominence during the Enlightenment in the 1700s, and most nation-states were created in the last 200 years. Italy, for example, only came into being as a unified country in 1861—if you asked a Roman living under Caesar whether they were Italian, they would simply not understand the question. Yet in the minds of nationalists, the nations to which they lay claim are eternal, stretching back into history and forward into the future.
Canadian nationalists, those who identify with Canada more than any other political unit, may see Quebec and Alberta’s sovereignist drives as similar. And really, there are some tactical similarities. Danielle Smith has, clearly, learned from Quebec’s nationalists and is looking to apply a similar strategy. Begin with something like sovereignty-association, give chips to the more radical wings of the movement, and use the leverage to make gains in negotiations with Ottawa.
But despite surface-level similarities, they are radically different phenomena, beginning from highly distinct historical contexts and only diverging more greatly over time. The political projects they represent in the 21st century continue to be wildly different from one another. Modern Quebec nationalism is a hybrid of social-democratic developmentalism with cultural chauvinism, and Western alienation is defined, in large part, by a frontier-style drive to unlimited expansion of resource extraction.
Canada, as a relatively recent national project built as a settler colony, has difficulties in defining its national identity. Unlike France, Vietnam, or even other settler colonies like Israel, Canada has no deep history to call back to and claim (however falsely) as part of a long national lineage. Perhaps that’s what Yves-Francois Blanchet was referring to when he referred to Canada as “artificial.” It would be good to recognize the artificially constructed foundations of all nationalisms, not just Canada’s.
