Lorne Gunter: Prairie people just want to be left alone for a while

In Canada’s wars — particularly the First and Second World Wars, and Afghanistan — as well as on peacekeeping missions, young Prairie men (and now young Prairie women) volunteer early and in disproportionately large numbers.

I was once asked why I thought that was. Was it because people from the Prairies are warmongers?

“No,” I replied. “I think they just like to be left alone.”

We’ve lived and worked so long and so far from the centres of power that whenever someone evil or megalomaniacal comes along, we sign up to go fight so they will leave us alone again to farm and ranch, drill for oil, run our small businesses and take care of our families, all of which is what we would really rather be doing.

I think it’s the same with Monday’s referendum.

Unfortunately, I have to file this column before any results from the voting have been released by Elections Alberta. So if you turned here to find my insights into what the numbers mean, I’ll have to encourage you to return tomorrow.

But I am happy to share what I hope will happen once the final tallies are made public, particularly if the separatists get a shin kicking.

I want both sides to leave us alone for a while. Let us get back to farming, ranching, extracting oil, running our businesses and taking care of our families.

For a while we want to be able to bomb around in our pickups tending to our crops and cattle, drive into town for a coffee and doughnut, and watch a hockey game on TV without being interrupted by arguments one way or the other about separation.

If the federal government had learned how to leave us alone, especially during the two Trudeau eras, we would never have started down this road in the first place.

I know all the arguments about central Canada’s maltreatment or ignorance about Western Canada going back to Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy (1879) and the Crow’s Nest Pass freight rates (1897), both of which conspired (intentionally or out of indifference) to keep Western Canada from developing its own industrial base thereby making us dependent on the prices paid by central Canadian commodities traders and the prices charged by central Canadian manufacturers and farm suppliers.

Why do we process so little of our own grain in Western Canada? Because the transportation system and the federal wheat board combined to make it cheaper to ship our crops East.

I know all the arguments about the imbalance in the Canada Pension Plan and especially in the funding of the federal equalization scheme. I know them, because I’ve made them myself hundreds, thousands of times.

I feel the grievances deeply in my Alberta soul and have had to convince myself on occasion not to become a separatist myself.

So, please, rather than rehash all this, let’s just all take a break and get back to our ordinary lives.

Take a drive through the foothills, stay at a mountain hotel, kayak on a lake or river.

Just let the powers that be leave us alone for a while.

If the separatists, as they claim, want to keep fighting, stop pestering the UCP. Set up your own party, hold a founding convention, elect a leader, recruit candidates, devise more than a one-issue policy, win seats in the legislature and, if you can, elect MLAs and form a government.

That ought to keep you busy and out of our hair for a while.

Let us go skiing or play beer-league hockey this winter, maybe drive a snowmobile.

I know this list is unrealistic. The separatists are already organizing to take over the UCP at the party convention at the end of November and force Danielle Smith into a leadership review.

But I can dream an Alberta dream, can’t I?

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