Alberta referendum expected to bring finality, but also more questions on separation

On Monday, Albertans vote on whether to stay in Canada or hold another binding referendum on quitting Canada.

If the vote goes as polls suggest, a majority of Albertans will mark an X to stay in Confederation, and Premier Danielle Smith has said if that’s so, she expects everyone to accept it and move on. Leaders of the independence movement contest that.

And political watchers are divided about whether separation — previously a fringe sentiment — will now be a prominent, permanent feature of Alberta’s political landscape, as in Quebec.

Julian Castro-Rea, a political-science professor at the University of Alberta who studies the separation debates in Quebec and Alberta, believes as long as Alberta feels alienated from the Canadian capital — feeling that Ottawa benefits from Alberta’s resource economy without giving back — the movement will have fuel.

“Even if the referendum is lost, the westernization will still be around, because it’s kind of a way which, traditionally, Albertans have related to the rest of Canada,” says Castro-Rea, who believes western alienation may remain indefinitely.

Alberta’s independence movement has been compared to Brexit and separation in Scotland, but the most obvious comparator is Quebec.

Earlier this month, Quebec elected a minority government led by the Parti Québécois, which has promised to call a third independence referendum to leave Canada, following votes in 1980 and 1995.

Experts say the two provinces differ in their catalysts for secession. Quebec and its francophone culture have developed over centuries. Alberta, by comparison, was created alongside Saskatchewan out of the division of the Northwest Territories in 1905.

Alberta’s separatists are driven by western alienation rather than a deep-seated nationalist sentiment, like Quebec, experts say. That means it’s difficult to see how the long-term future of the movement could pan out.

“They have different identity, different history, different language, as you know, and therefore they can claim, kind of, this historical legitimacy as the basis for their attempts for separation,” Castro-Rea says.

Separatist sentiment has been sprinkled into Alberta’s saucepan for the past half-century before coming to a boil in recent years. Premier Smith, who has voted to stay in Canada, has repeatedly criticized former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s policies as oppressive to Western Canada’s sovereignty and its energy-driven economy.

That criticism has softened against current Prime Minister Mark Carney, who referred to Alberta’s bid for secession as a “dangerous bluff” on Thursday night. He also said a decisive result would “settle this question.”

Andrew McDougall, an associate political science professor at the University of Toronto, says he sees Alberta’s referendum as a way to garner political leverage with Ottawa, as Quebec has.

“This has sometimes been referred to in Quebec as the ‘knife at the throat strategy,’ where Quebec could sort of push its agenda because we’ve had that incredible threat of a referendum,” he says.

But former UCP premier Jason Kenney, speaking in Edmonton earlier this week, said the knife analogy cuts both ways.

“The idea of making the threat by holding a knife to the throat of the federation is how you end up as a have-not province, like Quebec, instead of the ultimate have province like Alberta,” he said.

“You want to talk about a lack of investor confidence? The next year, moving towards an actual vote on separation when the first one is won — the economic consequences would be catastrophic.”

Political science professor Graeme Young says to understand Alberta’s future, one could look at Scotland.

Young, at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, grew up in Ontario and kept interest in Alberta’s prospective separation from afar as Scotland bolsters another push to leave the United Kingdom.

He says he doesn’t expect Alberta’s separatist campaign will last. He believes the movement could deflate with a different federal political party in power. And he says it can’t draw from the same wellspring of national identity as exists in Scotland.

Young says Scotland’s 2014 campaign was, in large part, defeated by uncertainty about the economics of independence, including pensions, currency, finances and its role in the European Union.

And while Scotland has been preparing for more than a decade for another run at independence, Alberta’s movement is underprepared, Young says.

“(Alberta’s case) has been put together quite hastily,” he says. “It does not seem that they have invested as much time and energy into that case as one would expect for setting up a new country.”

— With files from Lisa Johnson in Edmonton and The Associated Press