Fate and a very long career in journalism have enmeshed me in the separatist movements of two provinces, Quebec and Alberta.

I was in the newsroom of the old Montreal Star the day Rene Levesque’s Parti Quebecois won its first election in 1976.

The scene that night was barely controlled chaos. There were fears the separatists would sabotage the presses of Montreal’s dominant English newspaper.

Levesque carried 71 of 110 seats, a comfortable majority hardly anybody expected, least of all the new premier himself.

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History echoed, rather than repeated itself, on Monday, Oct. 5, when the PQ under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon won a minority, partly on the promise of holding a third referendum (but not until U.S. President Donald Trump leaves office).

When I arrived in Alberta later in the 1970s, separatist movements were just beginning to rise.

We saw the Western Canada Concept, Confederation of Regions, and the Western Independence Party; they fought each other as vigorously as they attacked Ottawa.

The anger today is more widespread. It will be tested in an Oct. 19 referendum that asks Albertans if they want to proceed to a full vote on independence.

As Premier Danielle Smith has confessed, the motive behind this strange vote is to prevent her United Conservative Party from splitting.

Separation movements often create such moments of cascading, unpredictable risk. In Alberta, government ambiguity adds even more anxiety.

The lessons I learned covering movements in both provinces are as much emotional as practical.

Without fail, separatism divides society, pits people against each other and disrupts economies.

Separatist threats deflect government energy and delay progress on real problems, especially health care.

They sow growing fury among federalists, especially in the face of current threats to our national sovereignty from the United States.

Canadian separatist movements bring no benefits I’ve been able to discern, even to themselves.

In 1976, I failed to fully understand the existential threat, the primal fear, that separatism posed for Quebec’s historic Anglo community.

Today, I feel it viscerally. Alberta separatist movements have grown from near invisibility to something truly disturbing.

Their unelected leaders court American help. Some would have the province become a U.S. state.

They imagine a nativist land where only the Alberta-born........

© Calgary Herald