On Monday, Alberta’s separatists have a date with defeat. The scale of that loss remains to be seen, along with the outcome of the Alberta government’s nine other separatist-adjacent questions. The real question now is whether the separatist movement will continue to dominate Conservative politics in Alberta and how much lasting damage it will do to the province and country in the process. 

I am not particularly optimistic about the prospect of it fading into the political bushes. That’s because, for all of their half-hearted interventions on behalf of Canada, Conservative leaders in this province have yet to confront the problem they spent years creating. Standing up to separatist yokels like Jeff Rath and Mitch Sylvestre doesn’t require much in the way of political courage or capital, after all, especially when it’s being done in the relatively safe space of a Postmedia op-ed or Chamber of Commerce event. Speaking truth to the falsehoods that animate the separatist movement very much does — and it has been conspicuously absent over the last few months. 

That’s because in Conservative Alberta it’s always Festivus, and the airing of grievances is always close at hand. Every time an argument is made on behalf of Canada, it seems, it has to begin with an almost ritualistic recitation of the various ways in which Canada has harmed and injured Albertans. In his National Post op-ed, former prime minister Stephen Harper wrote, “the federal government’s policy of the past decade — to ‘phase out’ Alberta’s principal industry — has been unconscionable. I am unaware of a precedent like this in a democratic society. That it has spawned a separatist movement should surprise no one. Anyone who wishes to speak credibly for national unity in Alberta needs to recognize this.”

That never happened, of course. As I’ve pointed out many, many times — and as I’m quite sure folks like Harper know — the damage to Alberta’s economy began in 2014, when he was still prime minister. The decision by the OPEC cartel to flood the market with supply crashed oil prices, crushed........

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