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Brexit May Be Haunting Carney’s Handling of Alberta Separatists

It explains why the prime minister has given the province almost everything it wants

In January 2013, the United Kingdom’s then prime minister David Cameron announced his intention to let voters decide whether the UK should remain part of the European Union or leave. “It is time for us to settle this question,” he declared. “I say to the British people: this will be your decision.”

Mark Carney, who navigated Brexit as the head of the Bank of England, is now facing Alberta’s separation referendum vote

As the UK bank’s leader, Carney spoke out against Brexit, emphasizing risks to financial stability

Rather than preaching against a possible secession for Alberta, Carney has often been giving into the province’s energy demands

Cameron himself didn’t want Brexit to happen. He thought a referendum would finally silence opponents who felt otherwise, including many in his own Conservative party. Yet he also sympathized with British citizens who “resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulation” and tried to leverage that resentment in negotiations for a better deal with the EU. When the referendum was held in 2016 and Leave won with 52 percent of the vote, Cameron resigned the next day in disgrace. The UK spent the next four years negotiating the terms of its divorce with continental Europe. In 2020, they reached an agreement, and Brexit became official reality.

The UK cycled through three prime ministers during those seven tumultuous years. But the Bank of England had just one governor that whole time, whose tenure from 2013 to 2020 overlapped this cautionary tale with eerie precision: Mark Carney.

Imagine the déjà vu Carney must be grappling with today as Alberta skips down the path paved by Brexit. “Alberta’s future will be decided by Albertans,” Premier Danielle Smith said in May, when she announced the referendum Albertans will vote on this fall—a vote to decide if the province wants to pursue a vote on separation. “It’s time to have a vote, understand the will of Albertans on this subject, and move on,” Smith echoed.

Like Cameron before her, Smith emphasized her personal desire to remain in Canada and promised to campaign to that effect, while positioning herself as the champion of separatist resentments. Lord knows if she appreciates how closely her rhetoric matches that of Brexit’s accidental enabler. But there’s no doubt Carney does.

“It’s a dangerous bluff—we’re literally at ten years’ anniversary of Brexit, and I saw first-hand what gets sold in these referenda,” he told reporters in June, when asked about the threat of Alberta’s separatist movement. “It’s very reminiscent.”

That was a rare moment for Carney, who doesn’t spend a lot of time publicly recalling Brexit. But Alberta’s separatist movement has been a major subplot of his time in office; defanging that movement goes a long way to explaining what many Canadians—myself included—have been scratching our heads over: Why is this former United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance being so damn nice to the oil patch?

For seven........

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