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Why Do Alberta Separatists’ Grievances Feel Small?

I don’t see a distinct people seeking political expression for a national identity. I see an angry faction

Having lived through Quebec’s last two referendums, it’s been hard to follow events in Alberta without a sense of uncanny déjà vu. Once again, a province has come to believe Ottawa does not understand it, that Confederation is somehow stacked against it, and that the ultimate remedy might be to leave. Some of Alberta’s recent moves even appear explicitly modelled on the sovereigntist playbook. But the texture of Western self-determination has a Black Mirror-esque, reverse-reality quality. The rhetoric is recognizable but feels distorted: a familiar debate returned in warped form.

Warped—and diminished. Quebec’s quarrel was big. Its separatist project was fed by long-standing, and not unreasonable, fears of disappearing into a larger linguistic and cultural melting pot. Sovereignty was thus a bid for collective survival: a French-speaking society asking whether its distinctiveness was a legitimate claim to greater control over its future. Whatever you thought of the Parti Québécois’s arguments for breaking up Canada, the question it posed was as consequential as it gets: Does a nation need its own country?

Alberta feels different. The logic for autonomy is transitional, born of discontent around energy policy, regulatory oversight, and the belief that the province—among our most........

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