Before the province even had a name, Alberta’s politicians demanded limits on the federal government’s power. “The new province in the West will not consent to be dictated to from Ottawa,” Calgary lawyer and senator James Lougheed said in 1904, as reported by the Weekly Albertan.

He was talking about education, but that sense of frustration with Ottawa has been a part of politicking in Alberta since the province joined Confederation in 1905.

According to the 1911 census, one in five Albertans came from south of the border, a figure much higher than the 3 percent reported across the rest of the country. Americans went on to dominate the United Farmers of Alberta, which formed the provincial government from 1921 to 1935. US investment then drove the early development of the oil and gas industry. Between 1955 and 1970, nine of the Calgary Petroleum Club’s presidents were American. The American influence on Alberta’s character has left its citizens wearing cowboy hats and boots, and also with a propensity for a “populist and anti-federalist” approach to government, says Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto.

The frustration with Ottawa came to a head in 1980 when prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau brought in the National Energy Program, which put price controls on Canadian natural gas and oil and routed tax revenues to the federal government. Then-premier Peter Lougheed (grandson of the earlier senator) announced that Alberta would reduce its supply of oil to the rest of the country and launch a legal challenge. Lougheed later became a driving force in adding the amending formula—which gave no province a veto but allowed dissenting provinces to opt out of amendments to the Constitution Act, 1982—and the........

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