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The War on Alberta Separatists Is a War on Democracy

We celebrate popular rule until someone calls a referendum we don’t like

Every year, I teach an introductory course on Canadian politics to hundreds of students at a Montreal university. There are a few central themes around which I frame the history and institutions of politics in this country. Federalism and regionalism take centre stage, of course, as does the idea of democratic deficit.

Yes: deficit. Canada’s story is not one of bold commitment to democracy. Following the British political tradition, Canada is absent a true “we the people” at the heart of its founding myth. Above all, we were determined to avoid becoming the United States. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation, proposed that a united Canada would help us “bear up shoulder to shoulder to resist” being added to the great American experiment in self-government and its claims of “manifest destiny.” The country’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, took the brutality of the American Civil War as slam-dunk proof of “the superiority of our institutions, and of the principle on which they are based.” This principle is: sovereignty resides in the Crown rather than the people.

And so, Canada was plainly never designed to be a full-bore democracy. We remain a constitutional monarchy governed through representative rather than direct democracy. With precious few exceptions, elected representatives make laws on our behalf rather than us taking on that burden ourselves through citizens’ assemblies and initiatives, popular and legislative referendums. Power to the people, sure, but only to a point.

For my sins, I remain something of an unreformed democratic romantic. I believe in the transformative power of collective action, political parties, the sanctity of a democratic mandate, and the capacity of a Parliament to express the sovereign will of a people. I have sympathy for the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the transcendent “general will” of a people divined through the process of rigorous, informed, and, ultimately, unifying debate.

In short, I’m possessed by a zealot’s faith in my fellow citizens to govern ourselves well in furtherance of our collective well-being. I’d prefer to see far more robust forms of participatory and direct self-government and far less technocracy.

This is why some of the reaction to Alberta’s October 19 referendum on a potential second referendum for the province to separate from Canada troubles me. It has exposed just how little faith many of us still have in democracy itself.

To be clear, the vote itself is almost entirely for the benefit of Premier Danielle Smith’s tightrope act to stay atop a fracturing United Conservative Party. The premier is in thrall to the diehard separatist wing of the activist base in her governing UCP. Smith’s gambit to allow a referendum to bubble up via the route of a citizen-led petition was blocked by the courts on the grounds that due diligence to consult with affected Indigenous communities was not done. Backed into a corner, Smith may have calculated that putting a version of the separation question on the October referendum ballot was........

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