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Alberta Separatists Forgot to Build a Culture

Independence movements usually have more to them than economic grievances

The question of separation is fundamentally a question of identity: not just how you think a society should divvy up resources but who you are at a basic level. Take my home province of Alberta. It hasn’t been excessively hard for separatists to convince people that they’re getting a bad deal from the rest of Canada. It’s been another thing entirely to convince them they aren’t actually Canadian.

For the leaders of Alberta’s separatist movements, identity doesn’t seem to be a meaningful question. True, they are full of ideas of what an Albertan is, ranging from someone who is angry about DEI initiatives to somebody who “shouldn’t have to apologize for being white,” with a sprinkling of entrepreneurial, independent, cowboy spirit. But they rarely do anything with that identity beyond proclaiming it, as though endlessly asserting it were enough.

For reasons ranging from world-historic to personal, Alberta has struggled deeply to offer any cohesive sense of self that goes much deeper than a stereotype. Which is presumably why Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet felt so comfortable noting that he was “not certain that oil and gas qualify to define a culture.”

It might be worth lingering on that stereotype for a second, if only because it’s all separatists typically throw out in between anti-woke rants regurgitated from whichever social media channel they follow for their foreign-propaganda diet. The historical case for the children’s book version of an Albertan goes something like this: Alberta was a land of free-range ranchers who resiliented themselves through our rugged landscape until the Leduc 1 oil well hit in 1947, at which point they all put pumpjacks on top of their open prairies and pipelines below. These stalwart individualists have been capable of absolutely anything since, except resisting the nefarious forces of Upper and Lower Canada or developing a third way to make money after oil AND gas.

Even for a symbolic identity, which necessarily omits a lot—look up the North American range of sugar maples some time—this is exceptionally delusional. For a start, it omits Indigenous peoples entirely (which is, at least, mostly consistent with both the Canadian and separatist mindset, I suppose). It also ignores the northern two-thirds of the province, which was, if we’re limiting ourself to economic exploits, fur-trading, farming, and government........

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