Petro-Separatism on the Prairies
The once-fringe dream of Albertan independence has gained new prominence, forcing Canada to confront the political and economic power of fossil fuels.
This October, the province of Alberta intends to ask its voters the following convoluted question: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?” If this would at first seem to be a rather abstruse constitutional wrangle—a headache for a weak and geographically dispersed Canadian Confederation that has wrestled with separatist forces ever since the nineteen sixties, when Quebec began to demand sovereignty for their province—its implications both for Canada and for the wider world could yet be immense.
If the world is increasingly divided into rival electro-states and petro-states,[1] Canada—a major petro-state which is the fourth largest exporter of oil in the world, producing over five million barrels a day—now faces the novel prospect of losing the province that contains almost all of the country’s remaining reserves. In the opaque phrasing of the referendum, are we beginning to see the emergence of a new phenomenon in global politics: petro-separatism?
Albertans have long identified their prosperity with their oil and gas industries and resented the federal government’s efforts to redistribute their revenues or to reduce their carbon emissions. But in the last decade, this extractive populism has entered a more radical phase: around a third of Albertans now feel that leaving Canada may be the only way their oil and gas industries could survive and thrive. As journalist Tyler Dawson argues in his lucid pamphlet, The Republic of Alberta, it is largely the self-interested shenanigans of Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith that have given these once unpopular and still wholly unrealistic designs a shot at implementation. Yet Dawson is convinced that it’s worth taking a close look at this movement nonetheless. Separatist movements reveal how the promoters of fossil fuel extraction shield it from challenge by binding it with other political and even religious ideas. In this logic, oil is no longer resource—still less a pollutant—becoming instead an identity, even a faith.
A Prairie Norway
Albertan discontent with Canada long predates the development of the fossil fuel sector, which only took off after a spectacular oil strike at Leduc in 1947. In 1905, the federal government of Canada carved out the province of Alberta from the vast North Western Territory, which it had acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company.[2] Although provincial status granted Albertans representation in the federal Parliament in Ottawa, they immediately grumbled that theirs was a colony rather than a true partner in Confederation.
In making this case in his pamphlet Canada and Her Colonies: Or Home Rule for Alberta (1911), the federal MP Alwyn Bramley-Moore drew a loaded parallel with contemporary agitation in Ireland. Just as Westminster foolishly refused to give Dublin a Parliament, so Ottawa constrained the Albertans. Sprawling empires and confederations, he argued, could only survive by granting autonomy to their sub-units. But it was economic grievances that ultimately gave this constitutional kvetching its bite. Albertans did not yet control how land and resources under Crown control were allocated, and were powerless to change the tariff regime that made their province a dumping ground for eastern manufacturers.
Over the next few decades, Albertan politics developed a repertoire of economic grievances to add to their political ones, even after federal legislation in 1930 turned over the management of raw materials to the province. At this time, it was still the cries of depressed wheat farmers rather than the grousing of oil men that supplied Alberta’s political music. Of particular importance was the Social Credit movement, which rose to power between the world wars by capitalizing on their discontents. Its leaders pledged to guarantee a minimum income to every Albertan through heterodox forms of money creation that deliberately violated federal legislation on banking and currency and were therefore disallowed by Ottawa.
Gareth Fearn
Other Canadians sometimes represent Alberta as an Americanized province, changed by the influx of oil workers from south of the border. But as the religious historian Darren Dochuk has pointed out, it was homegrown Protestants who originally championed fossil fuel extraction out of a desire to strengthen their existing grip on the province. Ernest Manning, the premier who pushed to open up of the Athabasca oil sands that today constitute most of Alberta’s and Canada’s remaining fossil fuels, was a protégé of the Social Credit Alberta premier William Aberhart, himself a Fundamentalist who moonlighted as a Bible-bashing radio preacher.