Alberta’s nationhood delusion

Alberta is a lot of things: wealthy, proud, indignant and endlessly controversial. But a nation? That’s the argument Danielle Smith and her allies in the local pundit class are trying to make in their quest to defend her Alberta Sovereignty Act. It fits within her overarching strategy of poking Ottawa directly in the eye with a constitutional stick to provoke a response that could help get her re-elected. As she wrote back in August, “Quebec has asserted it is a nation within a nation… Under my leadership, Alberta will, too.”

In fairness to Premier Smith, Alberta already possesses many of the cultural prerequisites for post-modern nationhood.

It has a well-honed sense of victimhood and a political culture that rewards those who indulge it. It has a well-defined enemy (Liberal governments led by a Trudeau) whose apparent desire to suppress and oppress it dates back over multiple generations. And it is deeply invested in the belief that if only that boot was removed from its collective back, whether through the elimination of the carbon tax or removal of bills C-69 and C-48, it could finally thrive as it was meant to.

As Alberta Sen. Paula Simons once said, “For better or worse, and often for worse, the culture of grievance is baked into the DNA of this province.”

But while Alberta has all the requisite feelings for nationhood, it’s badly lacking when it comes to the facts. There are no distinct linguistic or cultural characteristics that would clearly distinguish Alberta as a nation, unless you consider the hoser dialect from the mockumentary Fubar to be an accurate representation of the province as a whole.

Unlike Quebec, which existed long before Confederation and had a clearly defined political and legal tradition that set it apart from the rest of what would become Canada, Alberta was part of “Rupert’s Land,” an administrative territory signed over to the Hudson’s Bay Company by King Charles II. Eventually, that land was bought out by the newly formed country of Canada in 1869 for the princely sum of $1.5 million, and Alberta was carved out from it alongside Saskatchewan in 1905.

Those two provinces, if joined together, might actually come close to resembling a nation — although one without any credible claim to its land, given the numbered treaties between the Crown and Indigenous nations that predate their creation. Sir Frederick Haultain, then the premier of the Northwest Territories, wanted to see them share the boundaries of a new province called Buffalo. But Sir Wilfrid Laurier, wary of creating a new province that might one day have enough power to rival Ontario and Quebec, decided to cleave it into two. Here, at least, is a historical grievance that has some merit.

So if not history or language, what is it that makes Alberta a nation?

According to the signatories of the Buffalo Declaration, a quasi-separatist manifesto headlined by Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner and released in February 2020, it’s a combination of economic circumstance and cultural inclination. “Throughout Alberta’s history,” the declaration reads, “we can see several distinct cultural themes. A struggle against a colonial government, a desire for individual freedom, a willingness and drive to achieve personal economic liberty; a deep connection and respect for our land; and an economy unique to other areas of Canada.”

Ottawa was never a “colonial government,” though, and the desire for freedom and economic liberty, along with a connection to the land and an economy that relies on natural resources, is hardly unique to Alberta. If anything, that’s the story of the West, writ large, both in Canada and the United States — one that’s underwritten by the exploitation of the real nations who live there, the Indigenous Peoples whose history long predates that of any settler on their land.

Alberta isn’t the only Prairie province trying to seed this ground right now. Saskatchewan is also in the midst of an effort to claim nationhood for itself, one that seems driven almost entirely by a desire for more power on the part of Premier Scott Moe’s government. “Moe did not demand the province be identified as a nation based on culture or history,” CBC’s Adam Hunter wrote in 2021. “He did not explain how Indigenous people or the treaties fit into his idea of a Saskatchewan ‘nation.’ Rather, Moe's focus was giving Saskatchewan more influence over its ‘destiny’ through various policies, including immigration and child care spending.” In other words: power.

That’s almost certainly what’s happening in Alberta right now as well. After all, this nascent sense of nationhood seems to disappear whenever there’s a federal Conservative government in power. As political science professor Mike Medeiros wrote in a December 2021 piece for Policy Options, “Political movements that represent actual ‘nations’ do not care much about which party is heading the central government; they are more concerned with preserving and enlarging their autonomy.”

The twin push for Prairie nationhood, by contrast, seems almost entirely informed by those sorts of political dynamics. If an election was called tomorrow and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives won, this talk would disappear overnight. It’s also underwritten by a certain degree of hypocrisy, given how little Stephen Harper and his decade-long Conservative government did to advance the interests of Alberta and Saskatchewan — and how conspicuously quiet the Alberta and Saskatchewan nationalists were during that time.

So no, hating Justin Trudeau, federal Liberals or their climate policies does not constitute nationhood. Neither does a desire for more power on the part of certain provincial politicians.

If Alberta and Saskatchewan want to merge and recreate the province of Buffalo, they can fill their cowboy boots. But claiming some unique sense of nationhood, and drawing a straight line to the precedent set by Quebec, falls somewhere between wishful thinking and outright delusion.