Alberta’s federalists have a key asset on their side: U.S. President Donald Trump.
Generally speaking, the wind’s already behind them: If you believe the opinion polling, the separatists are in for a fairly epic defeat in October in Premier Danielle Smith’s referendum about secession.
If Albertans vote yes to the five immigration questions on this fall’s referendum, many of Alberta’s 260,000 temporary workers and other non-permanent residents could lose their health and education coverage — while all the rest could have to pay access fees on top of the taxes they pay.
When it comes to the most prominent question on Alberta’s Oct. 19 ballot, Premier Danielle Smith has said she is against separating. But she endorses and has vowed to campaign for the other nine questions she’s put to Albertans on immigration and constitutional reform.
She’s pitched them as a third-way option for supporters to express frustration with Ottawa without going as far as endorsing secession.
Heading into Alberta’s upcoming referendum, the question on Alberta independence easily gets the most attention.
But 10 questions are on the ballot this October, five of which concern immigration — something that has been overshadowed since the separation question was announced in May.
To find out more about how Calgary’s multicultural communities feel about these proposals, CBC News collaborated with several local ethnic media organizations for a roundtable discussion at a southside library.
Alberta is home to roughly 12 per cent of Canada’s population, but it accounted for close to 80 per cent of all the jobs the national economy created in the past year, according to Statistics Canada.
Alberta added nearly 80,000 jobs in the past 12 months, while all of Canada added 99,000, the national agency said in its latest jobs report.
Alberta’s total looms large partly because it kept hiring while some of the country’s biggest provinces shed workers.
On a mild though grey winter’s day just before Christmas, citizens of the Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Slovenia voted 95.7% in favour of becoming independent. Six months later, after negotiations regarding a looser “confederal” arrangement with their Serbian overlords in Belgrade broke down, the Slovenian Parliament issued a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI).
It may have been the final day of the 10-day Calgary Stampede exhibition and rodeo, but two pancake breakfasts held simultaneously Sunday morning made clear the battle for the hearts and minds of Albertans is just ramping up.
At Ranchman’s Cookhouse and Dancehall, one of Calgary’s most well-known western bars, the pro-independence group Let Alberta Decide hosted a pancake breakfast, drawing hundreds. One man wore a shirt that read “Alberta First. Ottawa Last,” before grabbing a plate of eggs, sausages, pancakes and fruit.
Over a million people descend on the Calgary Stampede every year to marvel at the iconic chuckwagon race, a sport invented in the Albertan city where carriage drivers race teams of horses around the track to the sound of pounding hooves, or be amazed by the speed of bareback riders racing in First Nations horse relays.
The ‘Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth’ is the marquee event on Alberta’s summer calendar, a distinctly western Canadian spectacle where political leaders also have to test their mettle, judged on the quality of their pancake flips at community Stampede breakfasts and their ability to pull off a cowboy hat.
The 10 year anniversary in late June of the British public voting to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum received considerable coverage in Canada, not least because of the forthcoming Alberta separatism referendum.
Canadians were treated to a stream of reports of apparent regret by the majority of the British public and commentators from the U.K., who never voted for and never accepted leaving the EU, spouting all sorts of nonsense about the apparent economic impacts of Brexit on the U.K. economy.
The federal government often makes decisions that negatively affect the well-being of Albertans. Since the Liberals’ election in 2015, many of these decisions have been harmful to Alberta by design. The Liberals want to fight climate change, and they think Alberta’s oil and gas industry is the main contributor. Therefore, imposing heavy-handed policies to restrict Alberta’s major source of wealth will achieve their goals.
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When the Alberta government announced the makeup of what was to be an impartial panel examining the economic cost of independence, a couple of the names raised eyebrows.
Ted Morton would be taking part. The former provincial finance minister was a signatory to the infamous “firewall letter” that was published in 2001 and called for greater Alberta autonomy in Canada. Meantime, the panel was to be headed by Jack Mintz, a conservatively inclined economist who wrote a 2020 book with Mr. Morton (and Tom Flanagan) called Moment of Truth: How to Think About Alberta’s Future. In it, the authors said none favoured separation as a first option, “but we also see it as a viable last resort if all else fails.”
“Canada’s Texas is threatening divorce, and it could eventually become the 51st state,” crows the ultraconservative think-tank behind the Trump administration.
The free people of Alberta are about to take a vote.
It’s Canada’s fourth-largest province, both by size (about 411,187 sq mi) and population (5 million).
Several factors have triggered concern in some corners of the country about the role the United States may play in Alberta’s upcoming referendum on separation. They range from a Trump cabinet secretary’s remarks, to administration meetings with separatists, to the spectre of U.S.-based foreign influence campaigns.
But what if the biggest lift Washington gave to the independence movement was done in plain sight and through official policy channels, even though it was likely inadvertent and an indirect boost?
For months now, Alberta business groups and labour unions have been predicting an economic meltdown in the province while the spectre of separation hangs over Albertans’ heads.
Doug Griffiths, who is president of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce (and who was once one of the reddest Tory ministers in the government of red Tory premier Alison Redford), has been leading the surge of fearmongering.
A referendum is looming in Alberta, which will reveal this fall how far the province is ready to go toward the independence option.
For the rest of Canada, a big question revolves around how much are we willing to do to keep Alberta in the federation. Some new polling by Abacus Data may offer some insights into that question and the short answer is: quite a lot.
The proposed crude oil pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to the B.C. coast that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been championing and that Prime Minister Mark Carney has ostensibly signed off on in a “grand bargain” last month is unlikely to be built.
It won’t begin construction as early as next year, as Smith has suggested, or be delivering one million barrels a day of Alberta crude to the Pacific coast by the mid-2030s, if ever.
