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.
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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 jobs before it was oil sands. And it doesn’t even paint a particularly accurate portrait of our cowboys, a pretty good number of whom were Remittance Men, nineteenth-century trust-fund kids, sent off with an allowance to buy big hats so they could stop embarrassing their families back in the British Isles. (We honour their memory every July, when the Stampede also makes a bunch of delusional carpet-baggers who would need two guesses to find the front of a horse wear overpriced Halloween costumes.)
Of course, the bigger problem with the historical case is that you’d be hard pressed to fill a foothills hamlet with people who are even passingly aware of any part of it. I was an Alberta education system honours student who learned more from my family trips to Fort Edmonton Park than I did from K–12, and experts are pretty sure the curriculum is getting worse.
Nor do we make up for it later in life: our premier postsecondary institution, the University of Alberta, offers a grand total of one undergrad course on specifically Western Canadian history—none about Alberta—and it ends at 1885. (To put that in slight perspective, at the University of Toronto, there are just as many courses specifically about the history of the University of Toronto.) The Alberta government is actually quite happy to tell universities what they can do, but, apparently, our own history does not rise to the level of provincial priority—which is also maybe why they couldn’t spare $76,000 to fund provincial historical societies.
To be at least a little fair here, Alberta’s separatists have picked a very hard era in which to forge a national identity. More or less, the entire history of Alberta as a province has been conducted in the age of mass media, when there have been lots of competing foreign stories—primarily American, of course—to soak up attention that might otherwise go to our own historical, or even just mythic, narratives. Most of the other prominent independence movements that have pulled off referenda in or near the twenty-first century at least have a few centuries of inherently local culture to draft off of. This includes all of the Scots, Catalans, and Quebecois who are distinct enough from their separated states to have their own language (or at least hilariously distinct accents), to say nothing of the 400 to 1,000 years of tradition, convention, and cultural expression that can help them weather the storm of the Super Mario Galaxy (and, you know, inform political discussions).
Still, if Alberta is starting from behind, it hasn’t worked especially hard to catch up. Alberta did not have a ministry of culture nor an arts-funding body until the early to mid-1970s. The former disappeared from 1992 to 2015 into the Ministry of Community Development, sharing attention with tourism and parks, and currently is known as Alberta Arts, Culture and Status of Women, to give you an idea of the importance of those three topics to the province’s current government; its mandate is to end gender-based violence and put up more Alberta flags. The funding body, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, has been chugging along fine, even if current per capita funding is less than one-third of Quebec’s.
Alberta has not had a public broadcaster on either radio or television since it sold off both in 1995, though CKUA, the radio station, does still broadcast province-wide as a not-for-profit. But, of course, our entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t require government largesse to assert cultural dominance. Which is why Alberta has been the home of precisely none of Canada’s largest media or communications companies since 1999—when Telus and the media production arm of Shaw went to Vancouver and Toronto, respectively—and every television channel but one is owned by a company headquartered somewhere else in Canada.
Owning the means of production isn’t the only way to get the word out—it doesn’t seem to hurt Quebec, it should be said—but at the least it means that any wider discussion about what matters to us first has to go through some distant intermediary. What makes an Albertan isn’t a particularly popular topic among Albertan artists—especially the ones who keep getting nominated for awards or leave to pursue richer and more developed opportunities elsewhere. One has to assume at least part of the reason for that is that there’s a pretty limited market for it: even Albertans won’t support it in any meaningful way.
To a certain degree, this is helpful to the separatist cause; they can, and do, fill the void with whatever they like, and the lack of competing narratives makes it de facto compelling. It also partially explains their fetish for Americanization. With no other good narratives, we essentially are just Americans with a regional flavour (that line of thought just happens to run into the fact that one of the only unifying concepts of any Canadian self-identity is that we are not American).
But for their fellow Albertans, imposing a definition, even the stereotypical one, doesn’t pass the smell test. We know what doesn’t fit, even if we don’t have many strong competing visions to stand up in their place. So, naturally, we slip to our default: I’m hardly the world’s most enthusiastic Canadian, but I would still obviously rather live in Canada than North North Dakota or the West’s Very Own Kazakhstan.
If my fellow Albertans want to change my mind on that, they might want to start showing me that their culture is more than honking when they get mad about something. Because for proud Albertans, they sure don’t seem to care about what it is we actually believe about ourselves.
