Michael Binnion is founder and CEO of Questerre Energy Corporation. He chairs the Canada Strong and Free Network and is executive director of the Modern Miracle Network.Alberta is a state of mind. You can be here for six generations and still not understand it, or you can be here for six months and completely get it. I sat on the Alberta Next Panel that shaped nine of the ten referendum questions, and I chair a national organization, the Canada Strong and Free Network. I am not for independence. Nor am I for the status quo. I am for a stronger, more autonomous Alberta, and I believe stronger provinces make a stronger Canada.Who we are as a people is not the facts and statistics. It is the stories we tell ourselves. Across this country, those stories are different, and they depend on when Canada started for us. Canada is not a common date or time; it varies from place to place. Our First Nations would be the first to tell you that. For First Nations, it started in time immemorial. For Newfoundland, it started with Cabot and the fishery. For Quebec it started with Champlain, and for Ontario with the Loyalists. For Albertans, the country began with a railway, in 1883. It should be no surprise that we tell ourselves a different story about what it means to be Canadian.Ours is a recent story. Our history since European settlement is so short that I literally heard it from my great-grandparents' lips to my ears. With so little history, we have a shared identity based on a shared future. Quebec, at the opposite end of Canadian history, has a shared identity based on language and a shared past. Where identity rests on a shared history, you can be welcome for a lifetime and still be from away. Alberta is a rare place where you become a local in the time it takes you to embrace it. People do not ask what your father did. They care about what you can do. That produced the wildcatters and the entrepreneurs Alberta is known for. It also produced the co-ops, the wheat pools, and the credit unions. None of those came down from Ottawa. When we did use government — Social Credit, municipal hospital districts, municipal doctors before anyone called it Medicare — we made sure it was ours. Western conservatives and prairie socialists often disagree on methods, but both look forward..Here is what we get wrong. We assume the rest of Canada is as excited about our story of a shared future as we are. And when the country lets us down, we assume it is a lack of knowledge. So we spend great effort communicating facts and statistics about our contribution to the country. The fundamental problem is that Ottawa already understands our contributions. It is we who do not understand them. Their stories of Canada are different. The rest of the country has generations of shared history, and some of it is about protecting a patrimony rather than building one. Canada bought the West from the Hudson's Bay Company for three hundred thousand pounds in 1870. Our provinces are a creation of the government in Ottawa. We only ceased to be a territory in 1905, and were only grudgingly given control of our own resources in 1930. According to those sensibilities, our land is their land, our wealth their wealth. Albertans' resentments are those of colonials throughout history. No statistic answers that. Only a different story does.My family did not come here at the turn of the twentieth century to be told how to live. Canada was struggling and offered nothing more, and nothing less, than a chance at a better life for people willing to take exceptional risks, suffer great hardships, work unendingly, and accept the results, fair or not. So what does the West need from Canada? Three things. Honour the free movement of goods across the country that section 121 of the Constitution promises. Stand with us against interference in how we make our living by foreign-funded environmental organizations and the United Nations. And want to share the future with us, not just share in the benefits of our resourcefulness and hard work. More Alberta and less Ottawa. Not necessarily sovereignty, but sovereignty if necessary.That is a position against the status quo, but it is a federalist position nonetheless. Under our Constitution, greater autonomy does not begin with the grant of more powers. It begins with Responsible Government, the doctrine that took Canada from colony to country: political authority follows a people who demonstrate they can govern themselves. Before anyone says Alberta has already tried this, look at Quebec. Quebec negotiates from a position of strength, as all good negotiators do. Because it built the strength first: its own taxes, its own pension plan, its own police, and its own immigration accord. That is what Alberta needs to do differently next time. I set out the legal path in a paper for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, How the West Wins. The nine questions on October 19 are steps on it: lawful, negotiated change, not walking out. Canada will decide whether it wants to build a future with the West or only to take the benefits of one. The West will decide whether it has the courage to govern itself responsibly. Neither decision has to wait for the other.I cannot tell my grandchildren the founding of Alberta from my lips to their ears the way my great-grandparents told it to me. I can only repeat what I was told, and soon enough it will only be in books. Our culture will change, and with more people born elsewhere than here, it will change faster than most. What we keep of it will be what we choose to keep, and you cannot choose what you do not understand. Our next chapter in the story of what it means to be a Canadian in Alberta is ours alone to write.Michael Binnion is founder and CEO of Questerre Energy Corporation. He chairs the Canada Strong and Free Network and is executive director of the Modern Miracle Network. He has authored peer-reviewed papers in petroleum geology and, for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, How the West Wins, which sets out the case for non-status-quo federalism. He is a fifth-generation Albertan who had the good fortune of knowing his great-grandmothers well.
