For many Albertans, politics today feels like the American politics of 1775. A year later, as every educated person knows, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. At the time, the Colonies were still part of the British Empire; it is, therefore, as much a British as an American document and ought to be read as part of our North Atlantic Anglo-Saxon heritage, which is to say British, American, and Canadian heritage. For reasons discussed below, it is not widely so regarded. The Americans understandably celebrate it as part of their two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. The British, in the recent remarks of King Charles, made a few diplomatic remarks. But what of us?It is probably fair to say that, in Ontario, the Declaration will be as well received this summer as it was by the Loyalists two and a half centuries ago. After all, the British territory that became Upper Canada in 1791 and eventually Ontario was settled along with New Brunswick by the losers of the Revolution. As for the “neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia,” who were invited to send delegates to Philadelphia but were prevented by British arms concentrated in the Royal Navy base at Halifax, one expects they have assimilated themselves into the Loyalist self-understanding and the Loyalist myth.The chief element of that myth, it is hardly necessary to point out, is the often-unseemly moral superiority, today called Trump Derangement Syndrome, that losers so often have historically displayed towards the victors. Most recently in this country, the moral superiority of Loyalist Ontario was expressed by the spectacle of the premier of that province pouring perfectly good Crown Royal down the drain to protest minute additions to American tariffs. Or there is the example of the prime minister’s “elbows up” campaign, which he inexplicably seems subsequently to have abandoned.If there is any genuine sympathy for the logic and the sentiments of the Declaration, it is to be found in the West, especially in Alberta, the West of the West. Interestingly enough, that sympathy is sustained by sentiments equivalent in many ways to those of the colonial Patriots of 1776..Let us recall what all American schoolchildren know: The Declaration begins with the reflection that, when one people seeks to dissolve existing political bonds with another, a decent respect for the opinions of humanity “requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” It goes on to affirm that all human beings are created equal, that they have inalienable rights that governments secure but do not create, and that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed. When governments are destructive of these ends, “it is the right of the people to abolish it.” Many political evils may be sufferable, the Declaration continued, “but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing inevitably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a government,” and establish a new one. Such was the position of American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776; I would submit that such is the position of many Alberta Patriots today. If the later-day Loyalists of Ontario and elsewhere find this observation intolerable, disloyal, treasonous, and so forth, I would say that such attitudes strengthen my point.Now we must consider some history, but not the history of Canada as seen by the triumphalist Laurentian historical school centred at the University of Toronto in the middle of the last century and comprised of Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, A.R. M. Lower, and their brilliant students. No, we must consider Laurentian Canada’s interest and involvement in the Prairie West as an external, even foreign, involvement. As one Western historian observed, if Creighton can write about the St. Lawrence River, I can write about the Whitemud.Here’s how this revisionist history goes: to the west of the confederated colonies of 1867 centred on the St. Lawrence River valley lay the Hudson’s Bay Company lands, by imperial law a plantation. From the beginning of Laurentian Canada’s involvement with the Prairie West, it has adopted the attitude as well as the political instruments of the British imperial Crown. Following the 1869 transfer of Company lands from the imperial Crown to the Crown in right of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald remarked that Canada had acquired its very own Crown colony. By imperial law and practice, a Crown colony was a possession of the Crown under the control of a governor appointed from the imperial capital, whether London or Ottawa. Such colonies may or may not have a legislative assembly, but always the Crown has the right of veto and the option of imposing direct legislation by order-in-council. A long-time critic of the Company, Alexander Kennedy Isbister, said the transfer of the former Company territory to Canada had made it a “colony of a colony.” That seems about right.As for the inhabitants of the new Canadian possessions, none were consulted. Canada saw no reason to do so. That decision contrasted sharply with the transcontinental expansion of the US. Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance, for example, the inhabitants of American territories could petition Washington to become an equal state in the American federation. The result of ignoring the inhabitants of the Canadian northwest was evident in 1870 and 1885 when Canada had to deploy a military force to extinguish an armed challenge to remote imperial rule from Ottawa. Following the completion of the CPR, protected by the “monopoly clause” to guarantee traffic, the settlement of the agricultural west under a land and resource policy that reserved sales “for the purposes of the Dominion,” and the tariffs of the National Policy that protected Laurentian manufacturing from competition, the three (not one) prairie provinces remained politically and legally subordinate to Laurentian Canada..The Northwest remained a colony of a colony until 1905, when two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, were created. Neither was a full-fledged province because, unlike every other province, they did not control the chief sources of revenue, namely public lands and natural resources. James Mallory, a distinguished McGill political scientist of an earlier generation, once said they were provinces “in the Roman sense,” by which he meant that, like Trans-Alpine Gaul, the West would continue to be ruled by the new Rome on the Rideau, as a conquered territory. In return, like Roman provincials, Westerners were compelled to pay tribute — taxes — to Laurentian Canada. This subordination lasted until 1930, when the Prairie provinces were granted control of their natural resources, just in time for the Great Depression.There followed years of efforts to turn the Prairie provinces into viable constituents of a genuine federal union. For their part, Laurentians continued to assume the West and its resources existed to benefit them. The resources changed, from fur to wheat, potash, uranium, and today, hydrocarbons. Accordingly, when the Yom Kippur war drove up the price of oil, Ottawa instituted a “made in [Laurentian] Canada” price that subsidized eastern consumers. They called it the National Energy Program, an obvious insult to Albertans. As the federal energy minister, Marc Lalonde, helpfully explained, its purpose was “to transfer wealth from Alberta to central Canada.”Albertans have tried to work for change within the system, but owing to the intransigent opposition of the Laurentians, this has proved impossible. The Great Depression saw the use of the Dominion powers of disallowance and reservation extensively used against Alberta initiatives to deal with economic hardship. Wartime centralization guaranteed by the War Measures Act was continued by increased postwar power in Ottawa exercised through tax-rental agreements, conditional grants, and especially the use of the spending power, which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.Albertans responded by working, as David Smith, then at the University of Saskatchewan, observed, first within the dominant “national” parties — the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives, not Social Credit and the CCF/NDP — then through third-party balance-of-power strategies to advance prairie provincial interests, including the recent agitation for central institutional reform such as a triple-E — elected, effective, and equal — Senate, that would have introduced federal elements into Canadian central institutions. All these futile efforts can be summarized in the slogan of a generation ago, “the West wants in,” by which was meant that the West sought to be a partner in a federal union, not a Laurentian colony. This effort has been rejected with not a little contempt by Laurentian Canada..It is hardly necessary to mention other instances of the long train of abuse, namely the transfer, since 1961, of some $630 billion from Alberta to Canada, as a result of various “equalization” formulae. The current rate, about $20 billion a year, works out to around $22,000 for every family of four in the province. Coupled with the decades-long attack by Ottawa on the oil and gas industry, which is not over yet despite the hoopla about MOUs, one can perhaps see the recent policy from imperial Ottawa as the culmination of abuse, now accompanied by obfuscation.So, now what?The discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947 made clear within a generation to Albertans (and so to Saskatchewanians as well) that economic power and prosperity soon would establish a new political reality. When the West wanted in, which is to say, when the West wanted Canadian political reality to reflect the new balance of economic power by way of a federal accommodation of its interests that had been denied and refused since Macdonald’s day, Laurentian Canada evidently lacked the will and imagination to deal with the new reality. That is, there was no effort to accommodate the Prairie West within a federal Canada. Instead, the chief problems of Laurentian Canada, the position of Quebec in the country (do Albertans really care?), became the sole concern of constitutional reform expressed in the 1982 Constitution Act that was explicitly designed by Pierre Trudeau to be nearly impossible to amend. The only omission was that the new reality, based on economic changes, was ignored. When every effort to change Canada from an imperial organization to a federation has failed, which is a summary of the history of the position of the Prairie West and Laurentian Canada, it should come as no surprise that so many Westerners, and especially Albertans, are ready to leave.As my colleague at the University of Alberta, Leon Craig, observed several years ago, if Alberta were currently independent, is it likely that it would join Canada as it is today? What would be the advantages? Seeing none, why should Alberta stay?The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration reminds us that the options contemplated in 1775 in the Thirteen Colonies are still open today in Canada. For many Albertans, independence is not a question of if but of when.Dr. Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His book on terrorism was recovered by Seal Team Six during their visit to the Osama bin Laden compound in Abbottabad in May 2011.
