It was no surprise that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre comfortably won Battle River-Crowfoot. What I find surprising was the ease with which the mainstream media concluded that there went the Alberta independence movement, that's that, done and dusted, let's move on. Michael Taube, a fellow veteran of the Harper PMO and normally a sober assessor of things, was explicit in the National Post: "Poilievre proved Alberta separatists were never a force to be reckoned with."Sorry, not so. There is a template for successful revolutions with which Alberta has already made a small alignment. It could make a bigger one. And whether one likes that or hates it, this byelection changed nothing.Fact: all revolutionaries do not dress like antifa thugs.The historical truth is that successful revolutionaries are often comfortably middle-class. They have a stake in the system, know when they’re being ripped off and sometimes resent it enough to rebel… .So before we come to Alberta today, let’s remember that in 1776, the agitators for the American revolution were not feckless bums, but small businessmen engaged (for example) in manufacturing malt (Sam Adams), printing (Ben Franklin), and silversmithing (Paul Revere). Others were farmers, or professionals … doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers.Before the English Civil War in the mid-1600s, it was merchants and the professional classes who supported Parliament against the royalist aristocracy. And more than a hundred years later and for reasons you’d never imagine, vintners and coopers were the French Revolution’s spearpoint. Same with Russia, that in 1917 boiled over in not one but two revolutions. The memoirs of Sir Bruce Lockhart, a proto-James Bond complete with intrigue and intriguing women, are particularly revealing of who was pulling the levers of power, and for what reasons. But workers and peasants? Lenin never did a day's work in his life.All of which is to say that revolutions are not usually — almost never — the work of worms turning. Instead, they start when a powerful economic class whose aspirations are unmet and even dismissed by a remote and uncaring governing class get angry, organized, and declare ‘enough.’Like Alberta today, then.For, there is a pattern to the four revolutions mentioned above — a life-cycle, if you will — and Alberta is so far right on track for radical change.The dissatisfaction of the important economic class is obvious. That would be the large number of people associated with the energy industry. For reasons that are demonstrably specious, Canada’s federal government has made economic war on them for more than 40 years. Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program decimated exploration and production, sparked bankruptcies and mass unemployment, put thousands of people out of their homes and added ‘Western alienation’ to the national vocabulary. In 1982, Albertans even elected a separatist MLA..At least in the case of Trudeau père it was a naked power grab. However, his hitherto barely-employed son won power in 2015, and messaged that in fighting oil and gas, he was doing something beautiful for the Earth... Perhaps. The result in any case was the ‘no pipeline bill,’ the West coast tanker ban, emissions caps, the puck-ragging approval process that led to major companies abandoning projects and a nation-wide loss of as much as $670 billion in investment.So yes, today’s Alberta revolutionary is a highly educated, ambitious man or woman who understands and, likely is, part of the energy industry. They see the lost potential, that Alberta continues to pay the freight for confederation through equalization and that in return Liberal politicians score votes in Eastern Canada by talking down the only part of the country that really still works.An important economic class is dissatisfied — and it’s a big one..The second stage of the revolutionary life cycle is the ‘organization of this discontent with demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing.’This understanding comes from Professor Crane Brinton who in 1938, analyzed these four revolutions in his seminal book, The Anatomy of Revolution.Albertans got serious with their demands when former premier Jason Kenney held his referendum on equalization. Why he then ignored the electorate’s instruction to deal with it has never been explained. However, he did at least raise the matter nationally. Thing is, by Crane’s definition, had Canada’s ruling class acted upon it to Alberta’s advantage, it would have amounted to effective ‘abdication.’ It was never going to happen without a fight.So instead, Trudeau-fils doubled down. And in Alberta, that's where we are, today. With her Sovereignty Act, court challenges and nine demands, a fight is what Premier Danielle Smith is now offering.Let's say Brinton is right. What comes next?Stage 3 is when ‘the empire strikes back.’.In the revolutions Brinton analysed, governments when challenged, tried force. It didn’t work. The revolutionaries proved stronger and governments changed. Yes, is hard to imagine this happening in peaceful, Canada The Good.But then, a lot of people were surprised by the 2022 Truckers’ Convoy. It certainly surprised Justin Trudeau, who with Romanoff hauteur refused to even meet them. (Instead, he headed for the hills faster than Louis XVI fled to Varennes.)The Convoy was not in fact a peculiarly Albertan rejection of federal authority. People forget, but it was originally just a protest by truckers in the cross-border trade who rejected Ottawa’s mandatory vaccination. They came to Ottawa from all directions.But the very fact that the federal right to issue arbitrary dictates was challenged at all, offers some explanation for the vituperous federal denunciation of all things Convoy and the keen enthusiasm of federal prosecutors to jail people for seven or eight years — for mischief.Seriously, eight years for mischief?That’s fear and hatred talking. But that's how official Ottawa reacts when it's afraid. And the Convoy rattled Ottawa in a big way. .So, to the point of how revolutions evolve, and the competence of the Carney-led Government of Canada, it is by no means beyond imagination that this Liberal crew would overreact to Alberta’s defence of itself and precipitate the very crisis they seek to avoid.At that point, what comes next is anybody’s guess. But, in the case of the revolutions Brinton examined, all hell broke loose: “These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates … power passes by violent … methods from Right to Left."As is so often the case when seeking precedent in the lessons of history, the comparison is not perfectly aligned. In this scenario, Canada’s federal government represents the Romanoffs, so power would be passing from the federal left wing to a conservative Alberta. But would it be a united Alberta?Nor would the transition necessarily be violent … much would depend upon who was president of the United States.Nevertheless, nothing is inevitable, and no status is indefinitely quo ante forever. So while not all revolutions succeed and all successful ones do not require Professor Brinton’s roadmap, it is simply a matter of fact that in Brinton’s four steps to a new future, Alberta finds itself already upon the second, with the ball in Ottawa’s court. What Prime Minister Mark Carney does next, how he handles Step Three, is therefore all important. That's because what Brinton clinically describes as “power passing by violent methods,” is actually the reign of terror. Nobody wants that.At the moment, Canada is Mr. Carney’s to lose. He has the power to accommodate Alberta's reasonable demands. But he has around him many of the same people who 'handled' the Trucker Convoy. I doubt the quality of the advice he gets...Here's my suggestion, offered admittedly in hope, more than expectation: those who desire a united country, should start by desiring a better country.
