RUSS: The West Coast stands apart from the West

Geographically, nothing at all save for the Rocky Mountains.Politically, demographically and even constitutionally, however, British Columbia has stood apart from its Prairie neighbours, both consciously and unconsciously. Separatism is a dead letter in BC, plain and simple. Despite its defeat in last month’s referendum, Alberta independence is not going away. A cousin movement will never get off the ground in BC.Obviously, currents of Western alienation still exist in BC, but they take different forms. Many have mistakenly tried to chalk up BC’s distinctiveness in the West to the province’s supposed left-wing tendencies.The myth of the “Left Coast” is one that needs to die. Between 1952 and 2017, anti-NDP coalitions governed the province for 52 out of 66 years. Whether Social Credit or BC Liberal, these governments went toe-to-toe with organized labour and urban activists and explicitly rallied voters against the “socialist hordes.”In BC, NDP governments have been interruptions to the political order, not the norm. Simply because the BC right has never been preoccupied with independence does not mean it is non-conservative. Certainly, BC has had more right-of-centre governments than the former NDP stronghold of Saskatchewan, whose turn to conservative politics is a decidedly modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, conservatism in BC has always favoured a more active government, not in the realm of economic dirigisme or social programs, but in driving the province’s development. BC is a rocky and often inhospitable province, as is obvious on any drive along the Crowsnest Highway through the Kootenays..In contrast to Alberta’s lovely, verdant prairies, building railways and roads through BC’s mountains required countless tons of dynamite and cost hundreds of human lives. State-led developmentalism was a hallmark of the province’s greatest Social Credit leader, former premier William Andrew Cecil Bennett, who believed that the provincial government had to clear the way so that “free enterprise” could take off. Long before Bennett, in 1871, BC entered Confederation only after receiving Ottawa’s promise to build a railway across the province to the West Coast and assume the debt of the then-Colony of BC. Canada needed its Pacific gateway and paid a heavy cost for it, while BC was transformed from colony to province largely on its own terms.This established a lasting pattern in BC’s relationship with Ottawa: the province could negotiate terms and reliably extract concessions from the federal government. Canada has little choice but to accommodate BC, especially today, when the Liberal government speaks of diversifying trade, particularly with Asia, as that trade must flow through BC to reach the Pacific.Meanwhile, Alberta and Saskatchewan had very different origins as provinces. Unlike BC, which negotiated its entry into Canada as a colony, both were statutory creations of the Dominion government in 1905, carved out of the then-centrally governed North-West Territories.The long push for responsible government within Canada was followed by another struggle over the two new provinces’ public lands and resources, control of which was not devolved to Alberta and Saskatchewan until 1930. BC, on the other hand, generally retained control of most of its own resource base during that period, apart from tracts of land that concerned building railways. Provincial equality was withheld from Alberta and Saskatchewan for far longer, and that disparity has left a seemingly permanent impression. Immigration patterns also helped distinguish BC from its Western cousins. Alberta’s agrarian movements received a huge shot in the arm from American migrants, such as the Missouri-born farm leader Henry Wise Wood, who helped organize both farmers’ political action and cooperative wheat marketing.The Prairie populist spirit owes much to these newcomers, as well as to the many Ukrainian immigrants who came to Canada to escape the oppressive Russian Empire. These arrivals did not always fit comfortably within the imperial and, later, Laurentian systems.BC, meanwhile, received a much larger influx of immigrants from the British Isles. With political and economic power concentrated on the coast, Vancouver and Victoria were home to British magnates and marked by strong Royal Navy connections and imperial political loyalties..Former Conservative premier Richard McBride, who governed BC from 1903 to 1915, often preferred to bypass Ottawa and bargain directly with London on financial and economic matters. That strong imperialist streak made BC a sort of Loyalist outpost and truly put the “British” in British Columbia.The differences between BC and Alberta are neither modern nor spontaneous. Both have rich but distinct histories within Canada, and that is not a bad thing. Their differences serve as a reminder that our provinces are more fascinating than we give them credit for, and that what works politically in one may fall flat in the other.One survey released in January 2026 found support for independence at 11% in British Columbia, compared with a quarter of Albertans who voted to pursue the question in the referendum.BC is not in the business of tolerating federal obstruction, and our premiers, including those from the NDP, have a long history of confronting Ottawa. But BC’s grievances are as different from Alberta’s as the provinces themselves, and that is not a problem.Alberta and BC are natural allies, with the former among Canada’s biggest generators of prosperity and the latter home to its most consequential trade corridor. Together, despite the different paths we have taken, we can, if we choose, determine Canada’s future.

RUSS: The West Coast stands apart from the West

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