Guest opinion column from Senator Paula Simons.There are those who insist that Albertan identity is linked, inextricably, to conservative politics and Christian faith. There are those who insist that to be Albertan is to embrace a very particular kind of rugged masculine ethos, that the real Albertans are to be found in the saddle or on the rig, fencing the back forty or slapping a puck down the ice. .For me, as a woman, a political progressive, an urbanite, a non-Christian, and a fiercely proud Albertan, such narrow definitions just don’t fit..There are four million of us who have made this our chosen home. We are a diverse and complicated and cosmopolitan people. Most live in cities. Few can rope a cow. .And our political culture is more layered and textured than it might seem. Edmonton routinely elects Conservative MPs but New Democrat MLAs. Calgary elects UCP members of the legislature, but voted for a progressive South Asian Muslim mayor in landslide after landslide. Fort McMurray elected its first woman mayor long before Montreal did..While our conservative political roots run deep, so do our communitarian ones, all the way back to when the CCF held its founding convention in Calgary, or when the United Farmers of Alberta held the premier’s office for 14 years. .Yes, there is a certain kind of Albertan cussedness that still marks us. Certainly, I’ve never felt more “Albertan” than I have since I became a Senator and started my regular (pre-Covid) commutes to Ottawa. On Parliament Hill, in the centre of the centre, you’re keenly reminded of just how far away Alberta seems to be from the national discourse. Part of it is a simple function of geography and distance. But there’s a long history of policy grievances too. .We entered Confederation a second-class province, without control of our natural resources. We fought hard for self-determination, and didn’t win mastery of our resource wealth until 1930. Since then, in every generation, we’ve found cause for complaint, whether the issue was Social Credit monetary policy, the National Energy Program, the Crow Rate, or Bill C-48. Those battles have defined and united us over decades..But we’re more than the sum of our grievances. The Alberta I love defines itself by its optimism, its commitment to liberty, its gumption..For my Jewish grandparents, who arrived here more than 100 years ago, Alberta was their Promised Land, the place where they found refuge after they fled the pogroms and poverty of the Russian Empire. Here, they renamed and remade themselves..Their story is mirrored by the story of Mormon settlers who came here fleeing religious persecution in America. Of Hutterite farmers, who came fleeing religious persecution in Russia. Of Lebanese fur traders, who came here seeking economic opportunity, or the Chinese railway workers, who came here to escape political tyranny or the French Oblate missionaries who came seeking a place to build a New Jerusalem. Alberta is a place where Metis freemen strove to found a new nation and people. It’s a place where the children of emancipated slaves fled the old Confederacy for new northern hopes. .Whether they came from the Scottish highlands or the Norwegian fjords, the Ukrainian steppes or the Punjabi hills, people came here to start over. To breathe free. They were people who were willing to risk everything for that chance. That has always been the promise and the potential and sometimes the peril of Alberta. That is the bargain we still offer to new arrivals, be they from Paraguay or South Sudan, from the Philippines or the Netherlands. This is a place without aristocrats, without sclerotic hierarchies, a place where people can be judged, not by who their grandparents were, but by the content of their characters and the boldness of their ambitions. That doesn’t make us conservative. It makes us revolutionary and subversive..Do we always live up to our promise? No. This isn’t a utopia, much though we’ve struggled to make it one. And too often our founding myth erases the reality that there were Indigenous nations here long before the first settlers arrived. Reconciliation means reconciling our triumphal settler mythology with the hard and ugly realities of colonization. .So yes. I’m a “real” Albertan. Not because my family has been here for more than 100 years. Not because I grew up riding ATVs and Ski-Doos, nor because I love rare steaks and saskatoon pie, nor because I choke up a little when I see a canola field blooming beneath a cobalt sky.. I’m an Albertan because I love the promise and the passion and the pride of this place. Because I love us when we are at our best: open, courageous, and ready for any challenge..Paula Simons is an Independent Alberta Senator and hosts the Alberta Unbound podcast
