A Liberal victory in the current federal election campaign could be the trip-wire that leads to Alberta independence. At least three times in the past 45 years, Liberal election victories have led to explosions of support for Alberta leaving the country. If the Liberals win this time, it could easily be the last straw.To be clear, a Mark Carney election victory might make the dreams of independence supporters — like myself — come true.Consider the elections of 1980, 2000, and 2019. In 1980, Pierre Trudeau was returned to power after defeating Joe Clark’s minority government. Trudeau’s Liberals had run on a platform of putting Alberta in its place and keeping oil prices low for eastern Canada. Famously, the Liberals’ unofficial campaign slogan was, “Screw the West, we’ll take the rest.”Albertans’ response to the Trudeau victory was defiant rage.Immediately after the election, Edmonton businessman Elmer Knutson wrote a letter to the editor of the Edmonton Journal arguing that Quebec had taken over the country: “Let us then look at the Canada of February 19, 1980, the day that will be remembered as the day after the second battle of the plains of Abraham, when the Anglophones lost and the French won.”Knutson’s letter generated immediate support, leading to the creation of West-Fed, which was widely viewed as a separatist organization. During the summer of 1980, West-Fed held a number of well-attended meetings in Alberta.The growth of widespread separatist sentiment in Alberta was noticed and the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party, Nick Taylor, warned his fellow Liberals not to provoke Albertans. He said that any move by the federal government to control Alberta’s oil “would be tantamount to the Boston tea party or the first shot at Fort Sumter and would turn every westerner into a separatist.”.That first shot would in fact be Trudeau’s National Energy Program, in October 1980. Many people did become separatists, albeit temporarily.Later, the Reform Party of Canada would emerge as a very credible political vehicle advocating for a Western political voice, putting a damper on the independence sentiment.Early in 2000 however, the Reform Party folded itself into a new party, the Canadian Alliance, with Stockwell Day as leader. In the federal election of November 27, 2000, the Liberals won with 41% of the vote and 172 seats, while the Alliance under Day received 26% of the vote and 66 seats, most of which were in the West. Ontario had voted overwhelmingly Liberal..For many Western conservatives, this was unbearable. The result was to generate new sympathy for independence in parts of western Canada, especially Alberta.Ironically, one of the first public voices advocating Alberta independence was Ian Hunter, professor emeritus of law at the University of Western Ontario. As he put it in The Report magazine (successor to Alberta Report), “For the West (particularly Alberta and BC) the way forward is out. If the West is finally fed up with Liberal governments foisted upon them by Ontario, it is time to go it alone.”The Alberta Independence Party, led by a young Cory Morgan, began to receive increasing support and media attention.What received even more attention was the January 2001 “Firewall Letter” written by Stephen Harper, Ted Morton, and some other prominent Albertans. Harper and his associates believed their firewall agenda was necessary due to the 2000 federal election. As they put it, “the Chretien government undertook a series of attacks not merely designed to defeat its partisan opponents, but to marginalize Alberta and Albertans within Canada’s political system.”However, independence sentiment would recede, especially after Harper became prime minister in 2006. Then it revived when Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, and it soared when he was re-elected in October 2019..In the 2019 election, even though Alberta had voted 69 percent for the Conservatives and Saskatchewan had voted 64 percent for the Conservatives, the Liberals topped the polls in Ontario and Quebec, thereby winning enough seats to keep them in power.Anger in Alberta was intense. As Ted Morton wrote, “Our news media is flooded with stories about the tsunami of separatist sentiment that has exploded in Western Canada since Monday’s federal election. Memberships for a ‘WEXIT’ website soared from 2,500 to 125,000 in less than 24 hours. Signatures on an online petition to separate have surpassed 80,000 and more are being added every minute.”The Wexit organization held three meetings during November 2019. The Edmonton event was attended by at least 700 people, the Calgary event had as many as 1700 people, and the Red Deer event about 700 people. Clearly, the movement was growing rapidly.A major national magazine called The Walrus carried an article on Wexit noting, “A referendum on Alberta’s relationship with the rest of the country feels practically inevitable at this point.”To deal with the anger felt in many parts of the province, Premier Jason Kenney launched the Fair Deal Panel to gather input from citizens about how Alberta could improve its situation within Canada. In June 2020 the panel's official report was published. It recognized the widespread anger of Albertans towards the federal government and recommended a number of measures to reassert Alberta’s jurisdictional powers within Canada. But this fell far short of what was needed.Then, with the arrival of COVID, Wexit faded away.Now however, large numbers of Albertans are very angry at the Liberal government and want it gone. The Conservatives had been way ahead in the polls for a long time, and it looked like the Liberal reign would soon end. But with the resignation of Justin Trudeau, the new Liberal leader Mark Carney weaving his magic, and U.S. President Donald Trump referring to Canada as the fifty-first state, the polls have swung back in favour of the Liberals.Elections have consequences, and the 2025 federal election could be historic. If Carney wins, anger in Alberta will boil over. People who never supported independence before will get on board. This could be the moment the independence movement has been waiting for.So the sixty-four thousand dollar question is: Will Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives defeat the Liberals and defuse the Liberal’s Alberta time-bomb? Or will Mark Carney’s victory detonate it? We will soon find out.
