The poor and downtrodden peons in the economically ravaged area of Buffalo are moving towards separation from their colonial imperialist masters in Toronto and Montreal:
I read yesterday’s “Buffalo Declaration” signed by four Alberta Members of Parliament with the serious and consuming interest natural to an Albertan. I see, however, that the revolution it is intended to provoke in my mind, and in the minds of my compatriots, is not yet complete. I am still instinctively using the outdated terminology imposed upon me by the black iron prison that is the Laurentian empire.
The declaration commences with a long explanation of how “Alberta” was created by central Canadian Liberals against the expressed political will of the residents. The territorial government would have preferred one great province called Buffalo to have been created on the soil which the Canadian wolf decided to cleave into “Alberta” and “Saskatchewan.” Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook!
The natural conclusion would seem to be that to make any use of “Alberta” as a conceptual category is to play the game by the empire’s rules. And, in fact, the third of the 17 (!) demands in the declaration is that prospective adherents (who may or may not be contenders for the leadership of the federal Conservative party, wink wink) “recognize Alberta — or Buffalo — as a culturally distinct region within Confederation.”
Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism. (Or, rather, at the game of creating a Quebec-style spectrum of nationalisms, ranging from paranoid cranks to grouchy-but-devoted three-quarter federalists.)
It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands.”
You have to admit that Quebec’s plan of “soft sovereignty” has worked very well to keep Quebec’s concerns fully front-and-centre no matter which party controls Ottawa. In some ways it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for anyone to consciously copy it.
