In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why the Alberta government is consciously taking some of its strategies for dealing with the feds and other provinces from the generations-long success that has been Quebec’s planbook:
Quebec — as the single largest recipient of equalization cash — is often a target of anger in these parts, but I’d encourage any readers from thereabouts not to read too much into this fact. Both Alberta and Quebec suffer from a culture of political grievance that feed off one another. Alberta resents the fiscal balances, often casting Quebec as an ungrateful recipient of the very oil wealth that the latter regards with contempt. And I can only imagine how Quebec must read this; as a signal of its own isolation from Anglo culture more broadly. On both sides, I see politicians who have made a generational art of milking these respective grievances.
So sometimes it’s worthwhile to point this out.
Alberta doesn’t hate Quebec.
The provinces exist on flip sides of the very same coin; they are each others’ dark twins, and Alberta seeks mostly to emulate its French sibling.
Kenney made this point entirely explicitly in the days leading up to the referendum.
“We’re using this to get leverage to basically take a page out of Quebec’s playbook in having successfully dominated the political attention of the federation for the last 40 or 50 years.”
What playbook was he referencing, here?
The answer is obvious; the separation referenda of 1980 and 1995. In fact, the whole logic of Alberta’s referenda last night was predicated on a novel reading of the Quebec Secession Reference, in which a clear majority on a clear question must force the federal government to the negotiating table in good faith. The fact that this reference spoke to a secession question — and not a longstanding quibble over an item within the constitution — is a material difference from a legal point of view, but not a psychological one.
The hope is that this referenda will give us somethin akin to the “leverage” Quebec has enjoyed vs. Ottawa since its failed separation referenda; and the disproportionate financial and cultural incentives that followed in the following decades. Essentially, Alberta is asking for the leverage of a true separatist movement without suffering the risk of actually separating. We are play-acting a little Potemkin secession referendum, here. If it falls to me to point out the show is a little childish and even a touch pathetic, well, so be it.
