After spending most of last weekend in Calgary and having the privilege of speaking with scores of well-informed Albertans including a number of prominent political figures, I came away with an uneasy feeling that it is not generally recognized in Canada how politically vulnerable this country is and how vivid and well-founded are the public policy grievances of Alberta. Alberta was a conventional farming and ranching economy until the discovery of oil there in 1947. Today, mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction account for a quarter of Alberta's GDP, and 70 per cent of exports, with ancillary benefits to the construction, manufacturing, transportation and other industries.
For its first 30 years as an oil and gas producing jurisdiction, Alberta's standard of living and per capita income naturally rose accordingly, especially after the steep rises in international oil prices following the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in 1973 and the ensuing Arab oil boycott. The first cloud on the brightening blue horizon of Alberta came in 1954, when the long-serving premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, after warning the federal government for 20 years that income taxes were a concurrent jurisdiction and being ignored, imposed a provincial income tax and forced the federal government to accept its deductibility from Quebecers' income for purposes of assessing their federal tax. This was the beginning of decentralization in Canada, as other provinces followed Quebec's example and the federal government produced the equalization program, in which the most wealthy provinces paid through Ottawa to assist the less prosperous ones.
Duplessis was a political leader of such virtuosity that he managed to get the conservatives and the nationalists in Quebec to vote together without his nationalism frightening the conservatives or his conservatism irritating the nationalists. When he and his two chosen disciples, Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson, followed Duplessis in dying in office but at much younger ages and only a short time as premier, the nationalist torch in Quebec passed to Rene Levesque and the left, and there was no conservative restraint on what quickly became a move to the outright secession and independence of Quebec. Duplessis had effectively made this possible by preserving provincial autonomy from federal centralization and by maintaining the Roman Catholic clergy as the great majority of the personnel in the province's French-language education and health service departments, at very modest cost, while balancing the provincial budget, reducing taxes and devoting almost all of the budget to modernizing Quebec. When he died in 1959 after nearly 20 years as premier, he had built 3,000 schools, the first autoroutes and most of the modern roads and almost all the university campuses. Quebec had ceased to be a primitive province in all respects except possibly political mores, and these changed quickly.
In legitimate response to the separatist threat, the federal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau expanded the equalization transfer payment program and Alberta and Ontario and British Columbia were effectively buying votes for federalism in Quebec. This was a successful strategy, but it became particularly onerous for Alberta when the Trudeau government also imposed its national energy program and seized a confiscatory share of the income from that industry, despite the fact that natural resources are constitutionally a provincial jurisdiction. Alberta's talented premier, Peter Lougheed, strongly contested the federal government's action and he was widely represented in Canada by the Liberal party propaganda apparatus that has long dominated most of our political media, as a "blue-eyed Arab" greedily gathering in fortuitous oil revenue and overcharging his fellow Canadians. Lougheed and Trudeau jousted in the court of public opinion as well as the courts of constitutional law.
Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney arranged a reasonable compromise with western and eastern offshore oil producers in 1985 and comparative peace reigned for a time. This was the ironic background of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's assault on Canada's greatest income-earning industry, oil and gas, not to confiscate its proceeds as his father had attempted to do, but to shut it down, in the utterly spurious claimed interest of defending the planet against climate change. The Marxist left demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected talent for improvisation by spontaneously and almost universally clambering aboard what had been a somewhat tedious but honourable conservationist bandwagon of birdwatchers, butterfly collectors, champions of duck wetlands and Greenpeace zealots trying to climb up the anchor-chains of visiting American aircraft carriers, and transform the environmental movement into a battering ram against capitalism from this new unimpeachable angle of saving the ecosystem.
Of course, there are legitimate environmental concerns and great vigilance must be shown. All pollution is odious but Canada's record is good and it has almost no impact on global fossil fuel use. Now we are in the increasingly precarious position that Quebec, which has been fiscally better managed than Canada for some years, has prospered and ostensibly separatist parties are leading the polls there toward next year's general election. The economic argument is not as convincing as it was, but the nationalist susceptibility of the population has been diluted by the admission by the Government of Quebec of large numbers of Moroccans, Haitians and Lebanese, to try to maintain the French-speaking population of the province following the collapse in the French-Canadian birthrate after the secularization of the province, and these people are not much interested in Quebec nationalism. The outcome is unpredictable.
The election of a climate change fanatic, Prime Minister Mark Carney, with a long record of demanding the most rapid possible shutdown of the oil and gas industry, has caused Albertans to think increasingly of the fact that if they seceded from Canada and made an agreement to sell their oil and gas either to the United States or through pipelines like Keystone XL through the United States to the world, they could probably abolish the income tax, would become a petrostate like Norway and become one of the per capita wealthiest countries in the world, which they could run themselves without hearing another word from Ottawa. In Alberta, as in Quebec, there are alternatives to Canada. And there is no public evidence that this federal government has given much original thought to how to keep Confederation going. Carney's first five big projects did include an encouraging emphasis of liquefied natural gas, but they fall far short of an effective answer to the separatists of the east or west.