Colby Cosh: If Alberta separatists can’t convince me, they have no hope

Separatists participate in a rally advocating for Alberta's separation from Canada, in Redcliff, Alta., on Sept. 23. Photo by ABED ZAQ/AFP via Getty Images

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The Alberta separation referendum will happen on Monday, and I am very much looking forward to Tuesday, when I can go back to being my usual Albertan-chauvinist self. Perhaps I ought to say a word or two to my own tribe in advance of the vote. I was born in Alberta, in late Social Credit Alberta. I’ve never lived anywhere outside Alberta. Readers know I espouse weird anarcho-capitalist politics, all of which I learned growing up in Alberta, and some of which I got directly from an education at the University of Alberta.

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I then worked in the boiler room of Alberta Report (AR) for the better part of 10 years, as writer and senior editor (a job title only ever given to young people). I was friends with, and an admirer of, both Ted and Link Byfield. Alberta separatists who do not recognize these names should die of shame. Neither of those gentlemen were originally from Alberta, but they loved and advocated for Alberta, so that didn’t come between us.

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It would be understating matters to say I had a front-row seat for the rise of the Reform party. Even before my time at AR, helping the Byfields terrify and confuse Central Canada as a full-time job, I happened to live in the Beaver River riding where the amazing Deb Grey made her meteoric impact in a 1989 byelection. (I was a couple months short of being eligible to vote.) Later, while at AR, I was on the outer rim of Reform social circles, and I was privy to important editorial-board bull sessions about, among other things, the emergent 2000 Clarity Act and the leadership candidacy of Stephen Harper. I may carry molecules of personal blame for some of subsequent Canadian history; only God could know.

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I will add to this that I grew up in a working-class Alberta household and was shaped by the economic precarity of the National Energy Program. My father is a retired heavy-duty mechanic who was adjacent to the oilpatch when not directly inside of it, and I even accompanied him to work a few times. Although I am bookish and lazy to the point of pathology, I am probably the only Canadian newspaper columnist who has greased a Cat D8K on a pipeline site with his own hands. Feel free to come at me if I am mistaken. I have an enormous extended family that slopped over into Alberta in the 1960s and ’70s from Saskatchewan, and much of it has been oilpatch-dependent much of the time. Certainly every fragment of formal education I ever got was bought with oil and gas money.

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And, as a matter of political belief, I do have extremely broad streaks of Alberta exceptionalism. Like most Albertans, I do believe that Confederation has a Laurentian-conspiracy aspect, and that it nakedly rips us off in some ways while absent-mindedly harming us in others. My account of this is a little idiosyncratic, and I think federal equalization should be condemned more for its harm to the recipients than for its costs to us. (With that said, how can anyone love a mandatory insurance scheme that makes it almost impossible in principle for one payer to ever make a claim against?)