Colby Cosh: The Easterners who admit Alberta separatists have a point

Alberta separatism supporters rally in front of the Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton, on May 4, 2026. Photo by Henry MARKEN / AFP via Getty Images

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In Monday’s edition of the inferior national newspaper, John Ibbitson defends the thesis that “Central Canadian elites are as much to blame for Alberta’s separatist movement as anyone else.” It wouldn’t be tactically smart for an Albertan to go after Ibbitson for the way he goes about this, but I have to admit I had the exact same reaction as I did in that Simpsons episode where Bart cruelly catfishes his teacher, Mrs. Krabappel. When he sees her weeping in a restaurant, utterly undone by his prank, he utters the immortal line “I can’t help but feel partly responsible.”

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It’s not quite clear whether Ibbitson regards himself as speaking for the Central Canadian elites, or whether he sits aside, at a desk of the Globe and Mail, castigating them from below. And, of course, you never get far criticizing an “elite,” because nobody thinks of themselves as belonging to an elite, but there’s no danger in it, either, because nobody thinks of themselves as belonging to an elite.

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Anyway, Ibbitson is making a good-faith attempt to mirror Alberta separatist complaints about the Laurentian oppressor, and the effort ought to be honoured; I’m just reporting my own sense that there is a flavour of half-hearted box-checking to it. Ibbitson echoes separatist literature in mentioning the corrupted birth of Alberta and Saskatchewan, who were denied constitutional control of their natural resources for 25 years. He acknowledges fiscal equalization as an end-run around that restored constitutional order, a means of confiscating the local windfall; he revives the despised memory of the National Energy Program (1980-85).

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This swallows, without as much chewing as even I’d like, the separatist narrative of 120 years of injustice. But, you know, most of the Albertans who are tempted by separatism have no memory or awareness of the details of any of this stuff, and the actual engineers of the separatist movement would be in danger of losing a Canadian history debate to a pet rock.

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I’m old enough to remember the NEP period, a time when central-Canada economic nationalism coincided awkwardly with a collapse in oil prices; this resulted in an unemployment and housing shock in Alberta that has few postwar parallels anywhere. No one has successfully managed to romanticize the suffering that resulted from this, and even its basic scale is poorly documented, never mind the causal responsibility (for, after all, oil prices did crash). In lieu of an accounting we all got to live the rest of our lives with a little amulet of hatred, in the shape of the letters N-E-P, around our necks. Some of us handed it down in the family.

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It’s all very vibe-y, you see, as Quebec’s grievances are: it’s a matter of folk memory, of an inveterately confirmed instinct that Confederation will always be engineered to the West’s disadvantage. The fact is that Alberta was, in the end, allowed to get rich relative to the other provinces — not too rich, but as rich as any hour-long drive in the Alberta countryside will make obvious. Fiscal equalization isn’t big enough to prevent or thwart this, but at some point we might ask whether it’s working, and for what? If it’s a sort of insurance scheme, why are there provinces that always receive the benefit, and one province that never does?