Conrad Black: Canada better hope Alberta doesn’t leave with its wealth

A separatist supporter holds a flag during a rally near the Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton on May 4. Photo by Henry MARKEN/AFP via Getty Images

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It is painful to reflect on this, but I think we are disserving ourselves if we do not recognize how absurd this country appears to many well-disposed and intelligent foreign onlookers. We are now seen as the most absurdly woke and politically correct (and therefore foolish) country in the world, and the country with the highest suicide rate in the world because our crumbling health-care system now champions the virtues of early death, as well as being one of the most unsafe advanced countries for Jews to live in, because of widespread antisemitic bigotry.

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The latest nonsensical saga is about the status of Alberta, which has generated a number of queries to me from U.S. and European media friends who are legitimately interested in Canada and hope that it will step up and make the contribution that it could to intelligent governance in the world. I have responded as sensibly as I can that if Alberta is not allowed to export its oil and natural gas and satisfy foreign demands for it, there is likely a majority in that province who would prefer to secede from Canada. Albertans are loyal Canadian federalists and have carried water on both shoulders in taxes and equalization and transfer payments. But they are aware that if they did secede, they could dispense with any income taxes at all and would be the wealthiest per capita petrostate in the world, with a fine agricultural and some manufacturing economy, as well. Edmonton and Calgary would probably grow to have populations greater than Toronto and Montreal within a decade.

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But my foreign friends are incredulous as I unravel the facts for them that the Native people are contending in the courts, so far successfully, that Alberta has no right to hold a referendum on the issue of secession without the authorization of the tiny minority of Albertans who are Indigenous. At the same time, other Indigenous groups are petitioning the courts to prevent construction of the pipeline upon which the result of an Alberta secession referendum, should it eventually be permitted to take place, will probably depend. These facts have been publicized in Canada, but I see very little collective self-awareness of what a uniquely asinine state of affairs this is.

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I had a rare and distasteful recourse to a rhetorical question at the outset of a column in this newspaper nine years ago over the Ktunaxa Nation case, in which a report that a deceased high priest of the local Native band of 800 people had allegedly had a dream that if a projected comprehensive year-round ski area was built in the Kootenays, the spirit of the grizzly bear would desert the mountain and deprive his band of its religious inspiration, and that this case was proceeding to the Supreme Court of Canada. Despite my aversion to rhetorical questions, I asked: “Are we all mad?” The Supreme Court did reject the claim and allowed the project to proceed but did not suggest that it was frivolous or vexatious litigation.

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Now, because of our multi-level legislative cowardice before the Charter of Rights regime that permits every court in the country to masquerade as an autocratic legislature and ignore the text or absence of existing law for alleged reasons of modernization to conform with human rights as defined (by the judges in each case), we have brought the Governments of Canada to a standstill. Courts will decide whether Native claims of ubiquitous sacred burial sites and other conjured antiquarian rights prevent construction of a pipeline, without which our richest per capita and fourth-largest province might choose to secede from the country. All will be in abeyance while other courts determine whether the 3.5 per cent minority of First Nations Albertans have a right of veto over holding a referendum on independence. Any other serious country in the world would have elaborated a suitable and equitable doctrine of eminent domain decades ago, to prevent spurious legal self-strangulation.