The fight for Alberta’s ‘soft separatists’ — the conservatives who want to send Carney a message

Monte Solberg wants Albertans to believe their “future is stronger within a united Canada than outside of it.” Photo by Postmedia file

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Monte Solberg is between a rock, a hard place and a divided conservative base.

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The former Conservative MP and founder of Vote to Stay wants Albertans to believe their “future is stronger within a united Canada than outside of it.” Of all the players trying to sway the Oct. 19 vote — pro-separation and pro-Confederation — his path is the most treacherous.

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Champions of Alberta separation lean into a grievance culture carefully fed for a decade, especially during the Trudeau years. They have a motivated, sometimes angry base. Progressive “remain” campaigns — Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian, Stephen Carter’s Alberta’s Voice, Anne McLellan’s Before You Vote — draw natural support in Liberal and NDP constituencies.

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Solberg and his team, which includes former premier Jason Kenney, are hunting in tougher country. “We’d like to sway 100,000 soft separatists to vote on the federalist side,” he tells me over coffee in Calgary. “As far as I know, we’re the only ones in the Conservative fold.”

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Those soft separatists are his people. “These are the people who say, ‘I’m going to send Carney a message,’” and choose Option 2 — forcing the Alberta government to begin the legal process for a binding separation referendum. They think they are being tactical; Solberg thinks they are playing with fire.

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“I urge people not to see it as a way to send a message to Ottawa about Alberta’s ill treatment, which I acknowledge has been the case in the past. But I urge them to think about the consequence of blowing oxygen on a separatist movement.”

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Sending a message divides, he says. “We don’t need to turn people against each other.” That is the real contest. The separatist campaigns need the soft separatists — the conservatives who think Option 2 is a warning shot, not a first step out the door. Solberg is asking those voters to stand down; the independence camp is asking them to use the ballot as leverage.

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Solberg knows polarized politics. He chuckles recalling his youth in Saskatchewan under then premier Allan Blakeney, when the NDP partially nationalized the potash industry. “My dad was a conservative, very involved in politics, and fought against the NDP. It was a crazy time. You think democratic socialists are a thing in the U.S. now; they were way more extreme in those days in Saskatchewan.”

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In Alberta, he grants the anger is often righteous. “We were really attacked by Justin Trudeau. No question.” But Trudeau is gone. Mark Carney, he says, has moved in a different direction on electricity regulations, the EV mandate and export pipelines.

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“We’ll never know if we moved five people or 50,000 or 100,000,” Solberg says. The campaign’s job is to give people reasons to reconsider. “This is not a joke. Even though it’s a referendum on a referendum at this point, we could quickly be cast into a binding vote on the future of Alberta and Canada.”

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He is at his sharpest when he leaves the atmospherics and talks specifics. The Alberta Prosperity Project recently released a draft constitution for an independent Alberta that includes elements he says most Albertans would not recognize. “Making Alberta an open-carry state is ridiculous. I say this as somebody who is a firearms owner myself. This is not what Albertans are looking for. It’s not a priority.” Albertans care about affordability and about not being swallowed by larger powers — risks, he argues, that are more manageable inside a country than as a “statelet.”