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Alberta’s Flirtation with Separatism Gives Quebec That Familiar Feeling
As Albertans prepare to test the idea of leaving Canada this coming October, their most attentive observers may be found about 3,500 kilometres away in Quebec, where sovereigntists will be studying the outcome for lessons into their own long-stalled project.
Strictly speaking, Alberta isn’t holding a referendum on separation. Voters are being asked whether the province should begin the legal process that might lead to a binding referendum. In other words, it’s a pre-referendum referendum. A question about a question. That detour reflects the constraints of Canada’s Clarity Act, which requires a clear question and a clear majority before the federal government negotiates a province’s secession. By proposing a non-binding vote on the process rather than separation itself, Premier Danielle Smith is keeping Alberta one step removed from that framework.
Canada’s previous encounters with secession were far less coy. Quebec has twice asked direct and binding—albeit, convoluted—questions on independence. First in 1980, then again in 1995. Both referendums ended in a no vote. The second one in particular was quite the squeaker with the Yes side only managing a razor-thin win. (That shock ultimately led Ottawa to pass the Clarity Act’s ground rules for any bid to leave Confederation.)
But a lot has changed since then. In the past few decades, support within Quebec for independence has sputtered—even petered out completely—with interest in sovereignty at a thirty-year low. The reasons aren’t hard to find. Quebec has won increased recognition of its distinct cultural and linguistic character and secured significantly more jurisdictional autonomy than any other province. It sets its own immigration levels and criteria, maintains its own legal framework, operates its own public pension plan, collects its own taxes, and exercises broad powers to protect the French language. As a result, it’s become harder and harder for sovereigntists to persuade Quebecers they would be better off leaving a country that consistently ranks among the world’s most livable.
But if Quebecers have become less convinced by the case for independence, they have not stopped listening to it. Despite dwindling support, the sovereigntist movement remains a constant presence in the province, drawing strength from historical grievances and recurring fears about the survival of the French language.
In contrast, Alberta’s sovereignty movement has been conjured out of resentment over perceived political and economic injustices—specifically federal energy policies and equalization payments. It is also unmistakably a right-wing project, fuelled by conservative and populist anti-establishment ideas. It’s no surprise that media outlet Rebel News, founded by former oil lobbyist Ezra Levant and that thrives on “woke” outrages and culture-war controversies, has registered a third-party advertising group in support of separation. Nor is it surprising that concerns about foreign interference persist, particularly when prominent voices in the movement have openly flirted with the idea of joining the United States.
Quebec’s sovereigntist project runs along very different lines. Its main concern is the preservation of a distinct linguistic and cultural identity within an English-speaking continent. Those anxieties are not inherently left- or right-wing and have attracted supporters from across the political spectrum. They also help explain why many sovereigntists fear President Donald Trump’s fifty-first state rhetoric. For the Parti Québécois, the surge of Canadian patriotism has made it difficult to portray Ottawa as the primary threat to Quebec’s future. As a result, leaders have worked to downplay the dangers posed by the US while attempting to position Canada as the bigger enemy.
“Are we capable of understanding that our belonging to Canada,” wrote prominent PQ supporter and Le Journal de Montréal columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté, “is far more dangerous for our people than a cordial relationship with the United States?” In a province considered the “most anti-Trump” in Canada, those sentiments are finding few takers. Many Quebecers continue to feel the French language and culture are better protected within Canada than outside.
Given the obvious differences between the two movements, Quebec sovereigntists have reacted to Alberta’s vindications for independence with strategic solidarity and occasional scoffing.
PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has expressed support for Alberta’s right to hold a referendum, even rebuking Mark Carney for calling the move a “very dangerous bluff” based on the prime minister’s own experience with Brexit. Calling Carney’s comments “out of line,” St-Pierre Plamondon argued that provinces are free to consult their populations on sovereignty. In Calgary this past September, he said that, were he premier of Quebec and Albertans voted in favour of seceding, his province would officially recognize the new state.
No one understands better than Quebec sovereigntists the leverage that persistent and credible threats of constitutional instability can buy. Any effort by the Alberta government to assert greater autonomy and extract more concessions from Ottawa, while also normalizing the idea that provinces can reconsider their place within Confederation, serves objectives central to the PQ, making them natural allies to Alberta’s gripes of federal overreach.
But while they acknowledge Alberta’s right to determine its own future, Quebec sovereigntists have not been shy about mocking its reasons for wanting to walk away from Canada. Asked about the movement last year, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet explained that separation requires a distinct culture and nation. “I’m not certain that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture,” he quipped, adding, almost as an afterthought, “but it’s theirs to decide if they want to vindicate the right to self-determination.”
Alberta’s referendum in October may not be the only constitutional drama on the ballot. Quebecers will go to the polls that same month to elect a new government, and they could hand victory to a PQ leader who has promised to hold a third sovereignty referendum during his first mandate. Canadians may find themselves debating not one separatist movement but two.
It’s unlikely either movement will make it far. Previously the front-runner, the PQ is now mired in a three-way race with the Quebec Liberals and a revived Coalition Avenir Québec, which has rebounded since shedding its deeply unpopular leader. Just as importantly, support for Canada is at levels unthinkable a decade ago, with most Quebecers opposed to both sovereignty and yet another referendum.
In Alberta, separatism remains a fringe position. A June Ipsos poll found just 19 percent support a binding independence referendum, while 72 percent prefer the province stay in Canada. Meanwhile, another actor has entered the fray. A few weeks ago, an Alberta court halted the separatist petition process, ruling that separation could infringe Indigenous treaty rights and that the provincial government had failed in its duty to consult Treaty First Nations. More recently, those same First Nations formally demanded Smith scrap the referendum altogether. Smith has vowed to appeal the court ruling, opening a new front in the debate over who gets a say when a province starts mulling an exit.
Quebec sovereigntists will be watching. They’ve faced similar roadblocks from Indigenous communities, who reject the premise that Quebec has the right to unilaterally separate and claim traditional lands. Asserting their own rights to self-determination, some have threatened to remain with Canada should Quebec secede.
Of course, a lot can happen in the next months. But as Carney recently warned of Alberta’s referendum gambit, the problem with bluffs is that they can change the game even when nobody calls them.
The post Alberta’s Flirtation with Separatism Gives Quebec That Familiar Feeling first appeared on The Walrus.
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