BURSTThe Albertan separatism movement is comprised of several groups with no unified end goal, according to Jen Gerson.
Gerson, an Albertan journalist, political commentator and co-founder of The Line, was hosted at Vancouver Island University on Oct. 14 by Michael MacKenzie, VIU’s Jarislowsky chair in trust and political leadership, joined by Andy Percy, a Conservative member of U.K. Parliament who supported the separation of the U.K. from the European Union, known as Brexit.
The vote on Monday, Oct. 19, determined whether or not Alberta will proceed with a binding referendum on separating from Canada. The vote in favour of the referendum failed by a large margin, with unofficial results as of the following morning showing 1.4 million Albertans in favour of remaining part of Canada, while 457,625 voted in favour of the referendum.
Gerson argued that when considering the separatism movement, supporters are a mix of those who want an independent Alberta, those who want to join with the United States as either an associate state or full statehood, those who want to use a separatist debate to achieve better considerations from Ottawa, and those who see a reactionary movement that can net them careers, profiles and money. Combined, none of them have a central aim for what happens next.
“There’s no actual agreed upon end goal for any of these guys,” she said. “They are united in their desire that the vote needs to happen for the sake of the vote, and then they’re trying to build the plane as they go along. The end result of this is it’s kind of crazy … and there is a lot of in-fighting.”
Both Gerson and Percy were quick to distance the Albertan movement to what happened in the U.K. Gerson stated she believes that what has happened in Alberta is much worse, because the United Conservative Party wasn’t an explicitly separatist party when it was elected.
“Danielle Smith took over a mainstream Conservative federalist party, she ran an election on bread and butter, Conservative taxation and spending issues,” Gerson said. “If I had criticized Danielle Smith in the last election and said, ‘that woman is going to run a separation referendum’ people would have called me crazy.”
Instead, she said there has been “a minority of frankly highly fanatical people who have been deeply disillusioned and disenfranchised in Canada as a whole” as well as the political institutions, some of which she believes are rooted in legitimate grievances.
“They have hijacked a mainstream, explicitly federalist party; the federalism is written into the constitution. They’ve said ‘no, we’re going to use a minority of people, we’re going to take over your constituency associations, we’re going to take over your board and we’re going to force you to hold this referendum and if you don’t we’re going to use your own constituency processes to oust you as leader.'”
Percy added that while there is a considerable difference between leaving a trade union and a country, he pointed to what he considered to be similarities in the situation.
“We have a huge section of our communities who frankly, their lives are worse than perhaps a generation ago … and politicians, like me, have said their way out of that … is go to the university, get a degree and everybody needs to become a professional,” Percy said. “For a lot of people in an area like mine, they don’t want that, they want a good, decent blue-collar job that pays them well, to be able to buy a home.”
As a result, the Brexit politician argued workers are left angry and insulted.
To find out what happens following the vote, Percy drew what he felt was a comparison to Scottish independence and Albertan separatism, with a Scottish independence vote failing by a little over 55 per cent in 2014.
“Since then Scottish politics have become entirely tribal between either you’re a separatist or you’re a unionist,” he said. “The unionist vote is split between three or four political parties, in Scotland the separatist vote is in the SNP and people define themselves now by one of those two tribes.”
In his personal belief, Percy doesn’t think the separatist ideology will just end.
“They don’t just go home and go, ‘alright, cheers, thanks, we had our say, we’ll just go to bed now and carry on and do whatever we were doing before.’ They won’t, they will be angry, they will be motivated. If the Scottish referendum is anything to go by, and they will find a vehicle which becomes their political and tribal home.”
Gerson, however, told the News Bulletin that it remains difficult to say.
“I think a lot of these people are going to find a different issue to latch onto, if it’s not this it will be something else – something else maybe worse.”