Alberta: Independence’s Cold And Broken Hallelujah

On How We Got Here

There’s no more evocative sound in the history of music than Jeff Buckley’s sigh.

I’ve written at length before about the almost religious experience listening to Buckley’s rendition of Hallelujah represents for me, from the sigh to the slow buildup to the haunting lyrics, but it’s something I don’t seek out that often. Buckley’s tragic passing, and just the heavy nature of his only album in general, make it something I love, but don’t find myself playing quite as often as, say, In Rainbows or Strangeways. But, 29 years after he died, I’m playing it now, and I find myself feeling something closer to empathy for Albertans who are considering independence.

I’m still plenty angry at Danielle Smith for embracing this reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous referendum that will make both Canada and Alberta much worse off if it were to ever happen, and maybe at some point I’ll let the piece I’ve mostly finished ripping her to shreds out of my drafts. But right now it’s less my anger that I’m feeling towards her, and more a feeling of understanding how the voters of Alberta have been led to a place where they’d consider this nonsense.

Some amount of the blame for this obviously exists with the Federal Liberals, but they’re not the ones who are actually to blame. The reason Albertans are in the place they’re in is because they’ve been lied to by their politicians for decades. Since Ralph Klein left office, the Albertan right have been consistently running bad governments that haven’t done the basics of good governance. Stelmach rode a high oil price to some temporary success while the province withered, Redford was too busy telling everyone Danielle Smith and her people were crazy, and ensuring a penthouse suite in a government office was a Premier’s residence, to do any real work to sustain Alberta’s prosperity, and then Prentice caught a crashing oil price and the Notley surge before he could do any good. Kenney came in promising a return to the good ol’ days, and while COVID is a large part of the story, the fundamental promise of the UCP wasn’t fulfilled by Kenney. And, through her four years in power now, it hasn’t been by Smith.

The basic problem with Alberta is not a lack of pipelines or a lack of feistiness with Ottawa, but a lack of good provincial governance. Notley tried to do some of it, but four years with low oil prices wasn’t enough time to build the schools and hospitals places like Red Deer and Lethbridge need, let alone the two big cities, and to fix the structural problems. The oil money should be a bridge to get Alberta from where it is now to where it will be in a post-oil, or at the very least post-peak oil, world. But it’s not being used as that bridge, it’s being used to plug holes in a province that is rapidly failing at its admirable goal of being the best.

Danielle Smith admits they’re failing - the negativity from her own comments for the last number of years is an admission of failure, even as she dresses up her failures as those of Ottawa and not herself. The fact that she is so unrelentingly negative about the state of her province is a recognition that her people feel this way. And they’re right, in the same way that Ontarians feeling left for dead by Doug’s disastrous policies or British Columbians worried endlessly by Eby’s dithering nothingness are also right to feel this way. Bad governments are delivering bad results and making us suffer the consequences.

Of course any list of governments that are helping cause these problems has to include the recently departed Trudeau government, who got some big things right and a lot of big things wrong. Putting the environmental stuff and the buying a pipeline to the side, which can and will be endlessly debated, Trudeau’s immigration policies were bad for workers, bad for renters and people trying to buy into the property market, his government saw a substantial rise in violent crime, and generally focused on how to distribute the wealth rather than on growing the economy. It’s absolutely valid to see the combination of Trudeau’s failures with the increasingly decrepit state of the provincially run public realm in Alberta as a reason to embrace a wild or crazy idea.

Now, separation is the wrong idea, for a lot of reasons. Nobody’s building that pipeline Smith wants built any time fucking soon, as a start, and the nascent but growing tech industry in Calgary can kiss their growth goodbye. Nobody in Kitchener and Kanata who have been looking at maybe investing in Calgary will do that anymore, as the uncertainty of this bullshit outweighs the benefits of a low tax regime. The Alberta budget looks fine for this year because of the oil spike from war with Iran, but the idea that Alberta’s still in the boom days and can afford to lose investment is, plainly, how you become Quebec. This decision to validate and officially begin a Western front of the National Question means Alberta is inviting stagnation, brain drain, and economic malaise.

If anyone is under the impression that this will only start to hurt Alberta when they actually risk separation - more bluntly, that this is a free hit that won’t change investment decisions and prosperity - then they will face a hell of a shock soon. The UCP’s problem is that they are fundamentally unable to provide the thing they need to provide to make Alberta independence somewhat non-insane - economic growth at a far more robust rate than they’ve had, and a clean balance sheet - in an environment where they actively make those goals harder to achieve. Nobody’s investing in Alberta unless they’re an idiot or an ideologue, and Quebec can tell you this well; ideologues don’t have enough cash to make up the difference.

Obviously I’m not from Alberta, but I’ve spent a lot of time writing about it, and even more thinking about it. It is a complex and interesting and vibrant place with good people. It is being failed by its provincial political leaders, who keep promising the moon, underdelivering, and then pretending that “But The NDP Suck!” is a good enough retort. And yes, part of the blame absolutely lies with Notley - if she had listened to any of us when we screamed at her what to do to win the 2023 election, Alberta might be in a place where the voters aren’t so desperate for any form of radical change that Smith’s question gets 35% in this week’s Angus Reid.

Like, I know it won’t work, and Alberta won’t actually secede, but the fact that a third of a province wants to leave fucking sucks. It’s such an avoidable situation, with better governance in both Edmonton and Ottawa, with a recommitment to working together, and with meeting each other with more of an open heart. I certainly know I’ve failed on the last front, and I’ve seen the screenshot of when I said that if Alberta wants to leave I wouldn’t care plenty in the last week or so. I was wrong to say that, both because it was unhelpful but also because as I’ve realized, I don’t actually mean it, when the rubber meets the road.

We find ourselves where we are because Alberta - like many other provinces - aren’t in a good position. The answer is to elect better ones, which no matter what Albertans think of Carney almost all would agree he did by swapping out Trudeau for him. Albertans deserve a government that is focused on rebuilding their schools and hospitals, growing the economy, working with Ottawa to fix the problems that Trudeau created, and attracting the kind of investment and opportunities that will keep Alberta the economic crown jewel of Confederation. Danielle Smith will never lead that government. Naheed Nenshi needs to show Albertans he can, and then he needs to do it, or we will all, across this country, suffer the consequences.

Separation isn’t the answer, but it’s hard to dispute that the state of Alberta today doesn’t deserve a radical departure. It’s on federalists to have an answer to fix the problems that isn’t the insanity of separation or the banality of vague appeals to patriotism. If they do, we will look at this like a bump in the road, an aberration in our national drama we have survived before and will survive again.

If we don’t? Well, I won’t have a better answer to how I’m feeling than to simply repeat the best moment in music history, and sigh.