Rage-Farmed Alberta Beefs

Some Albertans are just Newfies at heart

The world the Old Man lived in

There is something wonderfully Canadian - which is to say delightfully ridiculous - about Danielle Smith blaming Stephen Guilbeault for the Alberta independence movement that she is spearheading.

Just laughable.

Utterly ludicrous.

Smith asked an audience in Quebec City this week to imagine if someone had come to Quebec and said you cannot develop hydro power any more. That was Guilbeault in Alberta, supposedly. She told the American media outlet Bloomberg that he’d done more to damage national unity than any other politician and said the same thing in Quebec the other day.

Utter nonsense, but Dani betreayed no hint this was exaggeration, just as there was no tinge of reality as the clownish Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid told his readers that Steve was the father of Alberta separatism. Meanwhile, Preston Manning was busily rage-farming as he has done his whole political career and as he did last fall as his party went down to defeat in the federal election.

In the post-speech chat in Quebec, Smith pointed to Andrew Furey in the audience and noted she could work with him despite his being at least notionally a Liberal and that Premiers can work together across party lines. She did not say what Dani and Andy agreed on but Guilbeault was apparently Satan incarnate.

Then again, all of the grievances some Albertans and others drag out to justify the secession referendum Smith scheduled for October are equally… incomprehensible. Well. Okay. Foolish. None of it makes any objective sense. Alberta is the richest provincial government in Canada by far. It is so wealthy it under-taxes citizens compared to the national average and then bitches about what other provinces do.

That’s the purpose: to distract from what Dani is doing. She talks about autonomy and democracy and responsible government and then evades all those words with the excuse that someone else, some foreign demon is responsible for all Alberta’s imaginary ills. This is what all petrostates do. If there are no foreign demons, the petrostate demogogues invent them.

Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is just the latest outbreak of imaginary foreign enemies. TDS is why the Alberta political right holds out as a mortal wound that a single pipeline stopped across to Northern British Columbia because some British Columbians objected. At the same time, the same imaginary victims of imaginary slights ignore that Trudeau’s Cabinet - including the demonic Guilbeault - took over a failing pipeline project and got it done within the same decade in which ‘Berta was supposedly benighted.

None of the gas that drives the Alberta pity machinery is real. It is all made up and then exhaustively farmed by politicians like Smith or Parson Manning or Jason Kenney for their own ends. That is natural for this country since reality was never a concept for Canadians who want to be angry. Since long before the Internet and long before the radio, let alone the telephone, Canadian politicians have only been too happy to farm their constituents’ rage for bumper crop of political gain. The politics of victimhood is the lifeblood of provincial politicians across Canada since 1867. There’s seldom been a Premier elected anywhere in the country who has not at some point blamed Ottawa for something that wasn’t Ottawa’s responsibility or fault.

There is something wonderfully Canadian - which is to say delightfully ridiculous - about Danielle Smith blaming Stephen Guilbeault for the Alberta independence movement that she is spearheading.

Just laughable.

Utterly ludicrous.

Smith asked an audience in Quebec City this week to imagine if someone had come to Quebec and said you cannot develop hydro power any more. That was Guilbeault in Alberta. She told the American media outlet Bloomberg that he’d done more to damage national unity than any other politician and said the same thing in Quebec the other day. No hint of exaggeration, just as there was no tinge of reality as the clownish Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid told his readers that Steve was the father of Alberta separatism. In the post-speech chat in Quebec, Smith pointed to Andrew Furey in the audience and noted she could work with him despite his being at least notionally a Liberal and that Premiers can work together across party lines. She did not say what Dani and Andy agreed on but Guilbeault was apparently Satan incarnate.

Then again, all of the grievances some Albertans and others drag out to justify the secession referendum Smith scheduled for October are equally… incomprehensible… well, foolish. None of it makes any obejctive sense. Alberta is the richest provincial government in Canada by far. It is so wealthy it undertaxes citizens compared to the national average and bitches about what other provinces spend.

In the grips of an incurable case of Trudeau Derangement Syndrome, the Alberta political right holds out as a mortal wound that a single pipeline stopped across to Northern British Columbia because some British Columbians objected while they ignore that Trudeau’s Cabinet - including the demonic Guilbeault - took over a failing pipeline project and got it done within the past decade that was the same decade in which ‘Berta was benighted.

None of what drives the Alberta pity machinery is real. It is all made up and then exhaustively farmed by politicians like Smith or Parson Manning or Jason Kenney for their own ends. That is natural for this country since reality was never a concept for Canadians who want to be angry. The politics of victimhood is the stuff of Canadian provincial politics since 1867. There’s seldom been a Premier elected anywhere in the country who has not at some point blamed Ottawa for something.

Even latecomers like Newfoundlanders and Labradorians invented a string of grievances to fuel their own demands of Ottawa. Newfoundland and Labrador even had a Royal Commission to catalogue all the imaginary grievances against Canada. Start with Confederation itself, which was supposedly a dastardly plot. Then there were all the local resources traded away to foreigners for deals for Quebec or Ontario or Alberta even though there were literally none, ever.

What we are talking about is not the Ottawa habit of setting up programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction and then cutting off the cash a few years later. No. Nor are we talking about rackets over Term 29 or ownership of the offshore. We are talking the pure fiction stuff. Indigenous people left out of the Terms of Union (they weren’t). Newfoundland and Labrador never ceded the airspace to Ottawa in the Terms so we are owed billions by h’Ottawa (they did and we aren’t).

And Equalization.

Danny Williams went to war with Ottawa because as the provincial government made more from oil and gas, the Equalization transfer went down… exactly as it was supposed to, and exactly as we all wanted it to. Danny lost the war but got a cheque, which is what the whole victimhood game is always about. When that cheque ran out Dwight Ball and later Andrew Furey picked up the same whine, with Furey even starting a nonsense legal challenge when the cheques started again because the dole wasn’t big enough to cover off his political cowardice and incompetent financial administration. Tony Wakeham at least had the good sense to kill that loser before lawyers got any more billable hours.

Danny’s favourite foreign boogeyman was Quebec and his favourite meal after rage was revanche. “‘Quebec lovers,’ Williams hissed in the House of Assembly in early 2010, ‘if we could only keep the Quebec lovers quiet, Mr. Speaker, it would be nice.’”

“Revenge against Quebec was an enduring theme of the Conservative policy going back before 2003,” your humble e-scribbler noted in 2017. “To highlight the contrast between himself and Roger Grimes, Danny Williams had vowed to develop the Lower Churchill with Hydro-Quebec only if the deal included redress for the 1969 agreement. In 2006, Williams rejected a development proposal from Ontario and Quebec for the Lower Churchill in order to go-it-alone.”

And in 2009, when Hydro-Quebec forced Williams to call an emergency session of the legislature to withdraw a clumsy effort to screw with the 1969 contract, Williams launched into an intense period of verbal attacks aimed squarely at the mythical enemy in Quebec. In the House of Assembly, Williams dismissed his opponents as “Quebec lovers” while his cabinet and back bench hooted, laughed, and cheered. They even introduced a resolution in the House of Assembly that prompted Kevin O’Brien to utter the immortal line that all “we” wanted was “fairity”. [Meanwhile, Williams had spent years trying to lure Quebec into a deal with no redress involved.]

Everywhere he went, Williams saw the evil hand of the imaginary enemy. There was a plot to block Labrador power from getting across to the United States. That was Williams’ explanation when the Quebec energy regulator rejected a string of appeals filed by NALCOR over transmission. Williams attacked Hydro-Quebec over [his own government’s] efforts in Quebec. He ranted about Quebec in the United States and to anyone who would listen.

Two years later, during debate about Muskrat Falls-related legislation, all that members on the House on all sides could talk about was Quebec. On one day alone, the word ‘Quebec’ appears in the Hansard transcript no fewer than 200 times, with Hydro-Quebec appearing another 32 times.

Canada and Quebec were synonymous in Danny’s mind, at least until one of them came with a cheque in hand. He told Nova Scotia Tories that Confederation was a (Liberal) plot to milk the Atlantic provinces dry. If it wasn’t Canada and Quebec, Danny was after some other foreign demon just like any other petrostate dictator. Danny’s world is the picture at the top of this column. Hugely popular when it first appeared in 2010. Still relevant, but maybe for Alberta with a few of the faces changed.

Meanwhile, if anyone ever went looking for the beef in any of these supposedly vital grievances, they’d never find it. As in the former Dannystani republic, so now in the putative American state of Dani-stan. Albertans, after all, are just another kind of Newfie.