FIRST READING: Is Alberta the new Quebec?

Tristin Hopper - NATIONAL POST

Danielle Smith celebrates at the BMO Centre in Calgary following the UCP leadership vote on Thursday, October 6, 2022.© Provided by National Post

The joke has been made quite often in recent weeks that Alberta and Quebec politics appear to have switched places.

Quebec – whose politics were once a decades-long struggle between sovereigntists and federalists – has now transitioned seamlessly into voting for an all-powerful, centre-right monolith.

And Alberta – which spent 44 straight years under the rule of the monolithic Progressive Conservatives – now has the most sovereigntist premier in its history.

On Monday, Quebec delivered an absolutely crushing re-election victory to Coalition Avenir Quebec, the big tent conservative-for-Quebec party headed by disaffected former separatist Francois Legault. The election also utterly demolished the Parti Quebecois, the province’s tradition standard-bearer for sovereigntist sentiment; they only got three seats.

Four days later, a leadership vote by the Alberta United Conservative Party confirmed Danielle Smith as the province’s premier-designate. The one-time leader of Alberta’s upstart Wildrose Party, Smith’s political comeback was due in part to her promise to champion an Alberta Sovereignty Act that would empower the province to govern itself “as a nation within a nation.”

But the wild rose and the fleur-de-lys aren’t so much trading places as they’re becoming mirror images of one another. Both Legault and Smith now share a common mission of aggressively seizing as much power as possible from Ottawa, but without all the red tape of literally trying to separate.

The Alberta Sovereignty Act was modelled to mimic Quebec’s unique level of control over its own affairs, something that Smith said specifically in an August National Post op-ed. “It would essentially give Alberta the same power within confederation that Quebec has,” she wrote.

Among other things, Quebec has control over its immigration, including the power to select the criteria and rate at which immigrants move to the province. Quebec also collects its own income taxes, rather than having the Canada Revenue Agency do it by proxy.

Quebec is also the most enthusiastic user of the Notwithstanding Clause, the section of the Constitution that allows provincial governments to ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This has been used most recently by the Legault government to head off Constitutional challenges against Bill 21, which bans religious garb for anyone in the civil service, and Bill 96, which polices mandatory use of French in the private sector.

Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec was founded in 2011 with the stated mission of pursuing unapologetic Quebec nationalism without advocating for outright separation. The pitch has resonated, and the explosive CAQ victory this week was due in part to the fact that so many former separatists have flocked to the CAQ banner.

In 2021, the CAQ even passed a bill proposing to unilaterally change the Canadian constitution to mention “la nation québécoise” and to state that said nation had only one official language.

And for Smith – and the United Conservative Party faction who voted for her – it’s this view of nationalism that has proved most attractive.

“Quebec has asserted it is a nation within a nation … Under my leadership, Alberta will too,” Smith wrote in August.

Despite any emerging political similarities between the two, Quebec and Alberta continue to harbour a raging mutual dislike, usually over the issue of money.

In a Leger poll from just last month, Albertans were found to lead the pack among Canadians who harboured the most resentment towards Quebec.

In 2019, Quebecers were asked by the Angus Reid Institute to rank the provinces that they deemed to be most “unfriendly.” Alberta was the clear winner, with 81 per cent classifying it as an enemy.

This sometimes manifests itself in a very public airing of grievances between the two provinces. In 2018, Legault declared his opposition to Alberta’s “dirty energy,” sparking backlash from then Premier Rachel Notley.

“(Legault) needs to understand that not only is our product not dirty, but that it actually funds the schools, the hospitals and potentially even some of the hydro-electricity infrastructure in Quebec,” said Notley at the time.

Three years later, a clear majority of Albertans voted “yes” in a referendum calling for the abolition of Canada’s equalization program – a program that disproportionately functions to transfer wealth from Alberta to Quebec. (NOT JUST QUEBEC)

THIS IS BULLSHIT PROPAGANDA, VERY LOW VOTER TURN OUT ON THE VOTE, EDMONTON OVERWHELMING MAJORITY VOTED NO, 

SOUTHERN ALBERTA HISTORICALLY AMERICANIZED POPULATION 

VOTED YES.