Jen Gerson: Can we put separatist madness to bed, now?

The ‘Leave’ crowd suffered a humiliating loss. We shall see if there will be consequences

Please let this be the last time we need to use this photo

By: Jen Gerson

Albertans sent a strong message to Edmonton, Ottawa, and the entire world last night; they’re ready to put this incredibly embarrassing chapter in our shared political history to an end.

With what appears to be an incredibly high turnout and votes still being counted Tuesday morning, the province elected overwhelmingly to avoid the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada. With almost 80 per cent of ballots counted, the “Remain” option had 76 per cent support.

The results ought to demonstrate Albertans for what they truly are — a mostly sensible and pragmatic people, if occasionally very slightly insane. God bless.

The question, naturally, will drift to the matter of what happens next; will this province’s separatists, having had their say, move on to some new moral outrage or political intrigue? Can we put this errant madness to sleep for another generation or two — or will the grifters and kooks who have boosted their profiles and fattened their nest eggs on this gambit continue to haunt AI slop generators and small-donations pages for years to come?

In truth, I’m not sure anyone can say for certain whether even this pleasantly decisive victory will put an end to the separatists’ grand ambition to lead North America’s very own landlocked vision of Moldova. I’ll note, the court challenge over the Stay Free Alberta petition still appears to be a live matter, so it’s possible we have not yet heard the last of it.

It’s equally possible, however, that the manic energy spent on this campaign will find a new lease at the United Conservative Party’s AGM next month — or, heck, maybe find itself enmeshed another moral panic over magic ostrich eggs or something.

For the moment, I’ll offer a few observations of the actual campaign — in so much as there was one. Third Party Advertising rules and spending limits around this referendum made it difficult for both federalist and separatist forces to coalesce around both a clear leader and a clear message. Many people and groups from across the political spectrum came together from the federalist side — and I think Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian campaign deserves especial mention, here — but if your impression was a vote that came off as unusually chaotic, this is why.

Due is also freely and happily given to the Vote to Stay campaign, and the Lead not Leave team, the latter of which put together some of the brightest policy minds in the province, and worked with us here at The Line, along with other publications, to produce proposals and op-eds to help improve the country, and Alberta’s place within it. That work won’t end today.

That noted, one of the criticisms I frequently received about the federalist side is that we failed to make the case for Canada.

While Prime Minister Mark Carney did offer a compelling argument for Alberta’s historical role as a contributor to many of the legal and moral developments we most value about Canada in the final days before the vote, I think that critique is fair.

However, there was a reason for it.

The federalist side understood that it had been backed into a rhetorical trap even before the vote had been called. Making the case for Canada reversed the onus of responsibility in the debate, forcing the pro-Canada side into a defensive posture against separatists who could not only lay out some entirely legitimate problems with Confederation, but then propose independence as an unfalsifiable solution to those problems.

The vast majority of Albertans, though many of them angry about the last 10 years of federal governance, had no desire to hold this vote at all, and the provincial government earned no real democratic mandate to foist it upon us.

The onus, therefore, was not on the federalist side to make the case for staying in Canada. The onus was on the separatists to credibly convince voters that leaving Canada was a responsible and practical solution to their stated grievances.

They failed. Spectacularly.

The results of this vote reflect the will of Albertans. Support for separation has hovered between 20 and 30 per cent for years, and there’s no evidence that either side managed to persuade a single vote either way. But even though staying was by far the most popular position going in, federalists started this campaign with a tricky disadvantage.

The people who supported staying were, by and large, individuals with real reputations and credibility — and, therefore, something real and valuable to lose if they lied. The other side, by comparison, was overwhelmingly dominated by kooks and crooks who suffered no reputational penalty for saying whatever crazy idea or claim slipped out of their mouths.

What we were left with is one side trying to defend an imperfect but reality-based status quo, a Confederation in which competing interests have to vie for their preferred policy choices. In the real world of politics, that means Alberta has to fight to have its voice heard; it has to make the case to the rest of Canada in order to win. And it means, sometimes, this province will lose on a policy debate or piece of legislation.

On the flip side, we had a separatist movement that could make up whatever it damn well wanted and often portrayed a fantasy of an independent Alberta in which citizens would pay virtually no taxes, be better run, and would somehow manifest every preferred policy and pipeline by dint of a new flag and a re-drawn map on a border. The further one travelled down the social-media propaganda rabbit warrens, the more likely we were to find a deeper aim. Some way to escape the broken modernism of Canada; and a return to an Alberta that was universally white, Christian, rural, and blandly “conservative.” This was a fever dream of an “independent” nation that totally divorced from both geopolitics, and the reality of the province today; which is, in fact, as pluralistic, urban, and irreligious as any other place in Anglo Canada.

Separatists are not, and have never been, representative of “Alberta.” They are the minority even as they claim to speak for the province as a nation.

The problem is that it’s rhetorically impossible to debate a fantasy. There’s an impossible asymmetry to overcome; fact vs. fantasy, credible vs. non-credible, real grievance vs. conspiracy theory, plausible but emotionally unsatisfying solution vs. conspiracies and simple cure-alls. And those people who are grounded in fact and reputation are at a perpetual disadvantage on the debate pitch against those who are not.

You can’t really have a productive argument with a fiction writer about a world that exists in only his own imagination. It’s a little like trying to hold a serious discussion about the allocation of scarce health-care resources in the Shire.

It’s a pointless exercise with fundamentally unserious people, and pretending otherwise is not only dishonest pandering, it grants the kook-aroos and their ideas the illusion of real intellectual weight.

The separatists haven’t earned the right to be debated on equal terms. Note, I’m not talking about censorship or deplatforming, here. Separatists have not been censored, and have had plenty of platforms willing to treat their claims with stone-faced consideration.

But if they actually want to be taken seriously, they’re going to have to start behaving in a way that is serious.

That means following in the path of this country’s democratic traditions. They’re going to have to put together an explicitly separatist party, craft a real and plausible party platform, earn votes, and win in a free and fair election.

Only then will they have earned the right to be taken at face value, or to be deserving of anyone’s time or consideration.

They have not done that.

The fact that we held this referendum at all wasn’t a heartwarming exercise of democratic will — it was a failure of leadership by the provincial government, and of Danielle Smith in particular, who eased the way for this vote via Bill 54 in order to placate her separatist base and ease tensions within her own party.

That was, and remains, an insanely reckless thing to subject an entire province to in order to save one party and one premier’s political ass. Conservatives are very quick to notice when the federal Liberal party conflates its interests with Canada’s interests writ large.

Hello? Tapping the mic, here. This thing on?

This province is led by a small cadre of “Conservatives” who have proven themselves perfectly willing to risk political instability, and to tempt foreign interference and economic consequences in the midst of a generationally dangerous moment in history in order to plow forward with a self-serving and juvenile democratic stunt.

Albertans, in their wisdom, had the good sense to reject this nonsense.

The separatists’ loss is both embarrassing and well deserved.

The last open question is whether or not there will be consequences, and for whom.

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