Jen Gerson: Oh, so you want to send Ottawa a message, eh?

Vote to stay and send Washington the right message. Namely, don’t fuck with us.

By: Jen Gerson

This column is aimed at a very specific subset of my fellow Albertans: Those who are considering voting in favour of hypothetically holding some kind of referendum on separation on October 19.

Guys, you don’t actually want to leave Canada. We know that.

You are frustrated and angry about the last 10 years of federal government; sure, Alberta’s oil exports may have increased during that period, and, yes, Justin Trudeau did purchase Trans Mountain, but you know very well that the growth would have been much more expansive and less politically polarizing if the Liberals hadn’t done just about everything possible to turn this province’s primary industry into a national pariah for their own narrow regional electoral interests.

And you feel the disrespect of that. That feeling is fair.

So, you want to send a message to Ottawa; give them a taste of just how shabbily we’ve been treated. And the October vote to hold a vote seems to be offering a consequence-free way to do it — of regaining some control over a country that seems hostile and unresponsive.

I get that. I do.

Here’s the problem.

Voting to leave — even just voting in favour of maybe voting later to leave — is not sending a message to Ottawa.

It’s sending a message to Washington.

The message is this: Canada is weak, regionally divided, and can be turned on itself for America’s benefit. Ultimately, that message hurts all of us, including Albertans.

Look, if you haven’t already, read the Globe and Mail piece that came out over the weekend that fleshed out many of the details about the connections between American political actors and the separatist set. The biggest takeaway was the fact that at least some separatist leaders were willing to effectively pawn off Alberta’s water and royalties, and to accept a massive debt burden, in exchange for U.S. help, consideration, or legitimacy.

The very leaders who are staking their entire argument for Alberta independence on the unfair treatment of Ottawa toward our resources hate Canada so much that they’re willing to sacrifice all of those same resources for God-knows what foreign assurances.

Because of course they will. Alberta is a landlocked oil-rich hunk of land subject to myriad Treaty rights and obligations; it’s not going to gain independence through generations-long negotiations via the Clarity Act. None of these guys have that kind of time or patience or follow through. Most of them are just grifters out to make a few bucks on rage bait crowdfunding.

This whole movement is pinning its ambitions on the hope that a vote secures the pretense of a democratic mandate so that the most unpredictable, avaricious, and corrupt U.S. president in a generation will then offer some kind of official recognition or legitimacy.

Realistically, that’s the only path to Alberta “independence,” and the separatist know it. The only question is what that recognition is going to cost, and what they’ve offered of our shared inheritance in order to obtain it.

I notice that U.S. officials have gone awfully quiet in the lead up to the referendum vote and I simply do not think that’s a coincidence. Even if we take the U.S. administration’s actions and non-actions in the most generous possible light — that they’re not serious about separation but are willing to humour some backwater separatist yokels in order to stick it to Mark Carney in a trade war — the Americans still don’t come off looking great.

But certainly, better than the Alberta quisling grifter class that has volunteered itself as tribute to serve as a cudgel against Canada’s interests. I sometimes wonder if they understand how hard the Americans are laughing at them.

We seem to have handed the reins of not only Alberta, but the well-being of the nation itself, to the most strategically short sighted, dishonest and narcissistic Useful Idiots this province has ever managed to produce.

Oh, but we’re sending a message to Ottawa, right?

I don’t know, guys. It seems to me that Ottawa’s got the message. We’re pissed. They get it. Nailed it. We won. We have a proposed pipeline to Sarnia from Doug Ford, and promises of shovels in the ground for a new Pacific Link pipeline within a year. How much more getting it needs to be got?

I understand why people are angry and skeptical; this country has been in an economic and cultural rut for a decade and for all I know, we may not be able to sort ourselves out as quickly as I might like. I’m not going to promise that every problem or grievance or issue can or will be resolved. Because that’s not reality. Polities are complicated. Non-fantasy governance requires the balancing of interests of one group of people against another — and that means we don’t always get what we want.

You can ask literally any American about that.

My fellow Albertans; if you think being 12 per cent of a population of 40 million has been a real persecutorial struggle, let me introduce you to the realities of being one per cent in population of 400 million. Statehood, independence, it’s immaterial to the bigger picture. Outside the legal and historical framework of Confederation, that’s what the province is now facing — negotiating Year Zero against state power that is 10-times the scale Dread Canada. Run by the very same provincial leaders who have spent years complaining that they were too weak and ineffectual to wheedle more out of Ottawa during the reign of the great and terrible Prime Minister of Fancy Socks.

Please raise your hand if you think that Ottawa is more difficult to negotiate with than Washington at the best of times, much less now? I’ll wait. Does Alberta’s over dependence on north-south trade give us better odds of managing that relationship — or does it just make us an even weaker target outside of the nation?

Can we — please — pull our heads out of our assess, here? Voting for separation isn’t going to win more consideration from the east. A leave vote is just advertising that the province is run by morons and ripe for the picking by an increasingly hostile and imperial power to the south.

Even if the current U.S. administration does prove too benevolent to take advantage of the ample neck Alberta is showing to the world, may I point out that by continuing on this path we also risk creating a counter-incentive with our fellow Canadians?

Right now, Ottawa is playing nice with us.

I know separatists will take some credit for this, but frankly, I think that credit is not at all deserved. What changed was Donald Trump; it was The Donald that forced our fellow Canadians to begin to see sense on the benefits of robust economic development and oil sands expansion to Asia. (Thanks, Trump!)

Keep playing the separatist game, however, and eventually the rest of the country is going to start asking itself if it’s rewarding traitorous behaviour by offering concessions on pipelines, equalization, or immigration. We risk losing public support and political momentum on a range of issues that are now, finally, going Alberta’s way.

Everything about this Potemkin separatist “debate” has been a pointless and divisive waste of everybody’s time. We have an opportunity, on Oct. 19, to never do it again. Let’s take the opportunity to chalk this whole episode up to an embarrassing error of the Premier’s judgement that we never speak about in polite company.

Families can fight and still be a family. We can disagree and advocate for our provincial interests, while still understanding that the strength of any individual region remains indivisible from the strength of a nation as a whole.

Vote to stay and send Washington the right message: don’t be lulled by our internal squabbling into believing we’re so weak and divisible as our stupidest citizens would have you believe. Oh, and don’t fuck with us.

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