Who is championing Canada in Alberta?

The most perplexing aspect of the incipient secession movement in Alberta isn’t that there are grassroots voices promoting it, but that there are few establishment voices challenging it. When the division of your country is on the table, why is the knife and fork only in the hands of the separatists?

Most days of the week, we are Team Canada. That’s because most days U.S. President Donald Trump seems to attack us. Unity against the latest orange narcissist threat comes automatically, if fatiguingly. But unity in the face of provincial grievance and a separatist movement is harder to manifest. It generates its own kind of fatigue.

Why?

First of all, we’ve seen this movie before. A half-century of official Quebec separatism, two referendums and numerous Parti Quebecois sovereigntist governments, have left most Canadians jaded as to the prospect of the same dynamic in Alberta.

Second, we really don’t expect it to come to this. Provinces are always unhappy to some degree with the federal government and their place in Canada. But it never rises to actual secession because, well, we’re Canadian. We work it out. Besides, Alberta isn’t Quebec.

Third, well, maybe Alberta has a point. Federal Liberal policies have made it harder for the province to exploit its energy resources. Like them, most Canadians don’t welcome the heavy hand of official Ottawa in provincial affairs. But our answer here is “build a pipeline” or “respect provincial jurisdiction.” It is provincial autonomy, not provincial independence that is required.

No, the real reason voices in authority are not speaking out is that they are fearful. Fearful of somehow giving separation support and even more fearful of losing support for themselves. The latter is crass, classic politics. It’s easy to understand, if frustrating to accept. The former is unfathomable to understand and impossible to accept.

If you’re afraid to challenge the benefits of being a citizen, of being Canadian, this simply emboldens secessionist sentiment. It is an open invitation to secessionist success. Which makes the casual Canadianism of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith so revealing. The United Conservative Party leader accommodates significant separatist actors within her party and caucus. Fearing a split in her party more than a split in the country, Smith has tossed any number of appeasing bones their way. The most consequential has been her clearing the legislative decks for a pro-independence referendum for later this year. She relaxed the threshold rules for signatures to petition such a referendum, signalling her openness to the incipient movement called the Alberta Prosperity Project, a misnomer if there ever was one. They need 178,000 signatures to qualify for an official provincial referendum.

A competing referendum initiative led by former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk called Forever Canadian collected over 450,000 signatures, signalling a strong unity base in the province.

Smith’s public position is that she supports a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.” She has refused to challenge the independence movement, its motives or its goals. This can mean only one thing: she intends to ride the secessionist tiger to get what she wants out of Ottawa. Enablers do that.

The danger is that the tiger devours her in the process. If not now, then later. The history of regional separatist or independence movements is that they grow if they are not stifled. They become embedded in the political DNA of society, rearing their heads time and time again.

The logic of Smith and her predecessors is that they are giving an outlet to this sentiment. She does not want to directly criticize her fellow Albertans for the frustrations animating this movement. What she is doing instead is allowing a push for independence from Canada to formally take root. The idea that a “no” vote will be the end of the story has not proved true in Quebec. It will not prove true in Alberta.

Smith’s “discretion is the better part of valour” position leaves the province without any credible voices in authority to speak for Canada. The Opposition leader, now a federal MP from Alberta, has decided to take the same stance. Nary a word passed his lips refuting the independence argument during his leadership review speech in Calgary last month.

There’s a Mount Amery in the Alberta Rockies. It is named after Leo Amery, a British politician who made the first ascent in 1929. Amery is best known not for his mountaineering, but his words. “Speak for England!” he cried in the House of Commons in September 1939, demanding his own Conservative government declare war on Germany in that fateful hour when the famously appeasing Neville Chamberlain dithered and delayed the inevitable and the necessary.

In this time of national unity challenge, who will speak for Canada in Alberta?

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.