Much consternation in Canada after the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, announced last week that her province would hold a referendum in October on whether or not it was interested in seceding. A vote against separation, she said, would end the matter, but a vote in favor would set in motion a process that could lead to a second, binding, referendum on a concrete proposal to leave Canada.
As we noted here three years ago, Smith represents the United Conservative Party, formed in 2017 by a merger between two rival conservative parties. Its political outlook, if not actually separatist, is at least strongly anti-centralist; while Smith says she will oppose secession at the referendum, it’s clearly a cause with significant support among her party’s base.
This has therefore raised an obvious comparison with Britain’s David Cameron and the Brexit referendum of 2016. Conventional wisdom has it that Cameron’s decision to hold the referendum was a dreadful mistake, and Smith’s announcement has been tarred with the same brush – particularly by prime minister Mark Carney, who remarkably enough had a front-row seat for Brexit as head of the Bank of England.
My view is somewhat different. I don’t think Cameron had much choice about holding some sort of referendum, and I suspect that Smith doesn’t either. Cameron’s mistake was in going to a single binding vote before there was any agreement on just what leaving the EU would mean: that was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. Smith is trying to avoid that by holding a vote that she hopes will kill the issue, but that is not a disaster if it goes the wrong way.
If Albertans vote to pursue the secession process, it doesn’t mean they will actually go through with it when it comes to the crunch. The practical difficulties of becoming an independent country would be formidable, and opinion polls have consistently shown a majority against secession of the order of two to one. The downside of doing it this way, however, is that a pro-secession vote this year is more likely than it would be in a single binding referendum: voters will know that nothing is really at stake and feel free to indulge themselves.
There’s also an irresistible comparison with separatism in Australia. Western Australia voted 66.2% in favor of secession in a 1933 referendum (although its efforts to press the issue with the British government were unsuccessful), and the issue has occasionally returned to the spotlight since. The state’s Liberal Party is probably in a similar position to Smith’s UCP – officially against the idea, but honeycombed with more or less serious supporters of secession.
An independent WA, however, would be logistically much more straightforward than an independent Alberta. Alberta is landlocked; its only outlets to the rest of the world are via either Canada or the United States, and with the US currently in a predatory mood it would be hard to strike a balance between the two. And Canada doesn’t end at Alberta: there’s a further province to the west, British Columbia, which would find its connections to the rest of the country severed by Albertan independence.
Most of Canada’s provinces can be mapped onto Australian states quite neatly. In both countries about 60% of the population lives in the two largest states or provinces, and in both the fourth largest (Alberta with 11.5%, WA 10.5%) is a considerable distance away out west, with a very different economic and cultural complexion. But Canada has no Queensland: instead British Columbia is the third-largest province, more remote from the centre but also less conservative and more cosmopolitan than Alberta.
Rather than open such a can of worms, it seems likely that Alberta’s voters will decide to stay put. But at least they are being asked, and consulting people rather than just telling them what’s good for them is usually the right way to go.
The World is Not Enough 