Alberta secessionists are demanding a vote as early as this October on leaving Canada.
They won’t win, of course – support for separation tops out at around 30 per cent in the province.
But what if they did? Separatists have focused on what a future Republic of Alberta would look like. Both boosters and detractors of the plan have argued about how much debt, CPP funds, military spending, and more a “free Alberta” would get.
But what about the rest of Canada? How would it change us?
First off, armed border guards and passport requirements are not likely.
We’d have to make a deal with Alberta on free passage through the new borders. We have too many road, rail, pipeline, and electrical grid links not to make a fair bargain. The two countries would probably create something like the European Union’s Schengen Area, with goods and workers passing freely back and forth.
However, this would still be bad for British Columbia. Canada’s political centre of gravity would be even more firmly embedded in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor. How much appetite would there be for major national projects running across the (newly divided) country to B.C.? The West Coast would suffer an economic hit and reduced national influence. Would B.C. stay stubbornly federalist, or spawn its own Bloc Columbia movement?
Politically, Alberta’s departure would decimate the federal Conservative Party.
Last year, the Tories under Pierre Poilievre sent a record 144 MPs to Ottawa. In Alberta, the Conservatives won 34 seats, the Liberals two, and the NDP one.
Without Alberta, the same election would have seen the Conservatives win 110 seats, and the Liberals 167. With a reduced House of Commons of 306 seats, that would have given the Liberals a pretty healthy majority on day one.
It’s not only the Liberals that would be propped up by Wexit. Canada’s other separatists, the Bloc Quebecois, would see their position strengthened, with a bigger share of Parliament’s remaining seats. In future minority governments, they’d hold more power.
We’d take a financial hit from losing Alberta, of course, but it would also kill any incentive on Canada’s part to build new pipelines, unless we got a very large share of the revenues up front.
Without the need for foreign energy buyers to put up money to get our oil and gas, the Canadian dollar would likely weaken. Our remaining exports, like manufactured goods, film and TV production, software, and agricultural products, would become cheaper for our trading partners, spurring demand. It would be a brutal trade off – we’d gain export-related jobs, but imports from autos to coffee, bananas, and oranges would spike in price.
Separating Alberta from Canada would change both, in ways that would make them unrecognizable from their present forms.