Premier Danielle Smith appeared to be working many strategies at once with her complicated 37-word, referendum-to-hold-a-referendum question on Alberta’s future in Canada.
One doesn’t put forth a vote with dueling options to remain a Canadian province or start a process to lead to a future binding independence vote, unless one is trying to juggle many tactical balls and clubs and chainsaws.
She wanted to get something on the ballot that would be more immune from constitutional challenges over the need to first consult First Nations, after two court losses on petitions that proposed straightforward questions on severing Canada.
She no doubt wanted to offer the large separatist faction within her UCP base something, to reduce the chances they plot to oust her as party leader and premier.
She also likely wanted a way to still align with the large majority of Albertans who want to remain in Canada.
One risky strategy has long been spoken of quietly among federalist United Conservatives, and is now bubbling to the surface.
Let the separatists have their vote. Let them lose by a tonne. And let’s leave it behind us.
The premier gently hinted at this in Friday’s news conference. She cast the referendum’s stay option as a “vote to remain in Canada [and] put an end to this debate.”
Technology Minister Nate Glubish echoed this line of thinking on social media. “A strong vote to stay in Canada this fall will put this question to rest and let us all focus on building the best possible Alberta AND Canada.”
The prediction was made more bluntly by Vitor Marciano, the energy minister’s chief of staff and once a top strategist to Smith: “There will be a vote. Separatists will lose. Badly. They have not convinced Albertans.”
Many separatist activists might not take kindly to the thought that the premier and her inner circle are engineering a doomed referendum question in hopes of quelling their movement.
But there’s another hazard to this strategy. History isn’t on their side.
The massive cautionary tale on this score is Brexit.
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called the 2016 referendum to appease the European Union skeptics in his Conservative ranks, in hopes it would flop. That move failed spectacularly, and Britain’s politics and economy are still reckoning with the aftermath a decade later.
But even the losing separatist bids don’t extinguish the mass movements behind them, much as their opponents might hope.
“Elsewhere it hasn’t worked like that,” says André Lecours, a University of Ottawa political scientist who has studied independence movements and votes around the world.
Quebec’s 1980 vote on sovereignty lost badly, with only 40 per cent support. Parti Québécois Premier René Lévesque famously replied “à la prochaine fois” (until next time) to a cheering arena full of supporters, and his movement nearly won the next time, in 1995. Quebecers may vote on it again if the PQ wins government this fall.
Scotland’s first vote to be independent from Britain fell short in 2014 with just under 45 per cent backing, and the nationalist movement has remained vibrant since, Lecours points out. The Scottish National Party has reigned ever since, and independence has often flirted with majority support in polls this decade.
It’s not just the leaders who keep supporters rallying along. It’s activists who spend months organizing and fighting for a purpose who don’t just give up that purpose after losing, Lecours said.
“They’ve never been in politics and they get involved in politics for the first time for the cause of secession and they stay there.”
There’s long been belief among 20 to 30 per cent of Albertans that the province should separate, but that sentiment never had much political direction until the UCP’s citizen initiative process gave them a path to pursue.
In Alberta, thousands of separatists spent four months canvassing for a petition to achieve secession. Many will likely keep campaigning for the next five months ahead of the Oct. 19 referendum, making them warriors for most of the year for a cause that some Smith allies now hope they’ll just abandon afterward.
“Even if they lose, the hardcore 15 or 20 per cent of the population who really believe in it, they won’t take no for an answer,” said Daniel Béland, director for the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montreal.
“They won’t change their vision, their view that Alberta should secede. They would say we need to continue to educate Albertans about how bad Canada is, or we have to wait for the next, bad federal policies.”
NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi says separatist movements like Brexit and the one in Quebec are divisive, and he is concerned about Alberta holding a referendum to ‘tear Canada apart.’
On the other hand, a more overwhelming defeat for the pro-independence side in Alberta might prove more dispiriting than in Quebec or Scotland.
Lecours cites additional reasons that Alberta’s movement could wither after losing: it’s not grounded in a linguistic or ethnocultural sense of nationhood like most other secession forces, and it has no formally organized political movement to lead it into government and force a subsequent referendum.
That is, it doesn’t have a party behind it right now.
Disaffected separatists could push to create a party larger than the fringe Republican Party of Alberta or Wildrose Independence Party. Or, they could become a greater force within the governing UCP, forcing the party to adopt pro-separation policies and run like-minded candidates — or install one as leader.
“Will the United Conservative Party morph into a sovereignist party?” Béland asks.
The UCP already is one, Opposition NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi likes to say. We wish, some separatists might grumble.
But they already found hundreds of thousands of Albertans to sign their independence petition, and will try to drive multiples more to voting stations in October.
If they fail, the movement’s leaders will likely have some strategy to keep Alberta separatists politically engaged before trying to win the next time.
