Beyond Polarity

MY MAIL-IN REFERENDUM BALLOT ARRIVED.

I’m one of more than 658,000 Albertans who asked for a special ballot, hoping to skip the lineups on October 19 (ditto for Don, my partner on this blog).

It was a thick packet: ten ballots, an explainer, a declaration that I am who I say I am. After months of heat about the vote, it was a relief to sit down and mark an X on the future of the province.

Like a lot of Albertans, I have done the homework. Everyone with a calculator is asking the same question: would leaving Canada make us richer or poorer?

Last month the Alberta Transition Council, the separatist number-crunchers, dropped two reports. One puts the one-time cost of starting up a country at about $5 billion over three years. The companion paper, Forward to Freedom, is sunshine all the way: keep the services Albertans already have, take on Ottawa’s jobs, and still have $22 billion to $32 billion left over every year. That is $4,390 to $6,350 a person, they say. Independence as a bargain, if the model holds.

They say they have stress-tested some ugly cases. What they also do is leave the heaviest items out of that tidy $5-billion headline: a negotiated share of the federal debt, and billions a year in First Nations and Métis program spending, among other things booked at zero. Earnest work but not the last word.

And not the only one.

At the UCP government’s request, the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy produced a commissioned look at what separation could do to the economy and the books. It puts costs and risks on the page, not just the upside. There is a “smooth” scenario and a “difficult” one. In the first, the short-term hit is real and the long run can look better. In the second, GDP, jobs and wages take a beating for years. One widely cited framing puts fiscal and transition costs between about $50 billion and $170 billion over five years. Different assumptions; different heaven or hell.

Albertans should read the reports. But October 19 will not be settled by anyone’s spreadsheet.

The ballot is not even a leave-or-stay vote. It asks whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada, or whether Edmonton should start the constitutional process toward a later, binding referendum on leaving. Polls show “remain” well ahead. That is not the same thing as the argument going away.

I have spent time with people who have lived this: voters from Quebec’s failed sovereignty referendums in 1980 and 1995, and from the Brexit vote that took the United Kingdom out of the European Union in 2020. A most useful comparison is Scotland in 2014. The result was 55.3 % No/44.7 % Yes. Turnout was 84.6 per cent.

Brexit was a vibe with a ballot paper. Scotland was the opposite: White Papers, Treasury notes, duelling economists. The Scottish people like to analyze. It did not settle the thing. Facts about the future are hard to come by, and both sides arrive with data that masquerades as certainty.

Then you are alone with the pencil. All of it has to collapse into a mark. In Alberta the choice is blunt: remain a province of Canada, or have the government start the legal process for a binding referendum on separation.

I had read the reports; I voted on identity. I am an Albertan inside Canada. I have lived here more than 40 years, and it gives me real joy that my sons and their families choose to stay. Over the past year I have gone to the edges of the country: Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland, Bella Coola and Vancouver Island, the shores of Lake Erie. I do not live in those places but I feel connected to them.

Scotland has the same split, Scottish and the UK, both real. The question is what “we” means: the town, the province, the country. Who “we” are is muddy; who “we” are not is often sharper. Canadians have long defined ourselves as not American. Prime Minister Mark Carney has leaned hard on that contrast with Donald Trump. Suggest who we are — closer to Europe, even an EU “associate” — and a lot of people flinch.

That affinity is why I voted to remain. I do want a message sent to Ottawa: stay inside the constitutional lines, and stop taking Albertans, and the West, for granted. I sent it on the other nine ballots.

Nobody in Ottawa should treat a Remain win as the end of the argument. After Scotland voted No, the Scottish National Party did not crawl off. A year later, in the 2015 UK election, it took 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats at Westminster. The vote was sold as once in a generation; it was not. This fall, for the first time, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have first ministers from parties that want out of the United Kingdom — the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin.

The Carney Liberals also have Quebec to look at. The Parti Québécois won and will form a government for the first time in more than a decade. It did not win a majority: 59 seats, five short of 64, on about 28 per cent of the vote. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon still wants a sovereignty referendum, but not while Donald Trump is in the White House, and a minority makes that promise much harder to keep. Liberals and Conservatives in the National Assembly have said they will block one. Even so, two provinces picking at Confederation at once ought to force some rethinking in Ottawa.

There is a second Scottish lesson. When the SNP won a Holyrood majority in 2011, it treated the result as a mandate for independence. It was not, cleanly. Plenty of Scots backed the party as a way to batter Westminster. That should sound familiar. Plenty of Albertans say they will mark the separation option to send Ottawa a message, not to launch a country. The two are easy to confuse, and arguably, dangerous to confuse.

The cases are not the same.

Scotland cannot hold another independence vote without Westminster’s consent. The 2014 permission was a one-off; the UK Supreme Court later ruled Holyrood cannot legislate a rerun on its own. Canada’s path is messy in a different way. The Supreme Court’s secession reference and the Clarity Act do not let a province walk out. A clear majority on a clear question creates a duty to negotiate; actually leaving still takes a constitutional amendment. October 19 does not clear that bar. It asks whether to start down the road.

None of that is what will decide the mark. We can dress the choice up as fact-led, but most people will vote on what they feel and on who they think they are. A spreadsheet will not turn a handle and produce the right answer. The strongest assumptions in this debate are not numbers. They are feelings about belonging.

So read the reports. Then put the calculator down and decide who “we” are — and who we are not. That is what people take into the voting booth.

BEYOND POLARITY is the consensus opinion of the writers Donna Kennedy-Glans & Don Hill. If you haven’t already, please subscribe — scroll down on your phone or tablet, or look to the right in the panel beside this post. Enter your email to FOLLOW, a wheel spins, hamsters get fed.