Notes on Alberta Separatism from the Quiet Revolution

Is Danielle Smith Today’s Robert Bourassa?

A Lesson in Québec History
In 1960, a new political force swept into power in Québec. Jean Lesage led a renewed Liberal Party into office after a period of sixteen years of the authoritarian rule of Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale. While the Liberals had been the natural governing party of Québec from 1897-1944, prior to the rise of Duplessis, the party that Lesage led back into office was a radically different organization than the one Duplessis had defeated in 1944.

While still technically the same corporate organization with the same name, the small government federalist Québec Liberal Party of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau and his predecessors bore scant resemblance to Lesage’s renewed Liberals. These Liberals were the party of Jean Marchand’s Catholic Workers’ Confederation of Canada (the precursor to the Confederation of National Trade Unions, one of Quebec’s two labour federations) and socialists like Eric Kierans.

Most importantly, it drew significant support from a new generation of nationalists who rejected the Irish Fianna Fáil-style Catholic authoritarian nationalism of the Duplessis regime. These new nationalists, epitomized in Lesage’s energy minister René Levesque, offered a new state-centred nationalism. Lévesque persuaded Lesage to call a second election, two years into his first term, to seek a new mandate to nationalize Québec’s hydroelectric grid under the aegis of a massive, state-run company Hydro Quéebec. The slogan, which Lévesque, not Lesage had crafted was “Masters in Our Own House,” a boldly nationalist slogan.

Even before Lesage’s unexpected defeat in the 1966 “wrong winner” election (i.e. an election in which the first-past-the-post electoral system awards a majority of seats to a party placing second or third in popular vote–Lesage’s Liberals had won the popular vote by 7%), obvious tensions began to emerge within the party. Lesage’s caucus could all agree that the creation of Hydro Québec was good and that the province should set a distinctive course on welfare state entitlement programs like Medicare and pensions, the party began to polarize between those like Marchand, who saw an unprecedented opportunity for Québec to take a greater leadership role in Canada as a whole and those like Lévesque, who had grown increasingly disillusioned about collaborating with English Canada and open not just to autonomy but to independence.

Because nearly all of Lesage’s front bench had pretty specific beefs about Québec-Canada relations many in English Canada assumed a level of consensus within the Québec Liberals that was simply not there. Furthermore, they radically underestimated support for independence because pro-independence parties appeared to be a nothingburger at the polls.

In 1966, the two pro-independence parties, Ralliement Nationale and Rasemblement pour L’Independence Nationale won no seats and scored, between them, just 9% of the popular vote. Just how big a threat could the separatists be? English Canada wondered.

But now we know. Just ten years later, the separatists would form a majority government, led by Lévesque.

I want to suggest that, as we march towards an Alberta independence referendum, that Canadians must examine much more closely the decade between the Lesage government and the election of the Parti Québecois.

First elected to the Liberal caucus in 1966 was Robert Bourassa, who immediately threw himself into a task whose urgency was vastly underestimated by his colleagues: keeping people like Lévesque in the party and in the country. When Lévesque submitted a pro-sovereignty resolution to the 1967 party convention, Bourassa led the effort to mediate a compromise between Lévesque and his supporters and the party brass, led by Kierans, the party’s new president.

In an effort to win Lévesque’s trust. Bourassa even helped him draft the convention resolution and only pulled-out of co-sponsoring it when he realized that his chances to broker a future compromise could be killed if he were part of the convention floor majority that Kierans’ forces crushed.

This scheme ultimately worked and won Bourassa the party leadership in 1970 and the premiership later that year. During his six years in government, Bourassa was in near-constant conflict with Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in Ottawa by championing Québec autonomy in constitutional negotiations, enacting discriminatory language laws reducing the rights of English speakers and opposing official Multiculturalism.

What many did not understand until it was too late was that all these efforts were designed to prevent what took place in 1976: the election of actual separatists and the divisive referendum of 1980 that took Canada to the brink of collapse.

Today’s Alberta and Yesterday’s Québec
I do not know Danielle Smith as a person and, honestly, my opinion about her fluctuates as much as my opinion of any Canadian politician I can think of. But the many parallels between contemporary Alberta and her place in it and that of Bourassa in 1960s and 70s Québec seem striking and worthy of observation.

Like Bourassa and Lesage, Smith and her predecessor, Jason Kenney, have led a different kind of Conservative Party than the one Rachel Notley’s NDP had defeated in 2015, one incorporating an autonomist tendency, a party more like Ernest Manning’s Social Credit than the Tory dynasty of Peter Lougheed and Jim Prentice.

This party has a far more complex and fractured caucus than national media care to acknowledge or investigate. As in 1966 Québec, the future leaders of Alberta separatism are likely submerged in the caucus of the United Conservative Party and not on the front lines of the province’s picayune separatist parties. Canadian federalists should take no more comfort from the separatists winning 1%, 3% and 18%, respectively, in the recent byelections in Edmonton and the rural area east of Red Deer than federalists should have from the anemic RIN and RA results in 1966. The future leader of Alberta separatism is almost certainly, like Lévesque in 1966, a member not of a fringe party but a prominent member of the province’s natural governing party.

These byelection numbers are not the numbers of which we should be taking the most notice when it comes to Alberta’s future in the Canadian federation. Since the re-election of the Liberal Party of Canada this spring, various pollsters have entered the field and found hard-to-measure chaos when it comes to Alberta public opinion about sovereignty. Of the respected, respectable pollsters who have asked Albertans, outcomes range from Angus Reid showing 38% for separatism to Leger measuring 49%, this without any Lévesque-like figure uncloaked and on the scene. Furthermore, the somewhat less reputable ThinkHQ has polled on an interesting, related question and found that 60% of the supporters of Smith’s party support separation.

The other numbers that should concern us are that 26% of Canadians now believe Smith is herself a separatist, and an additional 47% see her as fanning the flames of separatism to negotiate more effectively with Ottawa. What few seem to consider is the possibility that she is actually a Bourassa-like figure, a federalist doing everything possible to keep potential separatists in a broad autonomist coalition within Canada.

Because most Canadians outside the Prairies seem oblivious to the effects of the relentless anti-Alberta discourse emanating from our national media, opinion leaders and leadership of Canada’s progressive parties in constantly pushing Albertans away from Canada, it does not occur to them that Smith’s efforts to permit a referendum before pro-independence forces are organized enough to win one is an effort on behalf of federalism. They do not recognize that by co-opting the discourse and policy positions of separatists and presenting them on behalf of a federalist party, as Bourassa did, she is actually working to hold separatists inside her party and hold Alberta inside Canada.

Whether this is a plan or whether it is a series of reactions to events is unknowable to me and knowable, possibly, to her closest confidantes and Smith, herself. But whether she is conscious or not of playing a historical role analogous to Bourassa’s, we all know what happened when Bourassa failed: a national unity crisis of mammoth proportions that fundamentally reordered not just Québec but all of Canada.