Do you get the feeling that Alberta separatists want to have their cake and eat it too?
Last weekend, a social media post from the so-called Alberta Prosperity Project offered this advice to nervous Albertans: “Sovereignty doesn’t mean losing what matters. You keep your identity, pension, passport – and gain a hopeful future.”
The wordy image accompanying the post on the social media platform previously known as Twitter went on to promise that if Alberta separated from Canada – or, at least, became sovereign,* – you’d get to keep your “OAS & Pension,” your Canadian citizenship, your Canadian passport, your “personal identity,” and your “hope for the future.”
Senator Kristopher Wells, appointed to represent Alberta, sharply tweeted back: “I can assure you. No Canadian passport, no citizenship, no pension, and no future if you want to leave Canada.”
This set off a phenomenon which is technically known in the field of social media studies as “a shitstorm,” most of which unfortunately has now disappeared or dissipated, probably because the APP seems to have removed its original tweet and Senator Wells has restricted responses to his.
Both, however, seem to have had a second go at their statements. In a follow-up tweet, Senator Wells conceded that birthright citizenship is still a thing in Canada. The APP, which officially describes itself as only wanting to “empower the Alberta government to restructure Alberta’s relationship with Canada,” published a mealy-mouthed revised graphic that had enough qualifications to pass for an Internet terms-of-service page.
OK, the APP now seems to be saying, if you get to have an Alberta passport instead, what’s the big deal?
Regardless, while the storm persisted, what was striking was just how angry it made some people (and some bot operators) to hear Mr. Wells say that in the event of Alberta separating from Canada, Albertans might not get to keep their Canadian passports, Canadian pensions, and perhaps even their Canadian political identities.
On irate gentleman even called Mr. Wells a traitor, which under the circumstances seemed a little rich.
And this from a part of the country where folks used to shake their heads wonderingly when they heard that many Quebeckers assumed before the Quebec sovereignty referenda in 1980 and 1995 that they would still get to send Members of Parliament to Ottawa in the event of secession.
Don’t you get the feeling, watching what passes for civil discourse in this province nowadays, that a lot of the Alberta separatists who just won’t shut up think exactly the same thing? I can’t say I’ve seen it put as explicitly as some of the other claims on the APP meme, but I sure wouldn’t be shocked to learn it’s so.
Here’s one thing you can be confident of, if Albertans were ever so foolish as to vote that their province become a landlocked petrostate, there is zero chance they would ever get to send an MP to Ottawa again and, for quite different reasons, precious little chance they’d ever get to send an elected representative to Washington either, the obvious wishes of the APP’s leadership notwithstanding.
But what about passports, pensions and the like?
Well, it is true right now that Canada allows citizens living in other countries to continue to collect their CPP pensions, also permits dual citizenship (interim Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, c’mon down!), and lets citizens abroad vote in Canadian elections.
So, in that regard, while misleading, the APP statement was correct.
At the same time, in the event of a separation vote by any part of Canada, things would be certain to change significantly after separation.
I chatted about this with University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young, a thoughtful commentator on Alberta politics, last week after she warned in her Substack column that Alberta sovereignty could in fact mean losing passports and pensions.
“A more thoughtful analysis would say that Canada would have to sort out the citizenship question,” she told me. “I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that if Alberta were to separate, Canada would not be willing to allow five million people living next door to maintain Canadian citizenship and all its privileges.
“It would mean having to provide consular services and the like without being able to levy taxes to pay for it,” she explained. “True, Canada already has close to four million dual citizens, but presumably many of them are residents of Canada, pay Canadian taxes and so on.”
“Then there’s the question of democratic rights,” Dr. Young continued. “If you move to another country and maintain your Canadian citizenship, you can apply to join the international list of electors. You would then vote in the district where you most recently lived. So what would Canada do with a few million Albertans who wanted to vote in Canadian elections but had never lived anywhere outside Alberta?
“Presumably, if we ever got to this point, citizenship would be one of the items to be negotiated,” she said. “I suspect that someone who was born in Canada outside Alberta would be able to make a case for citizenship. But people born in Alberta? It would be open to negotiation.”
Of course, in the event it did get to that point – unlikely, notwithstanding The New York Times’s sophomorically one-sided report yesterday, which was worthy of a student newspaper – Canadians in the rest of the country would be furious. They would be in no mood to let the Alberta-dominated Conservative Party benefit from such an absurd situation.
And what could we Albertans do about it? Threaten to withhold our precious bitumen? I’ve got news for you, my fellow Albertans, there’s a reason they ship Saudi crude to New Brunswick and it’s got nothing to do with the ethics of a given barrel of fungible liquid.
As for the CPP, Dr. Young said, “Canada wouldn’t hand over the cash to Alberta. Folks like you and me who had paid into the CPP would still be able to collect it, just like we would if we moved to Panama. But Alberta would have to set up its own plan moving forward.”
Now, chances are high, as some suggest, that this nonsense is just being stage-managed by Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party to keep our eyeballs off the damage they’re doing to our province, and the metastasizing corruption scandal that just keeps getting worse every time The Globe and Mail publishes another headline like the one atop its reporters’ scoop on Monday.
But even former UCP premier Jason Kenney, who arguably started the ball rolling on this sovereignty-association scam, admits the Smith Government is playing with fire.
The trouble is, we could all get burned. And, if we do, don’t be counting on having an MP in Ottawa to complain to or having enough income from your Alberta-only pension to retire in B.C. or Nova Scotia. And don’t count on many foreign states to recognize your Alberta passport, either.
*A fact that a lot of Albertans, including some in our government, apparently don’t understand is that Canadian provinces and sub-national jurisdictions in all federations, are sovereign – within their jurisdiction and their territory, that is. Premier Smith’s definition of sovereignty, Alberta-style, however, clearly assumes it can intrude into federal jurisdiction, and all other provinces’ territory, whenever it pleases. That dog won’t hunt.