Alberta's referendum won't be won on facts and figures
The emotive argument will win. And I'm not convinced we federalists are ready.
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It’s going to be easy to make the economic case for Alberta staying in Canada, right? Perhaps. But that’s not what wins a referendum of this kind.
Premier Smith’s 37-word ballot question is a procedural mouthful, but the campaign it has triggered won’t be procedural at all. It will be about identity. It will be about who Albertans think they are, what they believe their province is owed, and whether the rest of the country can credibly say it has lived up to its end of the bargain. This might seem like an easy argument to make, but it’s going to be brutally tough.
Because while many have been distracted by the “healthy” numbers of Albertans who told Angus Reid they would vote to remain in Canada (60-67%, depending on the wording of the question), the more alarming number is that 30-35% would vote to leave. That’s a tipping point.
In Damon Centola’s spectacular book, Change, the sociologist outlines how the tipping point for social or behavioural change — the amount needed for a minority group to establish a new norm in a larger group — is 25%. Not 20%, 25%. Do we realistically think the leave side will ever dip below the 25% threshold? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Which means momentum can only go in one direction from here: in favour of the leave side. Why? Because the case to leave is emotionally resonant and easy to make. Because a leave vote will be a low-risk way to make a point. Besides, this isn’t the actual separation referendum, so what is there to lose?
The federalist side has spent the early weeks of this fight talking about the constitution, the legal threshold, the economics of a landlocked province, and the recklessness of putting this question to voters. Not to mention, drawing unhelpful analogies to Brexit. None of which is going to move anybody to the remain side.
And the federalists are about to make exactly the mistake the Better Together campaign made in Scotland in 2014. Better Together won — 55 to 45 — but it won so ugly that it earned the nickname Project Fear and arguably fed the grievance that has kept Scottish independence alive ever since.
The campaign was relentlessly economic, relentlessly cautionary, and relentlessly condescending. It told Scots they were too small, too poor, and too dependent to make it on their own. By the final fortnight, the polls had tightened to a coin flip, and the campaign was forced into a panicked late pivot — David Cameron's love-bomb speech, the Daily Telegraph's referendum-day Burns poem, and other emotional articulations of what the union actually meant. They may have worked. Barely. It was nearly too little, too late.
It’s a mistake to look at that win as a playbook to follow. The lesson of that campaign was how close the Unionists came to losing because they had spent two years arguing with people’s wallets instead of their values and relating to voters’ personal identities.
Listen to the language coming out of Ottawa and out east right now, and the same instinct is already in motion. Carney calls the separatists’ promises a “dangerous bluff.” Cabinet ministers warn about the legal threshold. Pundits litigate the question’s wording. The argument being mounted is that voting yes is irrational. It may well be. That is not the point. Telling people their grievance is irrational is the surest way to harden it.
The thing the federalists have to internalize, fast, is that a lot of Albertans pushing toward yes are not telling you they want to leave Canada. They are telling you they feel Canada has left them. They are wearing Canadian flags while collecting separation petitions, and the chattering class is mocking them for it without realizing the flag is the entire point. They want their country back.
So what would an emotional federalist argument look like? Not the bogeyman version where the rallying cry is Trump and the message is fear of him. That is just Project Fear with a new villain, and it concedes the same ground — we should stick together not because of who we are, but because of who is outside the door. That is not an identity. It’s a threat assessment. A shallow one at that.
The argument has to be affirmative. It has to come from Albertans first, then from federal voices willing to say plainly that the country got the message and is moving. It has to acknowledge — not deflect — that the last decade, Alberta was cast as the villain in someone else’s story. It has to make a case for Canada as something worth staying in for its own sake, not for fear of the alternative. And it has to do that without a single line that sounds like it was written by someone who has never set foot west of Dufferin Street.
The federalist side has the procedural argument. It has the economic argument. The constitution is on its side. The Supreme Court is, in all likelihood, on its side.
It does not yet have the emotional argument. That is the only argument that wins this thing. The campaign that figures out how to make Albertans feel that staying is an act of pride, not an act of resignation, will be the one that wins on October 19. It’s a brutally tough assignment.