Separating is the least conservative idea in Canadian Politics
Evan Menzies makes an Albertan conservative case for staying in Canada
Craft Politics is a Canada-U.K. cross-border political podcast co-hosted by Joseph Lavoie (former senior advisor in a Canadian Prime Minister's Office) and Andrew Percy (former UK Conservative MP). You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
For years, I’ve turned to my good friend Evan Menzies to make sense of Alberta, and he has never steered me wrong.
Evan recently penned a great essay every federalist should read, An Argument for Canada from an Alberta Conservative. He has the street creds to write such a piece, having cut his political teeth working for Danielle Smith and the Wildrose party, and having advocated for Alberta’s energy sector at the grassroots level.
We recorded and published this week’s episode of the podcast hours before Premier Smith was due to address the province about the ongoing political drama surrounding the big referendum question seizing mainstream Alberta right now: whether or not to call it quits on Canada.
Evan makes the case that separatism and conservatism are not the same thing.
He’s right.
And he’s also right to remind federalists that ignoring Albertans’ grievances is a big mistake.
The grievances are real. An Albertan’s vote counts for measurably less than a vote cast in Charlottetown. The National Energy Program still shapes how a generation of Albertans reads Ottawa’s intentions, as it should. A province that generates an enormous share of the country’s wealth, and is then told to be quiet about how that wealth gets spent, is entitled to be angry. I certainly feel it whenever I’m in Alberta, and especially when sitting in on focus groups in the province. The frustration is raw, and it’s very real.
And somehow, a movement to take radical action — to split the country up — has increasingly been branded as a conservative sentiment. Which, I get. I’m not pretending the polling data on this doesn’t exist. By and large, pro-separatist voters in Alberta are UCP supporters. But if we park party politics for a moment, this type of rupture is, by definition, un-conservative.
Conservatism is a temperament before it is a platform. It is a bias toward the tested over the theoretical — the instinct that a system which has worked, imperfectly, for a long time deserves the benefit of the doubt against a system that exists only on paper. Conservatives are supposed to be the people in the room asking the slow, unglamorous question: and then what?
The separatist project, as its loudest advocates now describe it, does not pass that test. The pitch, increasingly, is a blank slate. A new constitution, written from scratch. An end to the constitutional monarchy. A fresh founding document onto which Albertans can paint whatever they like.
I understand the appeal of the empty canvas. I also think it should worry any conservative who looks at it for more than a moment.
A blank slate is the most radical instrument in politics, and conservatives are meant to be the last people reaching for it. Everything currently guaranteed goes back into the box — the structure of the courts, the protections you never think about because you’ve never had to, the quiet arrangements that hold a society together — to be renegotiated by whoever shows up with the most energy on the day. Maybe you get those things back. Maybe you get them back improved. But “maybe” is a hell of a gamble.
Evan described the danger more vividly, describing the plan as pouring gasoline, striking a match, and hoping the explosion leaves the house arranged the way you wanted.
The aesthetics of the movement might look traditionalist. The mechanics, however, are revolutionary. You cannot conserve an inheritance by burning it down to see what survives the fire.
Which is a view we conservatives can hold while having empathy for the frustrations this movement is bringing to life. Let’s face it, political reform is slow. Albertans have been told to wait for it for their entire adult lives, and at some point patience runs out. It is the strongest card the separatist movement holds, and given how long it takes us to get anything done in this country, it’s a good one.
Independence is not the shortcut it looks like — a constitutional rupture is its own long, grinding decade, with one difference that outweighs all the others: you cannot take it back. The conservative wager has always been that the dull, incremental path compounds. The revolutionary wager is that you can skip to the end. Again, that’s a hell of a gamble.
There’s a part of this story that Evan highlighted for us, and it’s not getting enough consideration: Many of the people drawn to separation are among the most patriotic Canadians you will ever meet. They are not anti-Canada — they believe Canada walked away from them, and they have a decade of evidence to point at. Lecturing them is not a winning approach, and I won’t do it.
As Evan reminded me, a country is worth more than the government of the day, and always has been. Loving an inheritance enough to do the slow, thankless work of fixing it is a far more conservative act than trading it for a blank page and hoping for the best.
This debate is mainstream now, and it will not resolve this fall, or probably for years after. So conservatives are going to have to decide what the word still means. It cannot mean agreeing to tear the house down in order to prove you love it.