Opinion: Alberta's anger is not a rejection of Canada

My understanding of alienation begins somewhere more personal than constitutional arrangements.

My father fought in the Dutch resistance, supporting Canadians and their allies. He lost his sister, grandparents and most of his family in the Nazi camps. My mother was 14 when she and her family were taken at gunpoint from their home in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. She spent three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp. She told us countless times of prisoners who were beaten because they defiantly refused to bow.

Among my father's military papers was William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus: "My head is bloody, but unbowed." My parents taught me that a person can be forced to bow without inwardly submitting. They also taught me why the demand for submission cuts so deep.

There is no equivalence between what my parents suffered and political disagreement in Canada. But their experience left me sensitive to an otherwise theoretical distinction. Being subject to decisions you oppose is part of democracy. Accepting that your views and interests count for less and experiencing what feels like exploitation or even predation is not.

That distinction matters for Alberta. In a majoritarian system, a regional minority with little electoral weight can be ignored, or worse, exploited. The result is alienation, which can harden into a desire to leave.

I spent a decade representing Alberta's interests in policy debates. I never felt I was choosing Alberta over Canada. I argued that Canada could not realize its full potential unless every province was treated as a partner in Confederation.

Federal officials often agreed with my arguments but they said I did not understand their realities. The candid ones said those realities were political.

With virtually no electoral support in the West, they had little incentive to care.

The obstacle was not a failure to understand Alberta. It was a failure to see a reason to accommodate Alberta and the West generally. Being heard is not the same as having influence. Eventually, people stop asking whether a policy is fair. They start asking whether their place in the country is fair.

The dark side is predation. The National Energy Program of 1980 redirected Western resource income to Ottawa and Canadian consumers. It devastated businesses and workers. Marc Lalonde, then the federal energy minister, later told journalist Ron Graham the real driver was fiscal.

A majority imposing costs it does not bear, without consent from those who do, follows the logic of colonialism spelled out by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail. Their research with Simon Johnson won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics.

Unlike the U.S. and Australia, Canada has no equal, elected and effective Senate to check centralized decision-making. An aggrieved region is often heard only afterward, through the courts.

The Impact Assessment Act, Bill C-69, shows the cost. In 2022, the Alberta Court of Appeal said Parliament had taken "a wrecking ball to the constitutional right of the citizens of Alberta and Saskatchewan and other provinces." In 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada found the law largely unconstitutional.

Most boards I dealt with judged the process not worth the cost and uncertainty. Several major projects never came forward. The U.S. leapfrogged Canada to become the world's largest LNG exporter.

My father fought the National Energy Program to protect his business and community. He was a defiant Albertan. But when the anthem played, he stood, placed his hand over his heart, and wept. He saw no contradiction. Neither do I.

Western anger is not a lack of attachment to Canada. It is a demand to be honestly heard, with institutional protection from a majority that can turn indifferent or hostile.

There are ample warnings of what separation would cost. What is harder to find is a compelling case with real structure and process to support why Albertans should trust staying.

A longer version of this column originally printed in The Hub.

Mac Van Wielingen is chair of Viewpoint Investment Partners, founder and partner of ARC Financial Corp., and founder and former chair of the Business Council of Alberta.