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A new Manifesto for Alberta
Ted Morton, Calgary Herald

October 28, 2002

Twenty-two years ago today, Ottawa declared war on Alberta. That is how Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed summed up the National Energy Program (NEP) announced in the Trudeau Liberal budget of October 28, 1980.

This Thursday, October 31 in Lethbridge, Ottawa is going to send fourteen Alberta farmers to jail. Their offense? Selling their own wheat and barley without going through the Canadian Wheat Board.

On January 1, 2003, thousands of other Albertans will being facing jail time for failing to register their rifles and shotguns with Ottawa.

In the intervening two months, the Liberals will ratify the Kyoto Accord, a set of policies that, if implemented, will cost Alberta (and BC and Saskatchewan) billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

Has Ottawa declared war on Alberta, again? Just connect the dots.

And why should we be surprised? Remember how during the last federal election the Liberals demonized the West? Remember Mr. Chretien’s not so funny joke about how he preferred to “do business” with Easterners because “Westerners are different.” Remember how Allan Rock paid for television attack ads on Alberta’s health care innovations, notwithstanding that Ontario has more private health facilities than Alberta? Remember Eleanor Caplan’s infamous slur on the Canadian Alliance Party—and the fifty percent of Westerners who voted for the CA--as being full of “racists, bigots and holocaust deniers”? Are these the actions of a government that respects or even cares about the West?

And why should they! They don’t need any seats from the West to run the country. With almost two-thirds of the representatives in the House of Commons coming just from Ontario and Quebec, the Liberals can easily form a government without a single MP from the West. Nor do they have to worry about any opposition from the Liberal dominated, patronage-larded Senate. This in turn explains why Mr. Chretien continues to ignore the results of Alberta’s 1998 Senate election, in which the two winners—Bert Brown and myself--each received more votes than the total number of votes cast for all 26 Liberal candidates in Alberta in the 1997 federal election.

The results are predictable. The Canadian Wheat Board throws Western grain growers in jail for doing what any other Canadian businessman can do: sell their product or service on the free market to the highest bidder. In addition to the 14 Alberta farmers going to jail this Thursday, dozens of Saskatchewan farmers face similar charges next year, and two Manitoba grain-growers have already been jailed. In an act of discrimination that is so blatant that it boggles the mind, the Wheat Board restrictions apply only to the three prairie provinces. Grain farmers in Ontario and Quebec face no such restrictions.

Liberal disregard for the West also explains C-68, the Liberals’ firearms registration law, which has now cost taxpayers over $800 million dollars with no increase in safety or reduction in violence. We already know from the existing handgun registry that criminals do not register their guns. Besides wasting money that could be spent on real law-enforcement, all C-68 does is create thousands of “made in Ottawa” criminals—law abiding farmers, ranchers, hunters, collectors and recreational target-shooters—whose only crime is failure to do paper work. While C-68 needlessly punishes law-abiding firearm owners all across Canada, it has a disproportionate impact on the West because of our rural economy, frontier heritage and large native reserves. This is why Alberta and Saskatchewan challenged the constitutionality of C-68 in court in 1996, and still refuse to enforce those sections that allow for provincial discretion.

With respect to Kyoto, others have spelled out the devastating economic costs to Canada in general and the energy producing provinces in particular. Alberta, however—because of our oil sands and the fact that we are the corporate home of the Canadian oil and gas industry—will be hit the hardest. What others have not pointed out is the politics of Kyoto. Does anyone believe for a moment that Ottawa would have signed Kyoto if it focused on hydro-electric power and called for a stop to the damming of rivers for hydro-projects?

Back in 1980, two days after Trudeau announced the Liberals’ NEP, the Lougheed government rolled out a plan to fight back: a phased-in reduction in oil production; a moratorium on any new oil-sands mega-projects; and a constitutional challenge to the natural gas export tax. In less than twelve months, Lougheed’s counter-attacks forced Trudeau to abandon much of the NEP.

Faced with new attacks from Ottawa, Alberta must again fight back with every constitutional and legal tool at our disposal. Twenty-months ago, I was part of a group that warned of an impending attack on Alberta by Ottawa and recommended pre-emptive action. Our original five recommendations, the Alberta Agenda, make even more sense today.

1. Withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan to create an Alberta Pension Plan with the same benefits at a lower cost, while giving Alberta control over the investment of pension funds. This is a provincial responsibility under section 94(a) of the Constitution Act, and Quebec has already done this.
2. Collect our own revenue from personal income taxes, as we already do for business income taxes. This would create flexibility for further growth-stimulating innovations. This option is available to all provinces, and Quebec already does it.
3. Create our own provincial police force, the way Ontario and Quebec already do.
4. Resume provincial responsibility for health care policy, and resist, in court if necessary, any attempts by Ottawa to impose sanctions.
5. Hold a referendum to force Senate-reform back onto the national agenda. The Supreme Court has ruled that if a province holds a referendum on a constitutional amendment and there is a “clear majority on a clear question,” then there is a “constitutional duty” for Ottawa “to negotiate in good faith.” These are the ground rules the Supreme Court has laid down for Quebec referendums, and they must be applied equally to Alberta.

As Quebec has demonstrated repeatedly, when it comes to protecting provincial rights, the best defense is a good offense. (Each time the Separatists lose a referendum, Ottawa rewards Quebec with more powers.) If Alberta is to protect what is lawfully ours, we must counter-attack across these various policy fronts.

At the crudest level, politics is about power and wealth. The latter can be used to influence the former. But in a democracy, political power can be used to confiscate and redistribute wealth. This has been the basic modus operandi in Canadian federal politics since Pierre Trudeau came to power 30 years ago. The Liberals use their electoral superiority in Ottawa to scrape off wealth from BC and Alberta and to redistribute it to their strategic voter-blocks in Central and Eastern Canada. The most recent Stats Canada figures reported an annual net “outflow” of $2800 per Albertan to Ottawa. That’s approximately $50 per man, woman and child per week; or $8 billion dollars total in a year. If Canada were prospering under this arrangement, then it could perhaps be excused. But of course the exact opposite is the case. Our poor Loony continues its 30 year dive. If Kyoto is fully implemented, you can count on a 50 cent dollar, as foreign investors abandon Canada.

Critics will (again) try to stigmatize these initiatives as covert forms of separatism. Horse manure! It is simply a matter of asserting powers that are already legally ours. What is separatist about doing what Quebec and Ontario already do? These initiatives represent a prudent, middle-ground between the extremism of separatism and the equally irresponsible response of letting Ottawa walk all over us.

The West still wants in, not out. But the West also wants a fair deal, and we won’t get one without fighting for it.

Ted Morton is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and one of Alberta’s two Senators-Elect.