Western alienation is more about demonizing memes than reality!

It’s older than the Trudeaus, older even than the discovery of oil beneath the prairies. The deepest strands of Western alienation, many historians argue, are rooted in grievances as old as Canada itself.

But if political rage on the Great Plains has been a recurring theme, reawakening in Alberta and Saskatchewan time and again when good times turn bad, when booms go bust or when farms turn to dust, there is something very different about the 2019 version.

Western frustrations that fix anger upon the power centres of Ontario and Quebec – the “Laurentian elite” in today’s parlance – have almost always been about the unfair sharing of the economic pie.
“The great thing about Canada so far is we’ve always been able to weather these kinds of resentments without the devastating consequences that occur in many other countries – and we’ve done it by simply focusing on growing the pie even bigger,” Joseph Garcia, a political studies professor at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Star.

“That’s been the secret to successfully reestablishing Canadian unity – growing the pie. When economic challenges emerge, western alienation also tends to emerge because it is so deeply rooted in the DNA of the political culture,” said Garcia. “People tend to look for the simple answer and many find it in the legacy and mythology of grievance about the kind of forces that have been working against their particular region.”

The very different challenge today, Garcia observes, is that for the first time ever the debate has shifted to the nature of the pie itself. Across the prairies but in Alberta most vividly, frustration revolves around an inability to expand an economic pie dependent upon the carbon-intensive oil and gas industry – and the real-time pain of those who’ve already lost their jobs. And throughout the rest of Canada, as the results of the Oct. 21 federal election make clear, majorities of voters have parked their votes with parties – Liberal, NDP, Green, combined – that advocate for a new pie to meet our energy needs, because the science of climate change shows the pie we now are eating represents an existential threat to our future.