Sorry Alberta, but you're stuck with Canada

The NYT recently published an exposé on the province of Alberta and its “long-shot bid to secede” from Canada. Apparently Danielle Smith, “Alberta’s MAGA-style conservative leader” (I know nothing about her politics, hence the direct quote), is trying to make it easier for a provincial referendum on the subject to be held:

“The next day [after centre-left Liberal leader Mark Carney was elected], she introduced a bill, which the province’s legislature recently passed, making it much easier for a citizens’ movement to trigger a referendum.

“The federal government has taken hostile actions against Alberta and against the Constitution and against our right to develop our resources,” Ms. Smith said as she promoted the bill, listing nine energy laws she wanted changed to “reset” Alberta’s relationship with the federal government.

The new rules drastically lower the bar for constitutional referendum petitions, in part by slashing the number of citizens’ signatures required for a referendum, from 600,000 signatures to about 177,000. They also give petitioners an extra month to collect signatures, increasing the window from 90 days to 120.”

Albertans have a right to be aggrieved. The oil-rich province has a lot in common with Western Australia, in the sense that its provincial (state) businesses and politicians are constantly frustrated by laws made “over east” that affect how they want to conduct themselves.

In Alberta, it’s “climate-focused policies like emission caps and strict environmental assessments… that these limited Alberta’s ability to fully extract and export its mineral and fossil fuel wealth”.

In Western Australia, it’s things like delayed federal decisions on major LNG projects.

In both jurisdictions, horizontal fiscal equalisation rules—which ensure every state or province is able to provide comparable public services at a given rate of taxation—leads to both of them effectively subsidising the rest of the country, riling up the locals.

But Alberta and Western Australia also have one more thing in common: their respective national constitutions prohibit secession without a country-wide referendum. A Canadian province or Australian state can’t just secede unilaterally, regardless of how many local referendums are held in favour of doing so.

And I don’t know about you, but even if you could force federal politicians into launching a costly national referendum, convincing a majority of your country’s jurisdictions to allow you to secede when you’re subsidising their public services strikes me as an impossible task.

So, unless Alberta one day finds itself in economic ruin, say due to a massive oil crisis—in which case there would be no local support for secession—then sorry, but you’re stuck with the rest of Canada!

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