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No coastline

This is a big one: Alberta is landlocked. The province is so unfamiliar with the ocean, in fact, that Albertans can often be heard curiously referring to it as “tidewater.” If Alberta became independent, it would be wholly dependent on foreign countries for exports, imports and even tourism (not even a planeload of Germans would be able to visit Calgary without getting permission to pass through U.S. or Canadian airspace). With Canada having an effective veto over Albertan affairs, this would significantly kneecap the new country’s ability to chart its own destiny. “But what about Switzerland and Luxembourg? They’re landlocked and they’re also two of the world’s richest countries,” you might say. Fair point, but Luxembourg and Switzerland also have economies built upon light, specialized tasks such as banking and watchmaking. Alberta, by contrast, makes most of its money from extremely heavy commodities that need to be schlepped to market at great expense. Both Luxembourg and Switzerland also straddle multiple nations that they can play against each other. But an independent Alberta would be an island in the middle of NAFTA-land utterly subject to their whims. This might be why there aren’t too many landlocked countries that have decided to secede from a coastal mother country. To date, the club only includes Kosovo and South Sudan.

Photo by Google Maps

Get ready for a layer cake of Brexits

For two years and counting, the efforts of the U.K. government have been almost completely monopolized by the diplomatic odyssey of exiting the European Union. An independent Alberta would face the challenges of Brexit and much, much more. In an instant, Alberta would instantly lose access to generations of Canadian diplomatic work: Free trade agreements, treaties, alliances and membership in international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, NATO and the United Nations. In a nightmare scenario, Alberta would celebrate its first independence day without trade agreements of any kind. Overnight, hundreds of commodities that used to flow over Alberta’s borders absolutely free would be slapped with a web of baseline tariff rates in both Canada and the U.S. “Alberta already has a huge issue with trade costs … the idea that these costs would fall (after independence) is preposterous,” said University of Calgary economist G.K. Fellows.