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.

The stark colours of the 2019 electoral map say it loudest – a sea of Conservative blue from the western edge of Winnipeg to deep within the B.C. interior. An expanse within which the angriest now are calling for the most desperate of measures — “Wexit,” or Western separation, and the establishment of a de facto Carbon Nation, unshackled from the livelihood-crushing environmentalism taking hold elsewhere.

If this incarnation of Western alienation is different, Garcia argues that Canadians still need to appreciate the history that drives it. He laments that though he has given several dozen television and radio interviews since the election, there’s never been time to say much more than half a sentence – “there’s a deep history to this sentiment” – before time runs out.

“Western alienation extends back to before the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were created in 1905. It goes back to how violently the Canadian government answered the Riel rebellion in the 1880s. It goes back to the fur-trapping era, when the people of the west – at that time largely Indigenous peoples, Metis and early settlers – all felt exploited for the benefit of the financial interests in Toronto, Montreal and ultimately, London,” said Garcia.

Those laments ebbed and flowed into the early 20thcentury with the economic times. For some, a sense of having been deceived by false advertising – “Come to the Paris of the Prairies!” – was the natural result of hardscrabble realities of pioneer life.

In Alberta, the first hints of a transformative future in oil and gas came early – much earlier, in fact, than the 1947 breakthrough in Leduc, where the first large reservoir was successfully harvested, gaining international attention. The Toronto Star and Globe and Mail archives abound with stories of oil fever taking hold in Calgary in 1914 and again in 1926.

Each time, the booms evaporated in the absence of actually locating the black gold. But from a Western perspective, it was just as well – Ottawa was the primary beneficiary of those early frenzies of purchased oil leases and concessions, reaping fees that wouldn’t go to the provinces until after 1930, when Alberta and Saskatchewan attained control of their own resources from what was then called “the dominion government.”

The next phase of alienation came in the Dirty Thirties, when the Great Depression brought privation to the prairies on a scale that gave rise to two disparate political uprisings of agrarian populism.

Alberta saw the rise of William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, founder of the Social Credit party, who won in a landslide in 1935, bringing evangelical social conservatism and contempt for eastern bankers to the Alberta legislature.

Saskatchewan, in stark contrast, veered left, electing Baptist minister Tommy Douglas as a federal MP in 1935 under the banner of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner to the NDP.

If the two movements were worlds apart, politically, they both tilted against eastern-dominated money and power, drawing energy from the collective sense of grievance and exploitation, from rail rates to banking policies to the Canadian Wheat Board, that the west was being taken for granted and denied its fair share.

As the decades passed and as oil became king in Alberta (and now also Saskatchewan) – and with the arrival of the first of two prime ministers with the name Trudeau – Western alienation attained a dimension of personalized grievance. Ask any Albertan over the age of 50 about Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 industry-upending National Energy Program and brace for a blue streak. And watch how easily the grievance extends from father to son, driving at least some of the demonizing memes that prevail today.

“I think having a Trudeau today versus a Trudeau then is almost like the icing on the cake for many Albertans,” said Brendan Boyd, a professor of economics and political science at Edmonton’s MacEwan University whose work focuses on climate policy.

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“It feeds into the narrative that this is all about central Canadian interests exploiting and taking advantage of the Western provinces. People sort of move with the idea, thinking, ‘Here we go again, he has the same last name and he’s doing it again.’ Obviously the comparison is a stretch – they are different prime ministers living in different times – but nevertheless it resonates with people that much more.”

Boyd’s broader assessment of the populist alienation playing out today is that Canada needs somehow to break beyond the exaggerations and finger pointing that has dominated national discourse since election day.

“I think on both sides – east and west – there is a tendency to create a foil at the extreme and engage in straw-man arguments. So whether it is Albertans creating a caricature of Justin Trudeau as someone determined to destroy the economy or whether it is someone on the climate side, portraying the archetypal Alberta cowboy as an oil industrialist who doesn’t want to do anything whatsoever about climate change, it all seems overheated and untrue to reality,” said Boyd.

“What we’re missing with all this noise is the entire middle group of people who are much more nuanced. That, in my view, is where the majority of public opinion resides.

“So we need to set aside these caricatures we’ve created on both sides and talk to actual real people. Most people I talk to, here in Alberta and right across Canada understand that climate change needs to be addressed. And they understand that there’s going to be a cost to it – particularly in Alberta – and it’s going to involve a transition that won’t be easy.

“But right now everyone seems just too busy trying to create straw men – this scary person on the other side – because it is an easy and effective way to lodge your criticism. But it’s not really where most Canadians are at.”

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