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Photo by Al Charest/Calgary Sun/QMI Agency

Hill’s Declaration of Maybe Independence would ordinarily be news, yet, as I write, no one seems to have taken much notice of it. Hill was a senior figure in the government of the Dominion as a member of officially federalist parties (technically, four different ones). His despair might be thought worthy of some attention, especially since — despite the evidence before us — he is certainly no fool.

But perhaps others have reached the conclusion that Hill’s conditional separatism is a tedious Westerner’s game. He makes it explicit that it is a sort of negotiating tactic — that there is no emotional reality, no real dislike of Canada per se or the Canadian state he helped run, behind the threat. “Some will say this is fear-mongering,” he writes: “Some, extortion or blackmail … ” Nowhere does he actually plead innocent to this charge.

And, well, of course it’s blackmail. I am old enough to remember Western separatism 1.0, the version existing from about 1980-1984 which attracted actual political leadership and compelled semi-serious organizational action as opposed to mash notes in the Calgary Herald. The economic conditions and problems which created the feeling of the early 1980s were superficially similar to those existing now. Alberta, then as now, was a resentful permanent net fiscal contributor to Confederation. A Trudeau was in charge.

Even back in the day Western or Alberta separatism could never pass the Tebbit cricket test

But there were some relevant differences. Greater Alberta was angry about the National Energy Program, which was a virtually explicit attack on the perceived stranglehold that oil had gained in the older parts of the empire of the St. Lawrence. The problem, then, was not so much that Confederation wasn’t working as designed, or that its leaders were inept. The NEP involved confiscatory taxation on the export of oil to U.S. markets which would have paid something like a world price for them; it was deliberate nationalization of a provincial asset, executed in a form which generally passed constitutional muster in the courts. All the while, the West, whose population and influence had not yet caught up to those of the other regions, was being excluded from political power in the centre of the country — even as it provided a very disproportionate share of the Canadian public treasury.