‘People are upset’: What Alberta's anti-separatist worries about now
Thomas Lukaszuk, leader of the successful Forever Canada citizens petition, has been invited to Ottawa by the Prime Minister’s Office to explain what exactly is going on in the province.
Not surprisingly, Thomas is cautioning the feds to pay attention to the national unity implications of separatist sentiment in Alberta. More ominously, he’s suggesting rising anger could trigger national security risks.
Thomas perceives Prime Minister Mark Carney as being “very in tune with what’s going on in Alberta” and genuinely concerned. “I think not only is he concerned about, you know, just having an angry province,” Thomas says, “but in any country, you cannot have a large cohort of angry white men.”
In conversation Thursday, he remained wary despite a major victory for his unique preemptive petition against a potential separatist referendum.
Elections Alberta confirmed this week that his “Forever Canada” petition has been successful, validly signed by over 400,000 Albertans (that’s nearly 14 per cent of eligible electors in the province). It asks, simply and clearly: “Do you agree that Alberta should remain within Canada?”
But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith decides the next steps. Pursuant to Alberta’s 2021 law on citizen petitions, the premier can either call for a yes/no referendum question, or have all MLAs vote on new law or government policy affirming Alberta’s commitment to stay in Canada. The Forever Canada petition is recommending the latter option, and Thomas assures me, that’s always been his aim. But there’s confusion; some petitioners expected this campaign would result in a pro-Canada referendum.
“We gave her (the Alberta premier) a choice,” Thomas insists, “she gets to decide.” What does Thomas believe the premier will decide, I ask. “Well, she’s going to call a referendum, especially after this UCP convention,” he responds with a chuckle. “She painted herself into a corner.”
Smith was booed by some members of her own United Conservative Party at its annual convention last weekend, when she mentioned the MOU she signed with Carney to get an oil export pipeline built from Alberta to tidewater.
I’d be remiss not to mention that Thomas and I know each other; we were both PC MLAs in the Alison Redford-led government. Then, he was deputy premier with an uncanny ability to manoeuvre and to campaign; he hasn’t lost his political instincts.
(As well, I need to add that Smith also knows Thomas; she was leader of the opposition Wildrose Party when he was deputy premier. She has a good nose for political traps, and when asked in a recent French-language interview with Telejournal Alberta if she would support political rallies in support of federalism, the premier replied that she had no “problem saying loud and clear that Canada can work.” It’s also worth pointing out the Alberta government proposed, late this week, legislation giving the justice minister authority to decide whether a referendum application goes forward or is referred to court.)
When he caught wind of the Alberta Prosperity Project’s intention to submit a referendum question this July, he very quickly beat them to the punch and filed a pro-Canada alternative, and hired an IT company to not only build a website, but behind the wall AI infrastructure as well.
He reports raising close to $400,000, which, he says, “we burned through because of all this AI stuff and IT stuff.” And now he has, in his own words, “half a million signatures and about 25,000 signed-up volunteers, and a campaign bus and a logo that’s recognizable.”
This unelected champion of a citizens’ initiative may arguably have a louder voice in Ottawa than Alberta’s official opposition party. And with the federal Liberals only holding two seats in the province, he arguably brings more Albertans’ voices to that national table.
“I met with the Prime Minister’s Office and with the federal caucus and most of the Senate last week,” Thomas says. “I found they’re following what’s happening in Alberta very closely,” he reports, “and they’re very concerned.” Thomas plans to return to Ottawa next week.
What did he tell folks in Ottawa? “There are issues we need to deal with immediately because we cannot have a segment of the population that is angry … this can become a national security issue also, when you have this segment of the population continuously percolating with anger.
“There are two kinds of separatists in Alberta,” Thomas says, basing his insights on conversations he’s had with people across the province over the past months while gathering signatures for the Forever Canada petition.
“The first group,” he says, “is around 10 per cent of Albertans and they are hard-core separatists. There is nothing that will change their mind. And they are just unhappy with life and often it isn’t about Ottawa or equalization formulas or seats in Parliament or Senate.”
He reports this group to be largely Caucasian males, between 20 and 45 in age. “So that’s your 10 per cent,” he reiterates, “they were pro-convoys, they were pro-border blockade, anti-mask, anti-vax, and now this, right?”
And there’s an unusual number of dual citizens in this group, he adds, American-Canadians. “So, yeah,” he concludes, this group has a “sort of evangelical, Mormon, oil and gas industry flavour to it,” and “a lot of them either work for American companies or are of American origin.”
“The second 10 per cent, which brings us to 20 per cent, are what I would call soft-core separatists,” Thomas reports. “If you were to ask them to sign on a dotted line today, they would. But they think it’s a good bargaining technique. They actually think it worked well for Quebec. So they say, ‘Why don’t we use this threat, and maybe we will get a better deal from Ottawa?’”
I ask him: “If the separatists only represent 10 per cent of the Alberta population, as you suggest, isn’t there a risk that people in Ottawa interpret what you are saying as, ‘There’s just a lot of noise in Alberta; we don’t need to really worry about separatist sentiment?’”
“I will be the first one standing up, saying ‘you’re wrong,’” Thomas counters. “These people are upset. Maybe the level of their anger is out of proportion because it’s being fed and fuelled by other interests … and it’s incumbent on us to address these issues.”
And then he shares a story that shocked me, about what he calls the “lost boys.” A Nova Scotia mayor told him, “Thomas, we have a problem with Albertans,” because many Nova Scotians go to Alberta for work and then come back radicalized, or at least angry. Most of the people protesting a federal gun “buyback” program in Cape Breton worked on the rigs in Alberta, he said. (Thomas, 56, himself spent some of his childhood in Cape Breton after his family defected from communist Poland; they moved to Alberta seeking opportunity.)
Thomas worries about what he describes as “a very small group of angry militant men, armed to their teeth.”
You can think he’s being over-dramatic; perhaps he is. And it’s understandable people are angry against a federal government that for a decade seemed intent on throwing away Albertan prosperity; that’s not a radical thought.
But there is an undeniable political firestorm blazing in Alberta. I can’t help but wonder if this is what the 400,000-plus Albertans who signed the Forever Canada petition were thinking.
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