1 week Ago By Chris Selley
Despite what you may have heard , these are not happy times for separatists — not separatists from Quebec, and not separatists from Alberta. “National unity,” on the other hand, is a much more fraught question. Leger’s latest results on Quebec sovereignty, released late last month, suggest the referendum the Parti Québécois has promised to hold in its first term in government might yield a 68 per cent “no” to separation vote.
That’s 10 points worse than in 1980. Fully 30 per cent of respondents who intend to vote PQ in the next provincial election intend to vote “no,” as do 56 per cent of those intending to vote Québec Solidaire and a whopping 79 per cent intending to vote for the governing Coalition Avenir Québec. These aren’t just losing conditions.
They’re obliteration conditions. Recent polls have Mark Carney’s Liberals eating Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet’s lunch in Quebec, at 44 per cent to 24 per cent, according to polling analyst Philippe J. Fournier’s running average.
The Conservatives are just behind at 23 per cent — which would be a great result for the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre. A Poilievre government might be good news for nationalists. On federal-provincial relations, he is a proud non-interventionist, even (at least sometimes) when he disagrees with provincial policy.
But if anything, a federal government that respects Quebec’s autonomy is a threat to separatism, because it denies nationalists their most traditional foil: Ottawa’s supposedly appalling disrespect.. If I were concerned about Quebec separatism, I would consider all this good news.
Better a federalist party than a separatist party. But I’m not concerned about Quebec separatism, for the same reason I’m not concerned about Alberta separatism: Not enough people support it, and there’s no obvious prospect of that changing. The Angus Reid Institute published a poll on Sunday finding only 30 per cent of Albertans would vote for sovereignty even if the Liberals formed the next government — just 25 per cent otherwise.
Losing conditions, if ever there were any. That came days after Preston Manning wrote an article warning of resurgent Western separatism. He warned “large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government, no matter who leads it.
” I’m not sure polls back this up any more than they do the Quebec narrative. But many Laurentian types are appalled by this talk, needless to say — in his pro-carbon-tax era , Manning was, for a time, their kind of conservative — but 30 per cent really isn’t that many people in the midst of historic economic upheaval. Indeed, “national unity” is a much bigger question than “sovereignty,” and I think it would be silly not to worry about it at least a bit.
(Although I will note that despite its size and widely varying regional interests, the PR firm Edelman’s “trust index” in 2023 found Canada to be only “moderately” polarized , similar to much smaller and less economically diverse countries like the Netherlands, France, Ireland and Germany.) The double standard with which Central Canadians, Liberals in particular, treat the ideas of Quebec and Western separatism, has always been utterly flagrant. Quebec separatism: Mortal threat, to be countered however possible (see: Sponsorship Scandal).
Alberta separatism: Just stupid. To take just the first and most execrable example that showed up on my timeline on Tuesday morning, Ontario Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden sneeringly congratulated Poilievre for his Monday-evening endorsement by Stephen Harper . “(Harper) joins felons like Conrad Black, conspiracy fraudsters like Alex Jones, nazi-saluters like Elon Musk, and far-right influencers Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro.
Good company!” Would he say something similar if François Legault endorsed Poilievre ( as he more or less did Erin O’Toole) ? Like fun he would. Legault has done things that Alberta Premier Smith would never do include banning police officers, teachers and certain other public servants from wearing turbans, hijabs, crucifixes or kippahs on the job — as the Quebec government did with Bill 21. Smith has said Alberta will join on Quebec’s side once Bill 21 gets to the Supreme Court, in order to stand up for the notwithstanding clause that shields the law from the Charter.
That’s understandable, if not ideal. Mind you I’m not sure Mark Carney knows what Bill 21 even is: On Friday , the Toronto Star’s Althia Raj reported, he actually said he had “no opinion” on the matter . If this is where Alberta and Quebec finally join forces in earnest to fight the feds, in the courts or in general, it would in one sense be natural.
But it would also be far less than ideal. Freedom of all sorts, not least religious, should be Alberta’s nationality as well as Canada’s. And indeed, a Leger poll in February 2024 found Prairie voters were the most opposed of any region to both Bill 21 and Bill 96 , which attacks minority language rights.
(Both are now law in Quebec.) Forty-four per cent of Albertans said they felt the laws were discriminatory, and only 18 per cent said they weren’t. Meanwhile Poilievre, while himself quite rightly a defender of the notwithstanding clause (he would probably need it to mop up Canada’s justice system, for starters), has made no bones whatsoever what he thinks about Bill 21.
Asked by Radio-Canada in an interview last week about the bill, he cited a Sikh member of his security detail who wears a turban. “He’s ready to save my life. He’s ready to save the life of my children by giving his own.
Should I tell him he can’t have a job because he’s wearing a turban?” Poilievre asked rhetorically. “I don’t agree.” Not agreeing is fine, so long as there is basic mutual respect.
Central Canadians clearly feel Western Canadians are out to lunch on the subject of sovereignty, in a way they don’t feel about Quebec sovereignty. But they’re the same exact thing. If Alberta and Quebec do join forces against Ottawa in earnest, Central Canada will only have itself to blame.
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