Western secessionists play into Donald Trump's hands when they embrace his sore loser approach to elections

Mark Carney calls it “dramatic.” Former Reform party leader Preston Manning says it’s just the plain truth. Whatever way you look at this flurry of talk about Western secession if the Liberals win the federal election on April 28, it has injected another dose of existential rhetoric into a campaign already laden with do-or-die propositions.

This campaign was already being conducted in the shadow of a U.S. president with annexation designs on Canada, who calls the Canada-U.



S. border “an artificially drawn line.” Now we’re hearing that some Albertans may be interested in some border redrawing too if they don’t get the prime minister or government they want when the votes are counted in this election.

Say what you like about this campaign, but it does feature a disturbing amount of talk about the glue that holds Canada together. The Western secession talk remained just a whisper in the lead-up to the campaign and in its early days, with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith presenting a list of demands to Carney and promising to hold a post-election probe into Alberta’s future. But it was Manning who turned the whispers into a shout, writing in the Globe and Mail late last week.

“Voters, particularly in central and Atlantic Canada, need to recognize that a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession — a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it,” Manning declared. “The next prime minister of Canada, if it remains Mark Carney, would then be identified in the history books, tragically and needlessly, as the last prime minister of a united Canada.” Carney’s right.

Those are pretty dramatic words. In an interview on CBC Radio’s “The House” over the weekend, Manning cast himself as a Prairie scout, just looking at what’s ahead and warning which path is perilous. In that same interview, he reminded listeners that as Reform leader, his catchphrase was “the West wants in.

” Well, this is a bit of a departure, then. He’s now talking about why the West may want out. Notably, and to his credit, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre distanced himself from Manning’s views, saying now was the time to talk about unity.

Some will be asking how raising the spectre of Western secession is different from Quebec separatism, which Canada has absorbed into its political reality — so much so that there is a Bloc Québécois in Parliament, which even formed the Official Opposition back in the 1990s. There is a difference, however, as others have pointed out. Quebec sovereigntists haven’t wielded their separation threats as contingent on one political party winning or losing.

Nor is it the same as an election endorsement, which premiers have been known to do, albeit cautiously in most cases. This is actually an endorsement turned upside down, into not just a warning but a threat of perceived electoral illegitimacy. Lisa Young, a political scientist with the University of Calgary, has got to the heart of the matter in a piece posted on Substack after Manning spoke out.

It’s titled “Loser’s Consent,” after the democratic principle that Young believes is under assault by all those talking like Manning. It’s also the title of a 2005 book , which Young quotes right off the start in her column. “If democratic procedures are to continue in the long run, then the losers must, somehow, overcome any bitterness and resentment and be willing, first, to accept the decision of the election and, second, to play again next time,” Young cites from the book.

There is a real danger that Manning is whipping up some Albertans to believe that the election will not be legitimate unless it produces a result they want. You know who else has toyed with illegitimacy allegations in a free and fair democracy? Yes, as with so many things in this election, it leads back to Donald Trump. If Trump wasn’t floating his annexation fantasies, the threat of Western secession could be filed away as an unwelcome warning how a Liberal victory will be received — sore-loser discontent, you might call it.

But Trump has his eyes on Canada for a reason — resources and energy to fuel his promised “golden age,” and Alberta has a lot of those things. Trump may even be happier to only get the parts of Canada that are useful to him, and not have to bother with large swaths of the country opposed to his politics and policies. That may sound, to borrow Carney’s phrase, “dramatic.

” It remains true, however, that this brand of secession talk runs the danger of playing right into Trump’s hands and there seems to be general agreement in this election that what’s good for this U.S. president is bad news for this country.

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