OP-ED: Jason Kenney’s separatist panic misses the point

Collin May writes, "What’s especially striking about Kenney’s separatist obsession is that he seems to understand as little about Albertans now as he did while premier."

Source: Facebook

By Collin May

Time was a former political leader’s expected role was to enjoy retirement in relative obscurity, resisting the urge to wade into political debate. Conservatives generally stick to that tradition. Ralph Klein certainly did after his term ended. Stephen Harper has made no attempt to upstage his successors. Yet former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney can’t seem to help himself.

From the boardroom of Bennett Jones, one of Calgary’s oldest law firms, Kenney recently offered his thoughts on the unspeakable horrors that await the province should it entertain a debate (perhaps even call a referendum) on separating from Canada. While dismissing Alberta separatists as a “perennially angry minority”, Kenney nevertheless declared a vote on separation would “would divide families, divide communities, divide friends for no useful purpose.” Business partnerships, church and community groups, even marriages and families would break apart, he warned, “shredding the social fabric of the province.”

It was a remarkable burst of untethered hyperbole, but it says more about the former premier than it does about the province he once led.

Kenney’s take on the history of Alberta separatism is telling. It’s a 50-year-old “discredited concept,” he said, whose acolytes “couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this province.” Exhibit A in his analysis was Gordon Kesler, an Alberta rodeo rider and oil company scout who believed independence was the only way to save Alberta from Ottawa’s depredations. In a 1982 byelection, Kesler got himself very much elected as an MLA under the Western Canada Concept banner. He later lost in the general election to Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives, but Lougheed did not belittle Albertans for entertaining separatist notions. Instead, he asked for a mandate to fight Ottawa more effectively — and got it.

Kenney, by contrast, ridicules separatists while simultaneously painting them as an existential menace. Worse, he likens them to followers of Vladimir Putin and (perhaps even worse?) Donald Trump. “[I]f you just follow them on social media,” he claimed, one will quickly see that they cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and Trump’s threat of making Canada the 51^st state.

Kenney’s latest intervention fits a pattern. As premier from 2019 to 2022, he could not resist trying to stamp out dissent. During the pandemic, he alienated political allies by dismissing their concerns about mandatory vaccines with contempt. He saw his ouster as UCP leader as the result of a Trumpian-inspired or “MAGA” campaign. UCP party faithful, however, said their rejection of him had far more to do with his top-down leadership style and habit of “blaming other people for the errors he made.”

What’s especially striking about Kenney’s separatist obsession is that he seems to understand as little about Albertans now as he did while premier. Albertans have long debated separation without the province descending into chaos. When Kesler won his seat, people talked about separation, argued its pros and cons, but couples were not running to their divorce lawyers over the issue and business partners were not at each other’s throats.

And there are legitimate reasons for concern about Canada’s social and political structure, as well as the role provinces play in that structure. Canada’s institutions operate largely on an old colonial model that concentrates power in the original population centre of southern Ontario and Quebec. This has not, and does not, make for great national cohesion or political participation. Instead, it feeds constant fuel to separatist fires.

The current threat to Canadian identity comes as well from the ideological commitments of our federal government. Early in his time as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau declared Canada to be a “post-national” state. This sort of moniker is consistent with the popularly-designated woke doctrine that eschews the liberal nation-state, democratic procedures and individual freedom in favour of tribalist narratives and identity politics.

The obsession with post-nation-state policies has initiated the dissolution of the Canadian nation regardless of whether Quebeckers or Albertans actually vote for separation. We are all becoming de facto separatists within a dissolving Canada, a drift that current Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ineffective “elbows up” attitude has done nothing to reverse.

Kenney’s panicked musings about Alberta separatists would have us believe the province need only continue the fight for a better deal within the Canadian federation. Kenney pursued just such a policy, and failed signally to deliver. For too many Albertans today, his advice does not reflect the political reality on the ground nor appreciate the worrying trends within Canadian institutions and among our political class.

Kenney likes to associate himself with Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism and defender of venerable institutions. But Burke was known as much in his day for his sympathies with the American revolutionaries and their creation of an experimental new republic as he was for his contempt towards the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. Burke’s conservatism still linked real actions with true words. It would be advisable, perhaps, to keep our own political language here in Alberta within the bounds of the plausible rather than fly off into the fanciful.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Collin May is a lawyer, adjunct lecturer in community health sciences with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and the author of a number of articles and reviews on the psychology, social theory and philosophy of cancel culture.