Front Burner - Western Alienation, Part Two: Climate collision

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Today on Front Burner, the final installment of a two-part series exploring the growing political anger in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This time, Maclean’s Alberta correspondent Jason Markusoff explains how climate change has put Ottawa on a collision course with the West.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Yesterday we did a whole episode about the roots of Western alienation. And we did it because of what we're seeing in politics today. Real anger at Ottawa and Justin Trudeau in particular. A lagging energy industry, frustration about money that flows between provinces,

and the rise of separatist ideas. I think that if Albertans decide that they want to do this and the momentum builds, you know, we're going to make snowballs out of snow. Well, we've seen it all before, under the leadership of Justin's father, Pierre. I wouldn't be surprised to see the country split, and I think it would be too bad because we'll all lose. So it felt important to look at that history and learn from it. If you missed the episode, you can go back into our feed and check it out. Today, we want to look more at the present and the future, because there is one big thing that this country did not have to deal with the last time Western alienation spiked, climate change. I'm Jamie Poisson. This is FrontBurner.

I'm here today with Jason Markusoff. He is the Alberta correspondent for Maclean's. Hi, Jason. Hi. So first off, look, I really want to get your thoughts on this. This Wexit sentiment. You're on the ground in Alberta. Are people actually talking about this in bars and coffee shops? Is this a real thing? I think it's important in this conversation to distinguish between three separate things.

That's Wexit, separatism as an idea, and the frustrations. First, there's Wexit, which is this shorthand term we're all using for separatism, but it's actually this organization led by a former RCMP guy who's run a bunch of different online movements. We are Western Canadians. We will not allow ourselves to be divided. We are going to make Alberta great again. And that is when we cut ourselves off from the leech that is Eastern Canada. And it's quite fringe what they're doing there. They're mostly based online. I mean, they have drawn some decent sized crowds in some forms, including one last week and in Edmonton. But they are really based in the fringe. Some of the yellow vest ideology creeps in there. Climate change, denialism, really hard edge right wing talking points that I don't think

are in the main of where people are feeling right now in this frustration. We are sending in our application to Elections Canada tomorrow to register Wexit Canada in the main of where people are feeling right now in this frustration. We are sending in our application to Elections Canada tomorrow to register Wexit Canada as a federal Western Canadian political party. So the second element, separatism. Separatist sentiment is actually alarmingly high in Alberta as an idea. There have been some polls saying it runs around 20%, 25%, which is really, really high. That's people saying, you know, and this was a poll taken before the election, that if Alberta, if people were voting on a separatist referendum before the election,

it was running near a quarter of the populace was saying yes then. So people are that frustrated that they're thinking that they don't belong in this country anymore, and maybe they need to take a look. But, you know, as you get further down that line, how does that work? How do we get a pipeline if we're a landlocked province? Do we really want to abandon Canada? Are we sick of Canada as an idea? Do we want to abandon all these trade deals that have been negotiated between Canada and other countries? That's right. There's so many complexities there that that is still, I think, even though there are some polling numbers showing it's very high, still might be considered a fringe idea or a

far-fetched sort of fantastical idea born out of frustration. Thirdly is actual Western alienation, the frustration. That is ranging really, really high. You saw it in the vote, getting both Alberta and Saskatchewan getting rid of all their Liberal MPs. There's Ralph Goodale losing his seat in Wisconsin-Saskatchewan tonight. First elected to Parliament in 1974, is the only member to have served with Pierre Trudeau, the father, and Justin Trudeau, the son. To all of you, thank you.

Good night. Goodbye. High 60s percentage of people voting for the Conservatives. And just on the ground, you hear a raw frustration at Justin Trudeau, at where the national debate is, at the attention and power that is vested in Ontario and Quebec, and that the West seems shut out of the national interest entirely. People get pretty upset about the fact that the votes over East count for so much more. People have been kicked around, they've been working hard, jobs have been disappearing,

and the sad reality is the federal government hasn't paid any attention. And that is something that is real and being addressed by politicians across the spectrum. And it does strike me, you know, listening to how this anger was quelled before. In the 1980s, oil prices eventually went up. A conservative government got in. We are going to say that the liberal government and what it stands for and what it has done to this country is not good enough. But here it feels like something different is going on, right? We have this existential threat of climate change and some of these demands from

Kenny and Scott Moe, the premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta. A new deal that includes a cancelling of the carbon tax. Withdrawing devastating policies like Bill C-69. Restructure the equalization formula so that it is fair to all provinces. A substantial progress on the completion of a coastal pipeline. And a new deal that would allow us to get our products to market. They're completely diametrically opposed to what got Trudeau elected. That's right. You know, Justin Trudeau was elected with a plan to forward his progress on climate change. A lot of the proposals from Jason Kenney and Scott Moe would be to halt his plans,

halt that progress. A lot at the core of this frustration and a lot of the proposals are to basically not go so hard on Alberta and Saskatchewan, which are on a per person basis, the biggest carbon emitters in the country. Alberta, despite the fact that it's not the most populous province, is the highest overall carbon emitter. So when you're talking about reducing national emissions, a lot of the attention and pressure goes on how Alberta and Saskatchewan perform in that regard. And while Alberta and Saskatchewan are not wide-ranging climate deniers, but there is the least support for the climate science and willingness for climate action here in Alberta and in Saskatchewan. for climate action here in Alberta and in Saskatchewan. Both provinces, in a way, view the carbon tax as a tax on their industries.

They view Bill C-69, which is an environmental projects oversight bill, and Bill 48, which was Trudeau's ban on northern tanker traffic, as a direct attack on their industries. Alberta's always been oil patched since, what, probably the 1930s? You can't change that overnight. And that's what somebody's trying to do, and it ain't going to work. There does seem to be a collision course between environmental protection and climate change action and the oil sectors. Right. And these demands that Kenny and Moe are making,

do they think that they're going to get any of them? Some of them. I mean, certainly they're hoping to. I think what's going to be a challenge for Justin Trudeau and his liberals is to discern what are sincere demands from Kenny and Mo and what are them playing to their bases. You know, we heard Jason Kenny tell the Globe and Mail that one of the things he would like is for Catherine McKenna, the federal environment minister, to be removed in the cabinet shuffle coming up. And how realistic do you think that is? Well, I think there's a lot of arguments, and I tend to subscribe to these arguments, that

if you want to make sure Justin Trudeau keeps a minister, be the Alberta premier who says you should get rid of her. He might have just saved Catherine McKenna's job, really. Here's what I want to ask you about today. The idea of industry leaving, of investment leaving, this anger that you talked about, whether it's separatism or just general resentment towards Ottawa. There's this real sense of deja vu here. nitties and today. And I've heard people argue that this whole national unity problem is really being overblown, that liberal governments have been locked out of the prairies before, that when it's politically expedient, provincial leaders will rekindle the anger and frustration with Ottawa, and that this will all pass, right, the next time a conservative government is elected. Do you think anything is missing from that argument? I think it's the facts on the ground that are pointing to,

even if the Conservatives had won, we wouldn't have seen this level of anger as exhibited by the fact that when the Liberals won, this anger sort of exploded. It felt like it was a tinderbox suddenly being kindled. It's interesting to see the difference of the Facebook posts. Like this morning, everybody's talking about like Western separation. Last night, a lot of anger, social media from family, from friends, from people I don't even know. It's democracy. The mob takes what they want and we're left doing what we do.

It feels like now it's the rhetoric's getting even worse ever since this election. Basically, people hit the panic button. But even if the Conservatives had won, there would have still been a lot of these base frustrations that are at the root of this. The fact that the energy economy is not doing well. Alberta is not the sizzling jobs market that it used to be. Pipelines are still frustrated, even if, you know, whether it was Scheer or whether it was Justin Trudeau coming into power this month, you'd still have a Trans Mountain expansion pipeline being potentially held up by protesters and by the courts. And a lot of that would be out of

political hands. Right. Scheer couldn't just snap his fingers and get this pipeline bill. It's about fast tracking some of the questions that have been raised, referring those types of jurisdictional questions to the Supreme Court right away so that we can get certainty. As much as people would like to believe, no, he can't. Those are tricky things. And this whole issue of equalization, which we could probably spend another three podcast episodes getting into the nitty-gritty on that one, but the sense that there's a fiscal unfairness to Alberta. I'm not sure if Scheer certainly had no political agenda, no promises, or he hadn't said much on that. And I'm not really certain what he would have done or

would have been willing to do that would have helped Alberta on the equalization front and not harm some of the provinces he's trying to get votes in, Quebec and the Maritimes, which get equalization funds. You know, what do you think Justin Trudeau can do here to try and bridge this gap with these Western provinces? Is there anything he can do that's bridgeable here? You know, there are probably two buckets of things he's going to look at doing or people are asking to do. One of them is this process stuff. And this is where you hear about, should he appoint a cabinet minister from Alberta and Saskatchewan,

even though he has no MPs there. You know, some people in Alberta are talking about that, but they're not really conservatives. It's a gesture. Certainly, people want to have this idea of having a voice in Justin Trudeau's inner circle is important. But there's a lot of sentiment in the Kenney conservative camp or in other people's camps out west that that's not what matters. What matters is action. If the Prime Minister means what he said last night about listening to Alberta and Saskatchewan, the clearest way he could do so would be to unequivocally commit this new government to the completion of the pipeline that the federal government owns.

So you've seen Jason Kenney and the Premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, put out a list of demands. Right, they made it very clear what they want. Yeah. And a lot of those can be sort of boiled down to Alberta, Alberta and Saskatchewan don't want to be such milk cows for Confederation. We heard yesterday about this milk cow cartoon. It came out around Confederation. And it's a cartoon of a cow and the people in Saskatchewan and Alberta are working very hard to feed the cow. And Eastern,

they look like bankers are milking the cow at the other end of Canada. Essentially, that this has been a narrative going as far back as Confederation. You see that cartoon I mentioned on all sorts of social media, Facebook groups and Twitter. It becomes ever popular around this time in the political cycle. The other things that they're demanding are basically for Justin Trudeau to implement provincial and federal conservative policy platforms. They're demanding he embrace the energy corridor plan

that Andrew Scheer had. It will be a transnational corridor. We would envisage this terminating in ports that will allow us to ship our energy around the world so that more countries have access to Canadian energy. They want him to pause the carbon tax, which seems very unlikely given that this whole election, that was one of the main things that people voted for in this election. They want him to scrap some of the bills that

people view as anti-pipeline. We would be willing to be flexible on, for example, the emissions cap on the oil sands if we could exempt oil sands projects from the disastrous new bill C-69. There's another layer to this as well, right? So yesterday on the show, we talked about how Alberta and Saskatchewan think Ottawa panders to Quebec, that their demands are taken more seriously, and that threats of separatism have worked in Quebec's favor. And today, we have this federal party, the Bloc, which holds a huge amount of power coming out of this election,

more power than it's held in years, and talked a lot about climate change policies. That getting rid of oil is us. That clean energy is us. That innovation is us. That Quebec is us. And how do you think this will complicate Trudeau's job moving forward? He now sits in a minority government and he needs other parties to get stuff done. He faces, there are two pressures that you're kind of speaking to here. One is, can he bridge to Alberta and Saskatchewan and still get votes from the minority partners that he has, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP? That's going to be one of his biggest challenges right now. The good thing is he can, you know, there will be some issues, say if Trans Mountain Pipeline has to come to a vote again,

that he can get votes from the Conservatives and not have to worry about what the Bloc Québécois or the NDP think. But the other thing you talk about, when you think about the Bloc Québécois, you also think about the potential out West for another Western splinter party to form. Because not only does Justin Trudeau have this challenge of bridging, so does Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party. A huge chunk of their MPs are this big Saskatchewan and Alberta bloc. And their voters and their constituents are going to be demanding that the Conservatives fight for them. And Andrew Scheer has said he's going to fight for the interests

of Alberta and Saskatchewan that have so rejected the Liberals. We will do everything we can to make sure that this Liberal government understands that it has to change course. It cannot continue to attack our energy sector, to kill big projects that get our natural resources around the world. But Scheer and the Conservatives face a risk. If they play too much to the wants and needs of the oil producing base in Saskatchewan and Alberta, they risk alienating some of the people that they're trying to get votes from in Quebec and Ontario. So they have that same balance act,

balancing act that Trudeau has. Right. changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. And to Canadians in Alberta and Saskatchewan, know that you are an essential part of our great country. I've heard your frustration and I want to be there to support you. Let us all work hard to bring our country together. If the Liberals can't follow through on some of these big demands from Mo and Kenny, like repealing Bill C-69, like guaranteeing the Trans Mountain Pipeline gets built. And on top of that, the liberals were elected at least in part because of the promise of future action on climate change. Let's say they try and meet in the middle

here and they did some other massive thing, like through all this money at Alberta to help with renewable energy projects to get people back to work? Would that do anything? I have a feeling it might not. It depends on what exactly it is for two reasons. One is, if he puts a lot of money into renewable energy and talking about the transition away from oil and gas, Albertans are really afraid to talk seriously, and there's a real resistance to talking about the transition away from oil and gas. You think back to that one time in 2017,

Justin Trudeau talked about phasing out the oil sands. We can't shut down the oil sands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels. He said it one time and he apologized right away. I misspoke. I said something the way I shouldn't have said it. To hear Albertans talk about it,

you'd think that he said that every day for the last five years. So that's one level of skepticism. The other is that I spoke to the Liberal MPs running in Alberta, in Edmonton and Calgary, and they spent a lot of their campaigns talking about the infrastructure that Justin Trudeau did bring, the spending he did in Alberta. And of course, they talk about the $4.5 billion pipeline purchase. Those did not sell well. Those were not good sales. There is something.

You know how people talk about the oil price differential in Alberta, that bitumen is worth a little bit less, a certain amount less than regular oil? Well, I think in Alberta there's something that I call the Trudeau credibility differential. If any other politician were to buy a pipeline or to create a large infrastructure project in Alberta, they would get this much credit. Trudeau gets that much less because people are just generally distrustful of him here.

And of course, like we heard yesterday, that is certainly informed by his father's legacy. That's right. People are just, the name is tarnished here and people are very sensitive to anything he says that's derogatory toward the energy sector or against Alberta or Saskatchewan as regions. There's a bit of a hair trigger here. So almost anything he does that could be argued as throwing money at the problem might well be rejected popularly. So I think this brings me back to the question that I asked earlier, which is, it's not clear to me that he can really do anything here to quell this anger, particularly with this threat, existential threat of climate

change hanging over all of this, like a pall, right? Like the liberals have bought a pipeline for $4.5 billion. It seems to have done nothing to quell any of the discontent in Alberta and Saskatchewan. And it's not clear to me what other real options they have besides what might feel like tokenism to the people who live there. And please correct me if you think I'm wrong there. I think Trudeau and his inner circle must feel a bit of damned if you do damned if you don't. You know, if they if they pick a cabinet minister from the senator, if they appoint a mayor from one of the big cities in Alberta or Saskatchewan, they'll get accused of being undemocratic from out here. And if they don't do that,

they're going to be saying, you guys have ignored us. Why couldn't you pick anybody? Aren't there any of the 5 million people from the West that you could pick for one of those seats? So not only is there this tension, I mean, if you make some equalization reform that harms Quebec, how does that benefit Alberta? How do you balance that? But there's also the, will they just dislike almost anything I do? You know, until I suddenly, maybe he can change his last name. Right, or maybe he can change his last name or, you know, or repeal the carbon tax. you know, or repeal the carbon tax.

For him to give a holiday to Alberta and Saskatchewan on the carbon tax would be to severely undermine Canada's national climate change plan. So he faces frustrations there and people will be ticked off. You know, there's not much sympathy in a large swath of progressive Canada for the plight of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Part of that is born out of not really understanding the employment situation here, the economic situation out here, the sense of dread out here.

And part of it is just because people have a perception that Albertans and Saskatchewanites are rich whiners. That's not helping, but that's a certain, a huge sentiment from progressives that you hear out here to the great frustration of people out here. Right, because, you know, we have certainly heard a lot of stories on this podcast of people who have lost their homes. The economic anxiety is real.

There was an Alberta dream that people in Saskatchewan, in Newfoundland, in interior BC had to work on the rigs, make money, bring it home to your family. That dream is largely gone. That is no longer a thing. And that's very to your family, that dream is largely gone. That is no longer a thing. And that's very disorienting, that fact. Jason, I really hope that we can stay with you on this and that you'll come back and let us know what you think in a couple of weeks or months' time. I'd be happy to.

Thank you so much. Cheers. Before I let you go, some news I just want to mention. Late last week, it was announced that Encana, a company with a very long history in Canada, is moving its headquarters from Calgary to the United States. The company says the move isn't going to impact jobs or spending, but it's seen as a real blow by Albertans who work in the energy industry. So I feel, you know, maybe we can build a company that's the biggest, strongest, strongest gas company, and therefore we have no chance, really no chance of being taken over. But what I didn't, of course, anticipate is that through government policy that actually debilitated the industry, it would find it necessary to kind of export itself, if I could put it that way.

And then on Monday, the Alberta separatist group Wexit, the one that we've been talking about for the last two days here on the show, well, they applied to become a federal political party. Elections Canada is now processing the application, which included 543 signatures from supporters. So depending where you live in the next general election, Wexit candidates might be running in a riding near you. That's all for today.

I'm J.B. Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and see you tomorrow.