Although born in the Northwest Territories and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is an exemplar of the Eastern anointed class, the so-called Laurentian Elite, a term coined in its modern sense a dozen or so years ago by John Ibbitson in the Literary Review of Canada and elaborated in his book, The Big Shift, co-authored with Darrell Bricker. The Laurentian elite exercised political and economic control of the fledgling nation since Confederation and still remains the administrative, political, and financial power center to this day.
Writing in the National Post, John Weissenberger explains that “The Laurentian Elite were Upper Canadian Anglo-Protestants and Québécois Patricians, and their descendants still dominate the upper strata of politics, the bureaucracy, Crown corporations and agencies, academia and media.”
Cattle in Rocky View, where almost 1/2 of Canadian beef is produced. Image by Jack Borno. CC BY-SA 3.0.
It is now common knowledge that the Prairies, Canada’s food and energy breadbasket, have suffered both economically and politically under the rule of Eastern Canada’s Laurentian peerage. As Lloyd “Tex” Leugner suggests in an editorial to appear at the Alberta Cochrane Freedom Alliance later this month (to which I’ve been granted prior access), Alberta’s relation to Canada “amounts to servitude with a totalitarian, centralized, ideologically Marxist government. The disparities in Canada’s political and constitutional structure assures [sic] that Alberta has no real power, yet generates 33% of Canada’s GDP.”
It has come to the point that should there be a future for Canada, it will not be built by the East but, to cite Jamie Wilson in PJ Media, “It will be built by men and women who can work, endure and defend.” That is, in our current context, by the hardworking, energetic, and still somewhat rural-based West. Such a resolution does not seem likely currently under Mark Carney’s decadent Liberal regime.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, pushing back against federal overreach, seems to think that the European Union’s model of national autonomy within a cooperative framework, in some ways resembling the political situation in Quebec or Bavaria in Germany, might be a way out of the present quandary. But it is more reasonable to assume that Federal non-compliance makes reform a non-starter.
Absent a serious and effective reorienting of Confederation, giving the industrious, self-reliant, basically non-city-dwelling West its due, a strategy Carney is clearly unwilling to ponder, it follows that Alberta sovereignty and a fractured Canada are eventually probable. In any event, Canada is likely to be de-confederated if things do not dramatically change—and, aside from some tinkering here and there, Carney obviously has no intention of changing a bad situation for the better.
In his 1954 book Social Credit and the Federal Power in Canada, political scientist James Mallory described the prairie additions as “provinces in the Roman sense.” In our terms, the prairie provinces were regions dominated by the ruling, administrative center to which they owed fealty and paid tribute. Parsing Mallory, University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper explains: “Ottawa acted as a new Rome on the Rideau. The territories and soon-to-be second-class provinces existed to strengthen and benefit Laurentian Canada by analogy with Roman Italy, and to enrich its leading citizens.”
This arrangement is fundamentally an expression of the greater historical context of Eastern political, legislative, and market domination of the Western provinciae and the determined response of a long-misprized, undervalued, and misrepresented sector of the nation. It is now rising up against the metaphorical equivalent of the Federal government’s1885 land grab during the Red River Rebellion. The scalene relation between a vital provincial allodium and an ideologically socialist Federal structure continues.
As Leugner points out, “In 1904, Canada’s Interior Minister Clifford Sifton said in Winnipeg; ‘We desire, every Canadian desires, that the great trade of the Prairies shall go to enrich our own people in the East, to build up our factories and the workshops of Eastern Canada and contribute in every way to its prosperity.’ How prophetic that Sifton was laying the groundwork for the theft that has gone on unabated since 1905,” the date of Alberta’s entry into Confederation.
Brian Mulroney, who beavered his way into becoming one of Canada’s most disliked prime ministers, did manage to dismantle the remnants of the 1980 National Energy Program, by which Ottawa implemented price controls on hydrocarbon energy and undermined the economic interests of oil-producing Alberta. Mulroney signed the Western Accord in Energy, giving Alberta renewed authority over its petroleum resources.
This convention was undone by the bans and delays involving extraction and delivery inflicted on Alberta by Justin Trudeau’s disastrous administration, on which Mark Varney is now doubling down and thus helping to create conditions that are leading to the prospect of the province’s secession. The future looks increasingly problematic as the Laurentian elite continues to assert its coercive influence and assumed ascendancy over what it regards as its provincial ward or colony.
Donald J. Savoie writes in Democracy in Canada, “Canada was born to break the political deadlock between Canada West and Canada East.” Somebody forgot to inform Mark Carney.