Sam Anderson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University.
The movement of Alberta separatism – the angrier and more radical cousin of Western alienation – seeks, in part, to erode Ottawa’s jurisdiction over natural-resource management in the province. Alberta’s Premier, Danielle Smith, has made this a hallmark of her administration, most notably by the recent passing and invocation of the province’s sovereignty act. These moves from the Premier, whether they’re serious or simply political grandstanding, have fanned anti-federalist flames in her base in the far right, at a time when the province’s most precious resource – its water – is acutely at risk.
But what that movement forgets is that Alberta was only able to achieve its prosperity – which really began with water – because of its position as a province within a nation. And those advocating for its sovereignty from the federation of Canada are effectively calling to increase the province’s vulnerability to its changing water landscape, amid deepening drought, diminishing glaciers and a highly variable climate. Indeed, if Alberta retreated upstream and barricaded itself in its semi-arid pen, it would only make itself more acutely at the mercy of the environment over which it has sought dominion.
To understand this precarious moment, and why an independent Alberta is made more vulnerable to its changing water landscape, we should look to the province’s recent water history.
In the Prairies, farming has never been easy – but in the late 1800s, it was even more difficult. Despite the region’s fertile soils and perennial river flows, the whiplash from desert-like drought to torrential downpours prevented prosperity. Drought cracked soils open like shattered porcelain, and what grew instead were doubts that the Canadian West, recently integrated via the Canadian Pacific Railway, could achieve its potential within the newly established country.
Locals came up with an idea to address the inherent volatility of the Prairie water reality: reshaping the landscape through irrigation canals. Such veins could branch out from arterial rivers so that water could pulse more widely across the landscape, quenching crops’ thirst. But the water landscape in semi-arid regions involves asymmetries that defy local management: While the power to control and moderate flows is greatest upstream, the economic potential is greatest downstream, and regional renovations are prohibitively expensive for local budgets. The complex nature of water demands broader co-operation, not to mention the money that comes with that.
So federalism addressed these challenges by absorbing risk, both financially and geographically. Firstly, the young Canadian government had the financial resources and the time needed to fund the first irrigation projects. With this infusion of federal capital, irrigation districts in the area that became the province of Alberta were born; those districts now cover more than half a million hectares, primarily in the province’s more arid south.
Secondly, it was strategically important to the fledgling country that agriculturally productive regions of Canada spanned different climates, from the B.C. Interior, to the Prairies, to Southern Ontario, so that productivity fluctuations in one region would not spell national disaster. Regional climate variability bolsters national agricultural stability, and this is still true today: In 2021, when extreme summer heat diminished crop yields in Western Canada, more typical weather in the East moderated the overall national losses. In short, it is, quite literally, key to have eggs in different baskets.
Both of these prongs of federalism linked local water conditions in Western Canada with broader interests: Farmers could work the land with less personal financial risk, while the growing agricultural sector enhanced westward migration and bolstered national food production. Federalism was tied to local success by the rivers that flowed across the Prairies; the Prairies, through generations of farming efforts, thus transformed into an agricultural powerhouse.
The Canadian experience was not fundamentally unique. State involvement in water management to enable prosperity in semi-arid regions is a long-standing tradition in societies from the Roman Empire to the American West. State finance has been a powerful tool throughout human history in reshaping how water flows and where food grows.
Nevertheless, it was pan-governmental co-operation at the turn of the 20th century that set Canada’s course like a valley to a river. While the jurisdiction of water management shifted in many respects from federal to provincial oversight over the century that followed, insurance programs and cost-sharing agreements with the federal government – such as the one that supported the creation of Lake Diefenbaker in Saskatchewan, the largest reservoir in the Prairies, at more than 400 square kilometres in area – continued to mitigate local and provincial financial risk.
This is the water context for the jurisdictional crossroads where Alberta finds itself today. At present, the province has inherited a functional and dependable system of water management, whereby provincial and federal government funding has unlocked greater local agricultural agency. But the future of Alberta’s water is even more tenuous now: less stable, less consistent and less reliable. Just last week, for the first time in more than two decades, Alberta began negotiations with major water licence holders to reduce their usage of water from the Red Deer River, Bow River and Oldman River basins, amid fears of shortages.
Two key water-related challenges would emerge for a hypothetically independent Alberta: one natural, and one political. The natural challenge is that the underlying water landscape is shifting beneath our feet. The increasingly hot atmosphere will increase evaporative losses that will likely outpace increases in precipitation in the Prairies, leading to drier soils over all. In addition, the glaciers that support perennial river flows out of the Rocky Mountains are retreating rapidly. More than a million Albertans source their drinking water from rivers made vulnerable by the loss of glaciers, which typically support river flows through even the hottest and driest summers, acting as year-to-year stabilizers; when drought strikes, water flows. This was true for Alberta’s first century as a province, but it would not be true by the end of Alberta’s first century as a nation.
The political challenge is that interprovincial rivers would suddenly become international ones. Historically, international co-operation over transboundary rivers has required deliberate and delicate navigation in arid and semi-arid regions, from the Indus, to the Jordan, to the Colorado, and continues to be a source of conflict around the world. A sovereign Alberta would have a strategic advantage as an upstream state, but at the cost of depending more heavily on international trade to stabilize the products of their highly variable water landscape. Sharing transnational water resources wouldn’t be easy or straightforward, and competing national interests can amplify tensions expressed through trade and tariffs.
The legacy of Canadian federalism is seen in the very fact that agriculture exists as a powerful industry in the Prairies. The engineering and re-engineering of the water landscape would not have occurred had Alberta been a sovereign nation at the turn of the 20th century. So if the modern movement for Alberta sovereignty is premised on the pursuit of liberation to manage resources without federal involvement, it is also threatening the very relationship that has been key to its water and agricultural prosperity.
Isolationist policies at the provincial scale won’t achieve liberation when it comes to water. They would only tie the province’s fate more closely to its volatile water supply – and that’s a dangerous proposition.