The centrepiece of former Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s Fair Deal agenda, the equalization referendum, coincided with a dismal level of public support for an Alberta Pension Plan, Alberta Police Force and Alberta Revenue Agency. Mr. Kenney leaves a press conference in Edmonton on Aug. 7, 2019.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Jared Wesley is a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. Gala Palavicini is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Alberta.
Alberta’s bid to amend the Canadian Constitution died with a whimper today. Canadians can be forgiven for not noticing.
Three years have passed since Jason Kenney’s government held a referendum on removing the equalization principle from the Constitution Act. The “yes” side won, and the subsequent motion in the Alberta legislature on Nov. 18, 2021, officially started the clock, creating a three-year window to make a formal constitutional amendment.
To no one’s surprise, no other provincial legislature or parliament introduced, let alone passed, a corresponding motion. So the matter is now dead.
At the time, the Alberta government claimed that a successful referendum and motion would oblige the rest of Canada to negotiate with the province on its many grievances with Confederation. According to their strained interpretation of the Quebec secession Supreme Court reference case, a clear majority vote on a clear question would compel everyone else to discuss Alberta’s beefs which, at the time, included building new pipelines to tidewater and adjusting the distribution of federal transfers to favour Alberta.
That the Alberta government didn’t challenge Ottawa and the rest of the provinces for failing to negotiate suggests that not even they believed that legal argument.
Instead, Mr. Kenney saw the referendum as the opening blow in a fight for Alberta’s “fair share” with “every political tool.” The plebiscite would provide the “leverage” Alberta needed to make gains in other areas, like fiscal stabilization and energy development.
With only 40 per cent turnout, the referendum proved uninteresting or unsatisfying to the majority of Albertans. That apathy hurt the province’s chances of gaining the upper hand in intergovernmental relations.
The referendum failed to capture the attention of the rest of the country, too. Grappling with their own public health and economic concerns, Canadians either didn’t know the vote was held or wrote it off as hollow crowing from the privileged West. Four days after the referendum, newspaper archives show that the national media had already moved on.
The centrepiece of Mr. Kenney’s Fair Deal agenda, the equalization referendum, coincided with a dismal level of public support for an Alberta Pension Plan, Alberta Police Force and Alberta Revenue Agency. If all four policies were designed to build a firewall around the province, Albertans proved uninterested in gathering the kindling.
To be clear, the frustration that drove the Kenney government to launch the Fair Deal agenda was palpable. Support for separatism reached 30 per cent in the fall of 2019, according to our Viewpoint Alberta surveys, driven largely by the fact the Trudeau Liberals had secured a majority government with only a handful of seats on the Prairies. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether the Fair Deal gambit bolstered or took the wind out of separatists’ sails.
Either way, widespread public anger soon gave way to traditional sentiments of alienation and feeling jilted as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on. Calls to build a firewall around the province lost their relevance once again, as did the results of the equalization referendum.
In the meantime, the Alberta government lost its bid for leverage, its credibility, and months of time to negotiate a fairer shake in Confederation. It made no progress on intergovernmental files such as federal transfers.
Danielle Smith’s government doubled down on the isolationist strategy with the Alberta Sovereignty Act, drawing further ridicule and marginalization from the rest of Canada.
In “standing up” for Alberta, the UCP had forgotten that intergovernmental relations is just as much about sitting down to get the work done.
If the polls are correct, we are on the eve of a new era of intergovernmental relations in Canada. A Conservative government in Ottawa promises to bring a new approach, and the UCP will no longer have the foil so central to its governing strategy, brand, and internal unity. The equalization referendum will be an even more distant memory.
For those who paid attention, however, the episode showed how hollow and transparent attempts at gaining “leverage” through constitutional cosplay seldom result in the concessions sought.
A winner of and in Confederation, Alberta doesn’t gain by negotiating from behind a megaphone or musket. In fact, such strategies may backfire by making the province less credible as a partner in Confederation.
As we prepare to transition to a new period of Alberta-Ottawa relations, we can all hope for the return of functional federalism and the demise of costly stunts like the equalization referendum.