Fact Check: Will Canada’s trade dispute hinder Alberta’s independence movement?

Politically estranged, former UCP MLA Peter Guthrie told a Hill Times show that the current trade dispute between Canada and the USA dampens the independence movement in Alberta.

“What we’re seeing here is a foreign threat imposing its will on our nation and on our jobs, our economy, and we’re finding out that as a whole, as a country … that we’re stronger together in that negotiating position,” said Guthrie. “So, I really think that this damages the argument of leaving.”

What we are seeing is an illustration of the failure of the federation to present an effective trading bloc. This only strengthens the case for Alberta independence.

The trade collapse does not refute the independence argument in Alberta. It illustrates it. Ottawa could not close a deal. Other provinces now want Alberta’s oil treated as a weapon. And the people who would pay first for that weapon are not sitting in Toronto or Ottawa.

Quebec’s language demands and the dairy supply management system have become sacred policies which contributed to the cratering of a trade deal with Canada’s largest trading partner.

That is not a triumph of collective bargaining. It is a failed negotiation followed by a patriotism campaign. Guthrie’s claim that the country just discovered it is “stronger together in that negotiating position” asks Albertans to treat a breakdown as proof the federation works. A stronger negotiating position would have produced an agreement. What Albertans can see is the opposite. Talks pause, talks collapse, tariffs land, and the same people who could not settle the file now insist the lesson is loyalty.

Eastern politicians such as Ontario Premier Doug Ford have floated using Alberta’s oil as a bargaining chip. One must be pretty disconnected from the Alberta psyche to think that when citizens see such posturing, it endears them to the federation. Failed local politicians Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are making similar pitches. Presumably because neither of them realizes why Albertans fired them.

Alberta’s energy resources are treated as a national ***et when convenient and a political problem when it is not. You cannot spend a decade blocking pipelines, lecturing the oil patch, and then, when Washington turns hostile, discover that Alberta crude is the federation’s strategic reserve.

A movement that already argues Ottawa taxes the West, regulates the West, and speaks for the West without delivering for the West just received a live demonstration.

The trade dispute is not dampening the independence argument. It is teaching it.