Canada West Foundation: What Alberta Separation Would Actually Mean

In my last column, I wrote that there is too much perceived certainty in the separation debate.

Certainty that separation would be catastrophe. Certainty that it would be liberation.

Neither position leaves much room for the harder work of understanding what separation would actually mean.

That is why the Canada West Foundation sought out people with the expertise to ask the right questions and the experience to test the answers against facts and evidence rather than emotion. Knowing which questions to ask is important, but so too is having the insight and experience to understand the answers, weigh the evidence and recognize the broader implications.

Our contributors come from different backgrounds and, importantly, don’t agree on everything. Nor should they.

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Ted Morton taught constitutional law and federalism at the University of Calgary for more than 30 years and served as an Alberta cabinet minister. Dwight Newman is a professor of law at the University of Saskatchewan, holds a Canada Research Chair in rights, communities, and constitutional law, and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Those backgrounds matter because the constitutional questions surrounding separation are neither simple nor settled.

Quebec held referendums in 1980 and 1995. The second was decided by less than one percentage point. But Canada has never negotiated the actual departure of a province. The Supreme Court of Canada’s 1998 Reference re Secession of Quebec established that a clear majority voting on a clear question would create an obligation to negotiate. It also underscored that a referendum result alone would not separate a province. What the negotiations would ultimately produce was left open.

The federal Clarity Act of 2000 identifies some of the issues that would have to be addressed, including the division of assets and liabilities, possible border changes and, importantly, Indigenous rights and territorial claims. Audrey Doerr brings decades of scholarship on Canadian government and public administration and provides perspective on Indigenous rights.

Herb Emery holds the Vaughan Chair in regional economics at the University of New Brunswick and has spent years studying regional economic disparities. Paul Boothe has examined fiscal policy from both sides of the desk, as an academic and senior federal public servant. Lennie Kaplan spent more than two decades working on fiscal and energy policy in the Alberta government and served as executive director of the MacKinnon Panel on Alberta’s Finances.

Their expertise helps move the discussion beyond the question of whether Alberta should separate and toward the more difficult question: what would an independent Alberta look like?

What happens to pensions? What currency would be used? How would federal debt and assets be divided? What would a new government need to borrow? What would the fiscal position of an independent Alberta look like on day one, and what would it look like five or 10 years later?