The Conservative Party convention boasts roughly 2,650 delegates, which doesn’t make this the largest right-leaning political gathering this week in Calgary — or even the biggest on the Calgary Stampede park grounds.
That title would belong to Stay Free Alberta’s separatist rally and petition signing event that drew more than three thousand supporters on Monday to the Big Four building, a few hundred metres away from the federal party’s convention site at the BMO Centre.
There’s an acute awareness and sensitivity at the convention to the political issue that’s now at the centre of Alberta politics, particularly within conservative circles.
And to at least one attendee of this federal gathering, there’s even an eagerness to hold a vote on whether Alberta should leave Canada.
Medicine Hat delegate Daniel Hein told CBC News he’s signed the citizen’s initiative to require Alberta to schedule a secession referendum.
He isn’t sure how he’d vote but he wants the debate, no matter how “ugly and weird” it may get.
“I want the question, that’s what I want,” Hein said outside the main convention room. “I’m tired of people saying, you hush.”
Norman Schachar, a Calgary delegate, said he wants to sign the petition as well, to have “an adult discussion about Canada’s future.”
Many of his Alberta Conservative friends are similarly kicking tires and want the debate a referendum would stoke, Schachar said.
“They want to talk about moving, but they aren’t packing their bags.”
In the speech he delivered before his leadership review, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre addressed the threat of Alberta separatism in tandem with the looming prospect of another Quebec secession referendum.
He said rather than attack those sentiments, Conservatives should ask why people feel that way — and he answered that blame lies with the Liberals’ treatment of jurisdictional issues, the energy sector, affordability issues and Canada’s history.
He said electing a Conservative government can solve those problems.
“Our message to those youth and to all the people in Alberta and Quebec who are losing hope in our country: you will again have a country that respects your autonomy, is proud of your industries, unites us around our common identity and history — a country that will afford you the hopeful future you have earned,” he said.
His speech came as there are growing calls for more Conservative politicians to combat a feared rise in Alberta separatist sentiment, particularly Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
“This is an opportunity for Premier Smith to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ Either you’re with Canada or you’re not with Canada,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Progressive Conservative, earlier this week at a premiers’ meeting in Ottawa.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith were asked their response to an Alberta separatist group seeking support from U.S. officials ahead of a potential referendum. Smith said she expects the U.S. ‘would confine their discussion about Alberta’s democratic process to Albertans and to Canadians.’
The Alberta New Democrats have demanded all United Conservative MLAs declare where they stand on separatism, although Alberta’s governing caucus wouldn’t play ball with that request.
Jeff Rath, legal counsel for Stay Free Alberta, told the Canadian Press that multiple UCP MLAs have signed the petition, although he wouldn’t name names. A UCP caucus spokeswoman wrote in a statement that MLAs are “obviously free to express their views on any matter they choose,” but added she wasn’t aware of any MLAs who’ve signed the petition.
If that petition gets at least 177,732 Albertans’ signatures by May — less than six per cent of all eligible provincial voters — the government would be required to hold the referendum that activists want.
Support for separatism runs highest among Alberta’s conservative activists, especially outside the cities of Edmonton and Calgary.
It’s such a potent issue in rural Alberta conservative circles that two MPs from outside Calgary and Edmonton wouldn’t say whether they would sign the petition to force an independence referendum.
“That’s a hypothetical, right?” said David Bexte, MP for Bow Island in southern Alberta. “The devil’s always in the detail with words.”
But he did maintain that he’s “a federalist,” and in his district “it’s not part of the main discussion. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
Shannon Stubbs, MP for Lakeland, represents the northeast Alberta home base of Mitch Sylvestre, who leads the Stay Free Alberta separatist petition drive.
“My own view is that every single individual member of Parliament who is a resident of Alberta is also an individual Albertan who has a right to vote in petitions, to participate and vote according to their own constituencies,” she told CBC News.
The four-term Alberta MP said she’s sympathetic to her constituents who are so frustrated with federalism that they’ll consider separation.
“People are losing hope about the concept that Alberta will ever get a fair deal,” she said.
“A federal government can only block, denigrate and frankly villainize an entire province of people for so long before … people are like, well, what are our options here?”
Stubbs brings up the importance of national unity, but also party unity. That’s high on the minds of delegates this weekend as Conservatives vote on Poilievre’s leadership — but regarding separatism, party unity takes on a different dimension.
Independence is an issue that splits the federal Conservative base. According to a Janet Brown Research Opinion survey taken last spring for CBC Calgary, 49 per cent of respondents who identified as Conservative Party voters say they’d vote “Yes” for Alberta to leave Canada, while 45 per cent would vote no.
More recent surveys by other pollsters have suggested support for independence among all Albertans at between 20 per cent and the low 30s, although it trends much higher among people who vote for the Conservatives federally or the UCP provincially.
“This is what Pierre Poilievre is dealing with going into the convention,” Brown said this week. “A lot of people will be calling for him to declare that he’s against separation. But he has to remember that half of his base in Alberta is for it.”
Gord Tulk, a delegate from Red Deer, said there’s danger in Poilievre or other Conservatives denouncing Alberta separatists.
“I think a lot of Albertans getting told to sit down and shut up — [that] what you’re complaining about is silly — is massively wrong,” said Tulk, who’s also active in UCP politics.
He estimated that 50 to 60 per cent of active federal Conservatives in his central Alberta region back independence, even if many wouldn’t say so publicly.
“They’re conservative and they’re playing all their options, right?” Tulk told CBC News. “But if it came down to it, they would go [for] independence.”
He doesn’t consider himself a separatist, but said he’d have to think seriously about it in a referendum voting booth.
“We know the status quo in this country cannot carry on,” Tulk said. “We cannot have massive federal interference continue even more and more.”
