Why Alberta Separatism Went Looking for a Party to Borrow
Alberta's independence referendum is being held on Oct. 19. The political scientist Jared Wesley's account of how separatism got onto that ballot turns on a change in tactics rather than a burst of party-building. Similar parties had been tried in Western Canada before and failed to win seats. So, watching far-right populist movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, organizers concluded they did not need a party of their own at all — they needed to get inside mainstream ones, “and in particular, governing parties”.
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What makes the tactic striking is that the numbers were never on its side. Wesley says polls over the last two years consistently show about 70 to 75 per cent of Albertans want to remain in Canada, which suggests the prize was never the vote — it was the agenda slot, which he credits to groups such as Take Back Alberta and others.
An agenda slot arrives attached to a ballot, though, and that ballot is crowded: 10 questions in total, five of them about immigration, in wording Wesley describes as not particularly concise, with plenty of people struggling to understand what they are voting on. Access to a governing party is not the same as a clean question.