What is the capital of Western Canada? Is it Vancouver, the country’s third-largest city and sole Pacific metropolis? Or is it Calgary, where the wealth of the oil sands is expressed in smart new office towers and endlessly—and we do mean endlessly—sprawling suburbs? And what would Edmonton have to say about either choice?
In fact, none of them qualifies. The capital of Western Canada, the seat of its power and influence, is Ottawa. Nothing expresses the dominance of the West in Confederation like Ottawa today. The national capital is run, lock stock and barrel, by Westerners. The prime minister is from Alberta. Almost half of the governing caucus is from the Prairie provinces, British Columbia, or the territories. Half of the Commons committee chairs are from the West. The governor of the Bank of Canada, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and the clerk of the Privy Council are all from the West. The West dominates the power centres of the federal government today the way Quebec did under Pierre Trudeau.
Canada evolved profoundly under Trudeau’s Quebec influence. Social programs expanded, and the state along with it. The British connection was all but entirely severed. Bilingualism, the Constitution, asymmetrical federalism—if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry; it died with the Charlottetown Accord—all dominated a capital obsessed over Quebec questions and dedicated to accommodating, even if they could never be satisfied, Quebec’s demands.
So it should come as not the slightest shock to anyone to discover that today’s Ottawa is increasingly a city of Western values and Western priorities, dominated by Western politicians who lead the first truly Western government in this country’s history. Oddly, some Laurentianists seem to resent the new reality. But of course the shoe is no longer on their foot.
“The West wants in,” Preston Manning declared as he launched the Reform Party two and a half decades ago. Today the West is so in that other parts of the country are feeling crowded out. Nothing fuels the frustrated impotence of the Laurentian elites like the knowledge that the chairs they once occupied are taken by guys wearing cowboy boots. The West has power because the West has money and growth. In 1985, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia collectively accounted for 32 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product. In 2010, the figure was 36 percent. In 1985, the population of Calgary was 625,143; today, it’s 1,096,833. Alberta’s population is growing at twice the national average; Saskatchewan’s population, after years of decline, grew by 6.7 percent between 2006 and 2011. In those same years, Manitoba’s rate of population growth, at 5.9 percent, was double what it was in the first half of the decade. As we’ve observed, the population of the four Western provinces now exceeds the population east of the Ottawa River Curtain.
You might think Ontario would resent the new wealth and influence of the West. There is little sign that Ontario voters do. Protestant Ontario, after all, is rooted in the work ethic. Ontario respects success. There was a time when the impudent colonies to the west needed to be kept in their places. But that time has passed, and Ontario knows it. We are witnessing a new partnership between the old Centre and the new, forged in common interest and by the immigrants who flood into, and bind together, both places.
Here’s a funny thing. In the United States, Republicans confidently expected to govern pretty much interrupted throughout the twenty-first century. After all, the southern states had voted GOP ever since the Democratic Party betrayed Jim Crow by bringing in the civil rights acts of the 1960s. And the South was growing, with millions of people moving out of the Rust Belt in search of jobs or retirement sun. As the South grew, the power of the Republican Party would grow with it, strategists figured, making it the natural governing party of the United States.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Hispanic immigration was part of the reason, but internal migration had a lot to do with it as well. All those northern Democrats moving south brought their politics with them, painting bedrock states like Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Nevada blue. (In the U.S., blue is the colour of the liberal Democrats and red the colour of the conservative Republicans, while in Canada red equals left and blue equals right. The Americans, of course, have it wrong.)
But in Calgary, waves of immigration have had little impact on politics, at least at the federal level. Apart from Redmonton, as it gets called, which occasionally elects a Liberal or even—gasp!—a New Democrat, the province is wall-to-wall Conservative. Upon arriving in Alberta, people seem to shed their political pasts, jam a Stetson on, and head to the polling booth to vote for the nearest Tory. Why is that?
The power of the province’s political culture may have something to do with it. A land boom lasting about 20 years and ending with the First World War brought 600,000 Americans into Alberta, which is why the place looks, feels, and sounds more like a state than a province. The discovery of oil turned Alberta from poor and Republican to rich and Republican. There are signs of change—Naheed Nenshi becoming mayor of Calgary; Alison Redford’s moderate Progressive Conservatives beating back Danielle Smith’s hard-edged Wildrose Party—but the fact remains that Alberta remains the most conservative place in Canada and the beating heart of this government.
The West has always been a resource-based economy, thriving or suffering depending on the price of wheat or potash or softwood or oil. But with the emerging Pacific economies on a lengthy, sustained upward trend, the long-term prospects for those resources are more than encouraging.
Even Manitoba is thriving. The traditional poor cousin of the Prairies now has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. There’s a bit of oil in the southwest, there’s plenty of hydro in the north, agriculture is on the upswing, and a reasonably solid manufacturing sector is holding its own. Manitoba is also more successful than any other province, on a per capita basis, at attracting immigrants under the provincial nomination program, which accounted for over 91 percent of the province’s newcomers in 2008 versus Ontario’s 2.9 percent. (Most Ontario immigrants arrive under other programs.) In 2010, 15,805 immigrants arrived in Manitoba, the most since the end of the Second World War. Research shows that more than 85 percent of immigrants who arrive in Manitoba stay there. Partly that’s because the provincial government obsesses over matching intake to employment shortages. The top three job categories for immigrants in 2009 were industrial butchers, truck drivers, and welders.1
Manitoba offers living proof that even those parts of the West that aren’t directly affected by the oil sands are prospering. Saskatchewan has oil but is also doing well thanks to high potash and grain prices. The province has reversed years of population decline and is growing again, robustly.
In that same period, Alberta’s population increased by 10.8 percent and British Columbia’s by 7 percent. So throughout the West, robust growth is a constant. With growth comes wealth. And with wealth comes power.
We should really talk about the Wests rather than the West. After all, each province is very different from the others, politically as well as economically. To the east, Saskatchewan used to share with Manitoba a sense that it was in the midst of a long period of decline, alternating between Conservative and NDP governments as they struggled to stem the erosion of population and. Although both provinces are doing better, Saskatchewan is doing much better thanks to its own oil reserves, which may be why Saskatchewan (read: conservative) Party Premier Brad Wall is the most popular first minister in the country. Saskatchewan’s gaze is turning away from Manitoba toward Alberta.
The mountains that separate B.C. from Alberta are more than a geographical barrier. They separate the Pacific mindset from the Prairie mindset. British Columbia, with an economy historically rooted in lumber and minerals, has a strong labour movement. Alberta, historically a province of farmers, doesn’t. British Columbia and Alberta both had long spells of Social Credit government—a once-wacky populist movement that morphed into mainstream conservatism. But British Columbia has also had NDP governments, and pretty radical ones at that, while Albertans are mostly divided between conservatives and really, really conservatives. Although both Vancouver and Calgary are rapidly growing, cosmopolitan cities, their federal politics couldn’t be further apart.
In Vancouver in the last federal election, 13 Conservatives, seven NDPers, and two Liberals were elected MPs in the Lower Mainland. Despite that third-place finish, Vancouver is one of the few places west of Ontario where Liberals can still be observed in their native habitat. One way to think of Vancouver is as a western outpost for the Laurentian Consensus: a multicultural, politically complex urban recreation of Toronto, with the Pacific Ocean substituting for Lake Ontario.
In Calgary, meanwhile, the population is both culturally and politically more homogeneous, and at the last election the MPs Calgary sent to Ottawa numbered zero NDPers, zero Liberals, and eight Conservatives.
Of course, as we mentioned, even Alberta evolves: Nenshi is socially progressive and a Muslim; Stephen Mandel, mayor of Edmonton, is Jewish. The trouncing that Redford’s PCs inflicted on Smith’s Wildrose cleaved more or less along an urban/rural divide. And this reveals yet another fracture, not only in the West but across Canada. The white, rural parts of the country, the last places where the descendants of the original settlers can still be found, are deeply more conservative than their multicultural urban counterparts. And when we say white, we mean white. A Statistics Canada survey predicts that by 2031, 60 percent of Vancouver’s population will be overseas-born, second only to Toronto’s. But in Kelowna the rate will be only 10 percent.
The B.C. interior, the farms of Saskatchewan, the dairy operations in Quebec, and the outports of Newfoundland all hold much in common. They are tied to the land and to the settler culture. They resent and do not comprehend cities, with their multicultures, their gay villages, their exotic foods, and their liberal ways.
While we talk about regions and immigrants and languages, the greatest of divides might be between the country, wherever it is, and the nearest city. The countryside everywhere is in decline, unless it can grow Pinot Noir grapes. Its population is thinning, its economy is fragile, and its mindset is far, far removed from the burgeoning, entrepreneurial, multicultural cauldrons of the cities. But this chasm is universal, to be found as much in the United States and France and Australia as in Canada.
So, yes, there are several Wests: the Wests that divide politically between Prairie and Pacific, between social democrat and conservative, between relative decline and wildfire growth, between immigrant and settler and Aboriginal cultures, between rural and urban, between richer and poorer.
And yet those Wests do have things in common. Politically, they are more inclined to gravitate toward conservative values than their Central and Eastern Canadian counterparts. And those who are not conservative tend to be on the left, leaving centrist liberals in the lurch. We see it in the conservative/social democratic split in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. We see it as well in the values of the place.
The West, unlike the Maritimes, has never experienced a protracted period of economic decline leading to a sense of defeat and entitlement. The dust bowl, the Depression, and the erosion of the family farm left Westerners frustrated and aggrieved (and dangerously complacent about receiving agricultural subsidies). But they never turned Westerners into a defeated people. Defeat isn’t in their bones. However, they have led to what could be called the Western Way, which—after six years of Western-based Conservative government—is increasingly becoming the Canadian Way.
The traumas of the dust bowl and the Depression made Westerners suspicious of banks and debt, which might have saved the country in the 1990s. It was NDP Premier Roy Romanow who first tackled a provincial deficit, followed by Ralph Klein in Alberta. The Reform Party came to Ottawa demanding an end to deficit and debt, which gave Paul Martin the political cover he needed to slash public spending and balance the books. The West, not the East, led the push for fiscal responsibility that has become ingrained within Canadians, at least at the federal level. No federal political party would release an election platform that doesn’t at least promise to keep the budget balanced.
Balanced budgets were never a first priority for the Laurentian Consensus, who hewed to Keynesian economics long after the theory had self-evidently failed, once governments got into the habit of running deficits in good times and bad. One of the major Keynesian economists of the last half of the twentieth century, John Kenneth Galbraith, hailed from Southwestern Ontario and was much beloved by the Laurentianists. Besides, deficits were necessary to finance the pan-national programs—health care, welfare, housing subsidies, and later child care—by which Central Canadian elites hoped to cobble the nation together through shared values.
Westerners are, by and large, uninterested in such nation-building schemes, and certainly uninterested in subsidizing them. No wonder one of Stephen Harper’s first priorities, once he came to power, was to scrap the planned national child care program, instituting instead direct payments to parents.
But that was only the beginning, of course. Cutting the GST, cutting corporate taxes, cutting regulations, loosening environmental constraints, cutting government spending once the recession was over—all of the big-ticket fiscal items of the Harper government have been rooted in the Western aversion to big government and high debt. Some of these ideas the Laurentian elites had reluctantly embraced in the 1990s; the Harper Tories seized them with enthusiasm.
But it’s not just about balanced books. It’s also about the family. The West remains, perhaps because of its rural and American roots, a more socially conservative part of Canada. Ralph Klein, as Alberta premier, actively fought against the legalization of gay marriage. In an Ipsos Reid poll that asked whether respondents agreed with the statement that abortion “should not be permitted under any circumstances, except when the life of the mother is in danger,” nationally only 13 percent of Canadians said yes. In Alberta, however, the figure was 17 percent, while in Quebec it was only 8 percent. (Interestingly, 16 percent of Ontarians agreed with the statement.)
Back in 2003, when he was leader of the Canadian Alliance, Stephen Harper gave what is now famously known as the Civitas speech, named after the private conservative club in Toronto where he delivered it. Liberals, Harper said, had already followed Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s lead in converting from liberal to conservative orthodoxy—although, he added “we do need deeper and broader tax cuts, further reductions in debt, further deregulation and privatization.”
But the real challenge lay in confronting “the social agenda of the modern left.” Conservatives, he said, must fight for “issues involving the family … such as banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education, and strengthening the institution of marriage.” Conservatives would have to go slow, he warned. “Rebalancing the conservative agenda will require careful political judgment … issues must be chosen carefully …
real gains are inevitably incremental.” Patience, my friends, patience.
In power, Harper raised the age of sexual consent, cracked down hard on sex offenders, and introduced a bill that would expand police powers to monitor the Web in search of child pornographers. His most important family-values promise will permit income splitting between parents, once the deficit is eliminated, making it possible in more families for one parent to stay home with young children.
Part of the prime minister’s learning curve, however, was realizing that, on issues such as capital punishment, abortion, and gay rights, the national debate was settled and Conservatives would reopen it at their political peril. Harper took only a token and half-hearted stab at reopening the gay marriage debate, happily abandoning the idea when part of his own Cabinet voted against it. He has become visibly and publicly impatient with Tory backbenchers who try to drag the abortion debate back into Parliament. “As long as I am prime minister, we are not opening the abortion debate,” he declared during the 2011 election campaign. “The government will not bring forward any such legislation, and any such legislation that is brought forward will be defeated as long as I am prime minister.”
Even in the West, attitudes are changing in favour of social tolerance. Although Ralph Klein fought the gay marriage legislation, vowing to use the notwithstanding clause to nullify it in his province—Klein had, as it turned out, an uncertain grasp of how the clause and the Constitution worked—Albertans today are broadly supportive of gay marriage. Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith came a cropper in the 2011 Alberta election in part because of homophobic comments by some of her candidates. It turned out that Albertans are no less intolerant toward intolerance than anyone else.
And getting tough on crime may mean limiting parole, but it emphatically does not mean reintroducing capital punishment. Even if most Canadians do support the idea, few want to go through the agony of the public furor that would accompany bringing it back.
Westerners, in short, want their federal government to do less nation building and more family protecting. The differences between them and their Laurentian counterparts are not profound: even a politically polarized Canada remains more consensual by nature than most other countries. But these differences are real and they do matter, because Western values infuse the national government. In that sense, we are all Westerners now.
It comes down to this, the very essence of what we have been trying to say: Westerners are not interlopers who have temporarily seized power, but who will lose it when Ontario voters come to their senses and abandon their crazy flirtation with populist rednecks. Ontario voters—that is, suburban middle-class voters, many of them immigrants—identify more closely with Western values than with those on the other side of the Ottawa River Curtain, because they share the values of success through independence and hard work that are the hallmarks of the pioneer Western spirit, and that are reflected in the latest pioneers from China and India and the Philippines. This shift is permanent. Another party may come to power, but no one will ever again be able to govern this country without accounting for the West. There is too much of it, there are too many of them, and they have too much money to be pushed aside. There is an axiom in politics: power follows wealth. The West now has both. Suburban middle-class Ontario voters understand this. Anyone who doesn’t will be on the outside, looking in. Forever.
The Big Shift is, in the end, good for Canada. No, it’s great for Canada. It means that the expanding centres of growth will determine the national agenda, not the brackish backwaters of decline. Instead of wrestling over the last few crumbs of the last piece of the shrunken pie, government will seek to grow the pie. That is the West’s gift to Canada: to make it a country of the future, based on policies and principles that look to that future with confidence. We need only look across the Atlantic to see how we would do if led by the alternative.
The challenge for Westerners will be to grow into the leadership they have assumed. The chip has to come off the shoulder once and for all. The West is going to have to become the new Ontario. In exchange for policies that protect its wealth and promote its growth, the West will increasingly need to step up to the plate of national interest. As post-industrial Ontario turns into a region, the Prairies and B.C. will need to stop being one. Now that the West is the new Centre, it will need to start acting like one.
This doesn’t mean—it emphatically doesn’t mean—new transfer programs that funnel Western wealth into Eastern pockets. Westerners have never been keen on horizontal (region-to-region) transfers, rightly seeing them as a crutch that less prosperous governments use to avoid facing up to their own responsibilities. Leadership doesn’t mean just writing a cheque. Leadership means having a coherent idea of where the country ought to go and leading it there. Rather like the Laurentian elites used to do.
We already see signs that the West is ready to assume this role. We see it in Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s proposal for a national energy strategy, in Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s willingness to speak out on national issues. We could see it elsewhere. British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan have created a true internal common market, dismantling interprovincial barriers to trade and investment. Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger has committed his province to the project. The next step should be to invite Ontario to join. West of the Ottawa River Curtain, Canada could enjoy a national economic union, with people and goods free to move back and forth without restrictions on certification or the non-tariff barrier local preference. Provinces east of the curtain could be invited to become part of the pact. But as yet there is no sign that anyone there is interested in breaking the old bonds.
The West could also help to forge a stronger union by abandoning its provincial—in the worst sense of the word—obsession with keeping control over economic regulation. Alberta successfully fought the Harper government’s efforts to establish a national securities regulator, beating them at the Supreme Court by arguing that the Constitution doesn’t give Ottawa such powers. Ted Morton, a thoughtful if sometimes doctrinaire conservative who was Alberta’s finance minister at the time of the proposal, warned that if Ottawa were allowed to replace 13 provincial securities regulators with one national one—even though the Harper government proposal was strictly voluntary—Ottawa would soon be coming after “other areas of provincial jurisdiction governing finance, such as insurance, pensions, and financial institutions.”2 Imagine!
Yes, the Harper Conservatives have shown that the federation works better if Ottawa keeps out of the provinces’ hair in health care and other areas of social policy. But the provinces, led by the West, could return the favour. It profits everyone, in every sense of the word, if the federal government has the tools and the mandate to promote the economic union. That would involve uploading responsibility for regulating the economy—including insurance, Mr. Morton—creating nationwide standards for professional certification (if you can teach or practise law in Nova Scotia, why not in Manitoba?), and forcing provinces to drop non-tariff barriers that impede the free flow of both labour and capital.
Strong provinces, sovereign within their spheres, encompassed by a strong economic union watched over by the federal government, would make for a stronger country. Ontario has long championed the cause. When will the West take it up?
Asking the West to be the new Centre does not mean asking it to subsidize or prop up, to drain its wealth into sinkholes that never offer so much as a thank you, let alone a return on investment. But the West can lead by exporting its values eastward. Right now those values are conservative, expressed nationally through Stephen Harper.
But you’ll remember that there is another side to Western populism: the socially progressive side that gave rise to the CCF and the NDP, to Tommy Douglas and medicare. Social democracy is Western in its messianic zeal, in its conviction that growth and prosperity are around the corner for all. Its proposed solutions are radically different from those of its conservative counterpart, but its ethos, its political impulse, is the same.
And Adrian Dix, the fluently bilingual leader of the British Columbia NDP, could be premier by the time you read this.