Alberta Strong and Free: The effect of oil on political narratives

Written By The Argonaut
 

by Cai Williams

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I sure hope none of you were wasting your time following the Alberta provincial election earlier this year. I, however, was biting my nails at the contest, a potentially historic moment in the history of Alberta’s political development, yet one that may also reveal shifts and nuances in global understandings of political labels.

Okay, maybe I should get a life and tell you about the Potlatch instead. Having said that, Alberta is actually pretty important, and here’s why.

Alberta is home to the infamous Athabasca oil sands and contains within its borders the 2nd largest recoverable oil reserves on the planet. Alberta has become something of a punching bag for environmentalists, and with good reason. For those who are engaged in university-level politics, Alberta represents what may well be your nemesis on more or less every issue. Alberta is neoliberal, inefficient, polluting, conservative, extremist, patriarchal (Van Herk, 2010) and anything else you can fit under a wide prairie sky. However, as anthropologists, I’m sure it goes without saying that this picture is too black and white. In fact, as I will argue, some of it’s downright wrong.

Western Canada, like the western USA, is a land of straight lines. Lines which at once mean nothing, and everything. Alberta is a province that was created, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1905, by the Canadian federal government. It is distinguished as its own province from Saskatchewan, the North-West Territories, and Montana by three straight lines. The existence of an Albertan provincial, even at times national, identity is testament to the fact that even when political entities seem to have been artificially created by a few people in positions of power, the bonds of shared experience lead to real feelings of affiliation and identity which reconstruct those same arbitrary borders as cultural and even ethnic divisions.

As if by accident, Alberta is a land blessed and cursed by its plentiful natural resources. The discovery of oil at the Leduc No.1 well in 1947 spearheaded the solidification of the province’s identity and politics, allowing for political and financial realities that don’t exist anywhere else in Canada. These realities lead many within and sometimes without Alberta to have unrealistic expectations of other economies.

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 Alberta is stereotyped as a conservative province, this we know. However, this stereotype is fundamentally incorrect, and not just for the simple reason that it is rarely correct to say that X region is politically conservative or liberal or whatever. In terms of policy specifics, Albertans regularly display strong support for high levels of social spending, as well as socially liberal policies such as support for gay marriage above the levels of many European countries. According to a poll for the CBC, 78% think more should be done to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Calgary and Edmonton are both cosmopolitan cities with a similar proportion of visible minorities to London. One of the most popular Alberta premiers in (its admittedly short) history was Peter Lougheed (1971-1985), who was a Progressive Conservative, and yet who nationalized an airline in an attempt to diversify the economy, created a sovereign wealth fund similar to the Norwegian model, and drastically raised royalty rates, to the chagrin of private oil companies. This is far to the left of anything that the modern day left wing would dare to do. 

And yet, most Albertans are described as ‘fiscally conservative’, which means they favour balanced budgets. What gives this aversion to debt its special vigour in Alberta is not just Alberta’s agrarian nature and historical cultural ties to the libertarian Western USA, but it is also the product of the ways in which individual premiers and ministers of finance manipulated the provincial budget to realize the dream of a debt free province.

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 In Alberta it is politically toxic to suggest raising taxes. This toxicity is partially explained by the idea of the Alberta Advantage, a combination of low taxes and high spending that is only possible with a ready supply of easy money from oil and gas royalties. This policy’s principal exponent was former premier, ‘King Ralph’ Klein (1993-2006), a man largely responsible for the stereotype of the bombastic, macho, conservative Albertan.  By the end of his mandate, oil and gas royalties constituted 40% of all government revenue, while provincial income taxes were levied at a flat rate of 10% for all earners (unthinkable in other provinces). All the while, Alberta had some of the highest social spending in Canada. This set of policies created unrealistic expectations of what is fiscally possible.

In the recent Alberta election, the premier-elect Jason Kenney campaigned on a promise to both eliminate the deficit and implement a 9% flat tax rate, however with only marginal spending reductions on ‘efficiencies’. All this sounds very neoliberal, and you’d be right. However we must remember that Kenney was not necessarily elected for his policies. Kenney was elected mainly because outgoing Premier Rachel Notley was not seen as having been tough enough on the federal government, supposedly resulting in the Trans Mountain pipeline, touted as Alberta’s economic saviour, being delayed. Kenney, due to his pugnacious and populist style of rhetoric, was seen as the only credible option on this file. The carbon tax and the perceived need for its abolition was also a hugely important issue, and Jason Kenney was the only viable candidate promising its abolition. All this has little to do with political philosophy. Albertans seem to like to characterize themselves as practical people at heart, who see the word ‘ideological’ as an insult. As such it should come as no surprise that the political philosophy of Albertan politicians should be so far removed from the concerns of large numbers of voters.

This bizarre fiscal reality therefore has the effect of consolidating Alberta’s borders, arbitrary though they are, as borders of economic rationality in the face of the external threat of chaotic, debt-fuelled liberalism found in the rest of Canada, especially the East. These circumstances have also had the effect of reinforcing the feeling that Canada or the federal government act as constraints on Alberta’s (and Western Canada’s) economic development. 

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 One of the more bizarre implications of Alberta’s wealth is its undercurrent of nationalism. There have been two moments in history in which Alberta separatism became a serious political possibility. The first was in 1982, during an oil price crash which left many unemployed, and some homeless.  The culprit was a decline in the oil price internationally, after the province had got accustomed to the boom in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and OPEC’s decision to hike prices. The policy which received a large part of the blame, however, was the decision of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to implement a National Energy Policy (NEP), which forced Alberta to sell its oil to Eastern Canada below market rates. The second moment came in the aftermath of the 2014 oil bust. Once again, the culprit was a decline in the international price of oil. Once again, it was a piece of policy made at home, the carbon tax, which got the blame. And of course, it doesn’t help that the current prime minister is Pierre Trudeau’s son.

We can therefore see how Alberta’s nationalism comes alive at times when Eastern Canada is perceived as a hindrance to Alberta’s interests, especially to the ability of the oil industry to survive. Albertan populists are therefore required to ‘stand up’ to anyone jeopardizing the industry, be they liberal policymakers in Ottawa, environmentalists campaigning against the oil sands, or neighbouring provinces trying to block the construction of export pipelines. Alberta nationalism is thus economically based, and strongly linked to one industry. Anybody seeking to negotiate with Alberta is therefore going to have to accept this political and cultural reality for the time being. My worry for the present is what this means for the thousands of Albertans who don’t have anything to do with the oil industry, for those in the burgeoning tech sector, for those who, in the wake of the crisis, retrained as windfarm technicians, and for those cycling from Calgary to Ottawa to protest the lack of action on climate change. My worry for the future is what happens to Alberta’s sense of itself when the economy shifts from fossil fuels, and international investors look at Alberta’s oil, conclude that it’s too deep or too unconventional to extract economically, then turn around and ride off down to the Permian basin. Alberta’s arbitrariness allows Alberta to experiment with its identity, however it also doesn’t give a lot of guidance. Alberta, without a sustainable oil industry, may have very little to fall back on culturally, at least for now.

 

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