Alberta independence campaigners go for soft sell, even if they want a hard exit
Activists gather beneath a billboard promoting Alberta independence and/or merely sending Alberta a message in Taber, Alta. (Matthew Bruce/The Canadian Press)Social SharingWith polls of Albertans showing the pro-independence side trailing by a nearly three-to-one margin, some activists have been trying a gentler pitch in the referendum campaign’s home stretch.
It’s not a direct vote on independence, they say. This is literally true; the Oct. 19 question gives people the options to stay in Canada or commence the process to hold a future binding referendum on whether Alberta should leave Canada.
Independence advocates go further than this and suggest that the question isn’t really about the goal of independence at all. Which is literally not true, for the above-stated reason.
But darned if Let Alberta Decide co-leader Keith Wilson doesn’t try to frame a future secession vote as just one in a series of volleys in negotiations between Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“Even if you want Alberta to stay in Canada, vote Option 2,” Wilson wrote over the weekend on social media.
“It’s not a vote for separation. It’s a vote that the status quo with Ottawa is unacceptable — and it gives Premier Smith real leverage instead of sending Carney a message that everything is fine.”
Keith Wilson leads the group Let Alberta Decide, the best-funded of the many organizations lobbying for the referendum's pro-independence option. (Jennifer Chevalier/CBC)This has become the lawyer’s key refrain, as he tries to pry loose any votes from the dwindling ranks of undecided voters, or perhaps flip some Albertans in the “stay” camp.
“So even if you don't think Alberta should separate, whatever you think that means, even if you're holding on to a strong emotional and patriotic attachment to Canada, as all of us do, you should still vote for Option 2 because you need to give the premier leverage,” he told one recent forum, and has since promoted this clip repeatedly online.
What else is Wilson promoting heavily these days? A big gathering at the Alberta Legislature on Oct. 17, two days before the vote.
It’s billed as the “Alberta independence rally.” It’s not being advertised as a pro-leverage, or pro-future-vote rally. They’re marketing it as a rally for the objective that Wilson and others speaking there are trying to tell Albertans the referendum isn’t about.
Cory Morgan, a fellow independence activist, is another of the scheduled speakers. He’s also been urging his supporters to make “send Ottawa a message” their pitch to voters. In fact, that’s the message on billboards and lawn signs distributed by his campaign advertising group Pathway to Independence (note the name).
Morgan has urged his followers to campaign on that softer theme of message-sending to the “mushy middle," even if their true goal is separation.
“For the people like me and many of you, it doesn't matter. We're going for independence one way or another, anyways,” he said Saturday on his Youtube channel.
“But that's not what this vote's about. So, let's not campaign on that. We've got three weeks left and we've really got to move that needle with the undecided in the middle.”
The challenge Morgan and Wilson may face with that pitch is that there aren’t many Albertans in that undecided middle.
In the latest Janet Brown Opinion Research poll for CBC News, the “not sure” group was only four per cent of respondents, compared to 72 per cent of people who would vote to remain in Canada and 23 per cent who want a binding referendum.
Prime Minister Mark Carney greets pro-unity campaigners in Banff. The 'stay' side of Alberta's referendum leads by a nearly three-to-one margin, the latest Janet Brown Opinion Research poll says. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)Other surveys have delivered similar results, with small pools of undecided voters. That sentiment has not only become “baked in” over time, said data scientist John Santos, but he also points out that when support levels for the pro-independence option stood a bit higher at 27 per cent in the spring, Janet Brown asked the straight stay-or-leave question.
It didn’t appear to make respondents any more likely to say “yes” to the independence option when September’s poll was asked with the current referendum wording; in fact, support dropped.
People vastly prefer the “stay” option, regardless of how it’s asked, Santos said.
“That suggests to me that there isn't a huge market for the soft sell,” he told CBC News.
Smith, the very politician that would wield any supposed leverage that separatists tout, has repeatedly said that she doesn’t want it.
Rather than bring the spectre of Alberta leaving to the federal negotiating table, the premier has said she’d prefer as her bargaining chip a slate of “yes” votes on her other referendum questions on immigration and constitutional reforms.
“I say there is a better way,” Smith said at an event Monday. “If you're mad or you want to give leverage, let's vote to continue working on this relationship. That's what those nine questions are about, is saying things have not been perfect, but we recognize the effort that Canada is making.”
One of the premier's United Conservative caucus members has also characterized the unity question as something other than it explicitly is.
In a newsletter to constituents Monday, Red Deer-South MLA Jason Stephan disparaged the stay option as one that “affirms the status quo, a nation in decline, dragging Alberta down with it.”
But Stephan stopped short of actually endorsing independence, which no Alberta MLA has done. Rather, voting for a future referendum would “compel Ottawa to fix what is broken,” Smith’s former parliamentary secretary for constitutional affairs wrote to Red Deer-South residents.
He’d previously supported the separatists’ petition to hold a binding referendum, without Stephan himself saying he’d vote yes. But such careful rhetoric hasn’t stopped NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi from calling the government MLA a “full-throated separatist.”
Federalists, meanwhile, don’t believe their rivals’ idea of leverage would actually work. Political scientist Jared Wesley, part of the Lead Not Leave group, said separatists undercut their own message.
“A gambit this big only creates leverage if the other side believes you are prepared and able to follow through on the alternative,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. “The moment you tell the rest of Canada that support for Option 2 isn’t a true metric for independence support, you have killed the credibility of the threat.”
Morgan expresses awareness that many Albertans don’t share his passion for independence, and that polling proves it. But he doesn’t know how persuasive making Option 2 a mere “message” actually will be.
“I haven’t got a clue if we’re moving the needle at all,” he told CBC News in an interview.
An Alberta referendum sign suggests that voting for Option 2 means "we just wanna talk." (Tony Seskus/CBC)As for Wilson, his campaign efforts are not solely reliant on proposals to convert a secession vote into leverage. He’s also commissioned reports that suggest Alberta independence would bring more prosperity and economic benefits. In another of his latest videos, he’s talked about the changed “constitutional relationship” he foresees down the road if Alberta votes his way Oct. 19.
Alberta becomes “sovereign” and its power resides in Edmonton. “That will become the country's capital, the country of Alberta,” he told listeners.
That’s the sort of message that should go over better at an independence rally, rather than any pro-leverage event Wilson may hold in the campaign’s dying days.
Jason Markusoff is a CBC producer and writer. He analyzes what's happening — and what isn't happening, but probably should be — in Calgary, in Alberta and sometimes farther afield. He's covered Alberta for more than two decades, previously reporting for Maclean's magazine, Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal. He appears regularly on Power and Politics, West of Centre and various other CBC current affairs shows. Reach him at jason.markusoff@cbc.ca
