Alberta as our 51st state is not as far-fetched as it
sounds at first blush. The idea was written about by Peter Zeihan
in Accidental
Superpower (2014) and recently broached by Holman Jenkins,
Jr. in no less than the Wall
Street Journal. Before diving into the politics and practicality
of a Alberta leaving Canada, let's first review
some background to see why such a traumatic event could even be
considered.
Unlike
the U.S., which is netted together with the world's best river system and a
favorable geography and climate, Canada is the opposite. Zeihan
shows that three barriers split Canada into five largely autonomous
regions. They are the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Shield, and the
St. Lawrence River. He says:
Geographically,
Canada just isn't a unified entity, and that's without even considering its
more publicly discussed challenges such as the Anglophone-Francophone divide or
the country's confederal political system, or that because of cold
climate most of the Canadian landmass is simply too inhospitable to support a
large population, condemning everyone to live on the country's extreme southern
fringe.
This
makes Canada inherently unstable and unwieldy from both a political and a
geographic point of view.
In
two significant ways, Alberta is unlike the rest of Canada. First,
Alberta is energy-rich. Thanks to a several-decade-old energy boom,
Alberta has a high per capita income. This results in the central
government in Ottawa sucking taxes out of Alberta. For every dollar
Alberta sends to Ottawa, it gets back only about 65 cents in
return. This means that Albertans pay $21.8 billion more
in taxesthan they get back. And it is the aging population of
Quebec that benefits the most from this income transfer.
To
make matters worse, neighboring provinces have blocked landlocked Alberta from
building pipelines for its oil and gas. As for the Trudeau central
government, like all progressive administrations, it is enthralled with the
green movement and is anti-fossil fuel in all forms. Jenkins writes
that this means that Alberta oil has to be shipped to markets by truck or rail,
an expensive proposition either way, causing Edmonton's oil to sell at barely
$10 a barrel – an 80% discount to world prices. Having to subsidize
the rest of Canada while at the same time other Canadians try to squelch the
province's energy industry has rankled many Albertans.
The
second factor separating Alberta from the rest of Canada is its
demographics. Quoting Zeihan:
Alberta's
population is getting younger, more highly skilled and
better-paid. As the demographic and financial disconnect between
Alberta and the rest of Canada grows, these younger, more highly skilled, and
better-paid Albertans will be forced to pay ever higher volumes of taxes
to Ottawa to compensate for increasingly older, less skilled, and lower income
Canadians elsewhere in the country.
The
core issue is pretty simple. While Quebecois – and to a slightly
lesser degree the rest of Canada – now need Alberta to maintain their standard
of living, the Albertans now need not to be part of Canada in order
to maintain theirs.
Landlocked
as it is, Alberta could not make it as an independent country. But
joining the Union has many advantages, such as alleviating much of Alberta's
labor shortages in technical areas, privileged access to the U.S. market and
transportation system, unlimited access to the American capital market, and
inclusion in the U.S. currency zone.
Why
would the U.S. entertain the entry of Alberta into the
union? Economics. Unlike, say, Puerto Rico, which is (and
will continue to be) a welfare state and where Spanish is the native language,
Alberta is vibrant, wealthy in energy, and
English-speaking. Culturally, Alberta is more in sync with America than
is Puerto Rico. As a state, Zeihan claims that Alberta
would be per capita the richest. Some will say Democrats would
object to adding a "white" state to the Union. Yes, but
this knee-jerk racism of the Democrats could be placated by the prospect of
having more tax revenue flow into Washington.
As
Jenkins notes, the Civil War (1861-1865) made secession illegal in the
U.S. But Canada is more mannerly. Its courts have ruled
that Canadian provinces have a full legal right to hold independence
referenda. When the question of Quebec's secession was on the front
burner, the Canadian Supreme Court in 1998 decided unanimously in favor of the
legality of secession. Then, in 2000, the Canadian parliament passed
a "Clarity
Act" to lay out the political process of implementing secession.
The
legal framework is in place for secession if a Canadian province chooses to go
that route thanks to French-speaking Quebec.
Right
now, the secession of Alberta from Canada seems
unimaginable. But then again, in 2016, who thought the builder of
glitzy casinos in Atlantic City and a reality TV show personality would be
elected to the most powerful position in the world with zero political
experience? Many of the fundamentals for an Alberta secession are in
place. All that is needed is a precipitating event or
two. Black swans happen. When they do, people, after
getting over the initial shock, slap their foreheads and say, "Of
course. We should have seen it coming."