I wouldn’t consider myself a strident Canadian nationalist. Patriotism gives me a wobbly diffidence. To boast about living in the greatest country in the world displays a parochial, blinkered perspective. It suggests you’ve neither been around nor looked around. Depending on just where and how you’ve landed on this particular spot on the globe, I’ll only go as far to say that Canada isn’t a bad place to be.

So I don’t take easy umbrage at bad mouthing or a general disparaging of the place. There is much to complain about and criticize. If your country can’t withstand a cold-eyed, withering assessment of its shortcomings, a good ol’ judicious slagging, as I believe Benjamin Israeli once put it, then it’s hardly worth the paper its constitution is written on.

That said.

Let’s talk about that Grand Olde Fuck of western alienation, Preston Manning, and his jeremiad in the Globe and Mail last week that included these words of high dudgeon: “… the damage done to Western Canada by a decade of Liberal neglect and misrule…”. He went further over the weekend in an interview on the CBC’s The House, talking of how the Trudeau Liberals ‘demeaned’ the west.

For sure, the Trudeau years never came close to the Sunny Ways of its promise back in 2015. A lot of the disappointment was self-inflicted, action rarely living up to its rhetoric although the rhetoric was lofty. High bars were established. Few governments, in my lifetime at any rate, have lived up to their early promise. Dissatisfaction seems to be an inevitable turn of events.

In addition, there was the whole global pandemic thing that arose and the four plus year tenure of Mad Donald in the United States. The best laid plans, man plans, god laughs, and all that. History as an amalgam of unforeseen events.

But Canada, and in this case, western Canada, as some sort of damaged soul and broken vessel? It’s certainly been the article of faith Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s run on for the past two years. That, and pretty much nothing else. Liberals as destroyers of everything that is good and holy. Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, late last month, issued a list of demands that any new federal government had to meet in order to fix what Ottawa had ruined over the course of the past 10 years. Otherwise, pre-echoing Manning’s sentiments, the country would be facing an ‘unprecedented national unity crisis’.

“… large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government, no matter who leads it…” Manning wrote. “Voters, particularly in central and Atlantic Canada, need to recognize that a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession—a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it.”

It’s not unheard of for modern conservatives to seize onto actual problems and concerns, real life government failings, distort them through their funhouse mirrors of ideology and grievance, then attempt to present them back outside of its base, shorn of any jagged extreme edges, for voter consideration, usually in the form of three word slogans. This is the way our politics is done after all. But to threaten to try and blow everything up if the rest of country doesn’t elect them?

As an Anglo-Canadian having grown up through Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and the PQ’s rise to power and referendums one and two, you accepted a strong logic behind the drive for independence there. You could niggle over the details about how that might all work exactly, but it was easy to understand the impetus behind it.

Whatever else Quebec independence represented, it wasn’t about petulant sore loser-ness. Unless, of course, you took it all the way back to the Plains of Abraham, and that would be ridiculous. Not unheard of at the time. But still ridiculous.

Alberta secession?

To hear it told from the mouths of the current proponents, threats of western separation aren’t about different histories or cultures, and it certainly isn’t about a difference in languages unless we’re talking the vernacular of the oil patch. Premier Smith sounds less like an Albertan nationalist than she does a lobbyist for the resource extraction industry. Give us east-west pipelines or give us death!

For his part, Manning too spoke almost exclusively in defense of protecting Alberta’s ‘natural’ resources in the face of Liberal perfidy but also expressed his discontent somewhat more broadly in his Globe op-ed, demanding a possible Carney government reversal of ‘identity politics’. The West wants in, apparently, but it also wants the right to keep some people out.

In this current historical moment, with a U.S. administration beating its sunken chest in expansionist fervor (depending, of course, on the day), voices threatening Alberta secession aren’t chirping about Alberta independence so much as they are American annexation. With the premier’s regular visits down to the Floridian Versailles at Mar-A-Lago and appearances on far right media outlets with far right media personalities, attempting to soften trade war blows and talk up the ‘in synch’ possibilities of a Pierre Poilievre Conservative government in Ottawa, we’re getting glimpses of a conservative-driven disunity tour. Manning’s screed, ginning up non-existent poll numbers according to Lisa Young at What now?!?, in his attempt to Dr. Frankenstein some western separation sentiment to life, takes direct aim at the unified Canadian front coalescing in the face of American manifest destining, a cross county solidarity that is also undermining Conservative electoral chances at the moment.

Rather than embrace the genuine wave of nationalist reaction in the face of unprovoked bellicosity from Canada’s increasingly erratic southern neighbour, conservatives of Danielle Smith and Preston Manning’s ilk are doing their best to undermine it. If it were for reasons less contemptible than pure political ideology and oil&gas industry fidelity, hey! Have at it, I’d said. That’s what living in a democracy is all about. Unstinting, unquestioned blind nationalism has certainly led us to dark places in the past.

This, though, is nothing more than the hue and cry of cheap corporate shills.