Megan McArdle attended a conference in Montreal and was somewhat perplexed when she learned about the fragility of Canadian politics and the sentiments that could one day lead to Western separation. I wrote about such a scenario a while ago in a piece called A Western Republic. Depending on political events it is a topic that raises its head from time to time and it is something that is either used or abused by politicians from the country’s federal political center. In order to solidify his position as the new Prime-Minister Paul Martin made “western alienation” one of the central pieces of his platform last year, but when election time came around he wasted very little time to point out to the electorate that western values, notable those of free-market and conservative Alberta, were essentially “un-Canadian”. In doing so he contributed in no small way to the surge of a phenomenon that he vowed to fight when he took office.

The term “western alienation” doesn’t seem to capture the sentiment for it implies that one region can no longer recognize itself in the values propagated in and from the center. Canada has never been a federal state where a common culture and values are enshrined in a shared sense of nation such as the United States. The presence of a separate cultural and linguistic group in Quebec is an obvious example, but equally important is the absence of a melting pot for immigrants who in a significant number of cases hold on to their national identities and passports as they are unsure what they’re going to get if they swap them for whatever is on offer from their Canadian hosts. If they adapt to an identity it’s more likely to be a regional one than one defined by the center. Canada is and remains a loosely arranged set of regions and cultures that history has inadvertently brought together. Demographic and economic trends have made Ontario and Quebec the center of that and as a result the values of these provinces have somehow come to dominate this quaint federation. As long as that center is able to retain its dominance in terms of population and economic power the Canadian federation will - with ups and downs – be able to retain its present form. This by the way is not dissimilar to the grip on power that the North East held on the United States, migration to the West and South in the years after the Second World War helped shape a new Republican Party which has comfortably dislodged the old centrist GOP and a Democratic Party with strong roots down south. Yet, the United States are culturally and institutionally far more uniform than Canada and these demographic and economic shifts have not imperiled the American union, on the contrary.

In diverse Canada such socio-economic trends could well fray the federation and ultimately lead to some form of separation from an irrelevant center. However they unfold themselves over long periods of time so an uptick in Albertan separatism will not immediately destabilize the Canadian federation, it is however a sign of things to come.