Published in the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal
By: Gary Mar
July 28, 2026
I recently explained why the Canada West Foundation is bringing together economists, academics and policy practitioners with expertise in fiscal federalism, trade, public finance, constitutional law and other relevant fields for a comprehensive report to be released later this summer on what Alberta separation would actually mean.
On the question of separation, it’s not a straight yes or no answer. The ballot gives two options: keep Alberta a province of Canada or direct the government to begin the constitutional process for a future, binding vote on separation. That second option doesn’t pull us out of Confederation; it opens the separation door, while the first option closes it. Whatever happens on referendum night, the grievances that got us here still need to be tackled.
I was first elected in 1993 under premier Ralph Klein, and our cabinet carried forward the fight Peter Lougheed had waged against Ottawa’s National Energy Program (NEP) that was introduced in 1980, and over the patriation of the Constitution. At one bruising first ministers’ meeting in 1981, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau turned to the premiers and asked, half rhetorically, who speaks for Canada. Lougheed’s answer was three words: “We all do.” That exchange captures something true about how Albertans see their place in this country: not a junior partner waiting for Ottawa’s permission, but an equal one, entitled to be heard. When Albertans feel that isn’t happening, support for separatism rises, as it has through most of the past decade.
The NEP was gone by 1985, unwound after Brian Mulroney’s 1984 election win, but the mark it left hasn’t faded more than four decades later. University of Calgary economist Robert Mansell calculated in a 1995 study that Alberta contributed nearly $139 billion more to federal coffers than it got back between 1961 and 1992, a gap that widened sharply once the NEP’s price controls and new taxes began redirecting the province’s oil and gas revenue eastward. The equalization fights of the 1990s and 2000s kept the wound open.
Well before this referendum existed, Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel, and more recently the Alberta Next Panel, worked through many of the same underlying frustrations Albertans are being asked to weigh now. Add years of energy-generating and wealth-creating pipelines stalled in the courts, federal energy and climate policy that didn’t match Alberta’s realities and a trade system that still makes it easier to sell Alberta goods abroad than to a neighbouring province. That’s how frustrations accumulate: one bad year is a grudge; one really bad decade becomes a pattern people believe they can predict.
This decade has produced real separatist sentiment, with more than a little déjà vu of the NEP years. This isn’t a fringe grievance. It’s a majority government responding to something real. Real doesn’t mean settled, though. Plenty of Albertans who share these frustrations are nowhere close to being convinced separation is the fix or that they know enough about what it would cost in terms of pensions, currency, trade and the border to vote with confidence. The gap between grievance and information is what the research conducted by the Canada West Foundation is meant to help close.
Klein was premier for most of my 14 years in cabinet and, at his memorial in 2013, former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow told a story about a golf game the two had played and something Klein said walking off the last green: “It never pays to be too cocky. It never pays to be arrogant.” Romanow, no natural ally of Klein’s politics, called it more than a golf story but a dictum of life, built on speaking to people honestly and directly. I think of that line every time this separation debate slides into certainty on both sides — certainty that separation would be catastrophe; certainty it would be liberation. Klein had no use for either kind of certainty, and neither should we.
The Canada West Foundation’s report isn’t built to land on a predetermined answer. Some contributors think Alberta’s grievances are legitimate, but that separation is still the wrong remedy. Others start from a different place. What they share is rigorous, evidence-based work and a willingness to have their assumptions tested, including by each other, with one goal: leaving readers better informed, not persuaded. Our next two columns get into the work they’re doing, including who’s on the research team and the substance of the report — what separation would actually mean and the economic, trade and constitutional realities of leaving Confederation.
I’ve spent most of my working life around this argument, and if there is one thing most Albertans agree on, it’s that the grievances are real, and pretending otherwise gets us nowhere.
Gary Mar is president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation. This is the second in a series of guest columns from the Canada West Foundation on the topic of Alberta separation.
Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal