Preston Manning’s Not-So-Secret Game Plan

Just a darn minute there, Canada! Preston Manning wants you to know another pipeline or two isn’t going to cut the mustard.

You’re going to have to fork over more — we Albertans will decide more of what later. Probably federal jurisdiction. Sovereignty, ya know!

This just in, thanks to an obsequious little screed masquerading as news about Manning’s views on Alberta’s separation referendum in the National Post, a publication that’s been light on analysis and hard on spin since 1998.

On Tuesday the Post quoted the superannuated godfather of the Canadian right explaining that “the question with respect to remain is: Remain and do what? That’s the question that the remain people have to answer.”

“It means remain and push this sovereignty option within the federation,” he asserted.

And remember, thanks to the magic of international trade agreements, especially with the United States, more sovereignty for provinces like Alberta means less sovereignty for Canada.

Ergo, Manning continued, “there’s a number of other things the federal government could do if it wants to address the root cause of that alienation. Simply building a pipeline is not the complete answer.”

This is the game plan Manning spelled out to Danielle Smith in 2021 at that Red Deer conference put on by the misnamed Canada Strong and Free Network, the rebranded version of what was previously known as the Manning Centre.

Inappropriately wearing an Order of Canada pin on his chest, Manning smugly told the audience that “fear of the United States can be a factor in federal provincial relations.”

He continued: “What if Alberta did actually secede? There will be an offer from the United States for Alberta to become the 51st state. And why will that offer be made? It will be made because the United States would like to get a hold of the second- or third-largest source of petroleum in the world. That is why it will be made.”

“Now when that finally sinks in to Ottawa,” Manning paused, obviously pleased with himself... “Do they want that to happen? Or do they have to say, ‘Maybe we have to do something, to keep that energy sector and its development in Canada,’ and to accede to some of these other demands.”

Manning concluded his homily with another question: “Is there some way that fear of the United States can be used as a lever to get some of the things that the West needs to have addressed?”

The answer, in Manning’s opinion, was obviously yes.

I know I’ve printed this before, but it deserves to be hammered home that this is how Manning operates, and his strategy has clearly influenced the tactics adopted by Smith and the United Conservative Party to blackmail Ottawa into, in effect, making Alberta a superprovince that rules all the others in a new Confederation designed to make Canada as much as possible like the United States.

Nor is this the only time Manning has trotted out this kind of thing. Who can forget his warning last spring that if the Liberals under Prime Minister Mark Carney won again, Alberta might take its ball and go home.

“Large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government, no matter who leads it,” he asserted in an op-ed in the pages of the Globe and Mail.

Or to put that another way, no matter how many Canadians, including in Alberta, vote for it.

“The support for Western secession is therefore growing, unabated and even fuelled by Liberal promises to reverse many of their previous positions,” he said. “Such promises of expediency simply don’t ring true in the West. Who, except the most politically naive, would believe Mark Carney’s promises to reverse the Liberal positions on everything from east-west pipelines to identity politics and climate change, when standing behind him is a cabinet of 23 MPs who, just a month ago, were advocating for the very opposite and have done so for years?”

Who? I dunno. Someone who had actually paid attention to who Carney was and what was in his resumé, maybe? Someone who wasn’t threatening the future of the country because his team always has to win?

Well, maybe Manning didn’t call that one right, but Smith’s character is to push for a kilometre every time she’s given a centimetre, which is one explanation for why she’s pressing ahead with the Manning Strategy no matter how much harm it may do to the country.

And Manning, it would appear from his latest bloviations, is on board with that.

It can be credibly argued that Manning — who, thanks to the esteem in which he is held by so many Conservatives here in Wild Rose Country, has played a significant role in helping gin up the current separatist brouhaha in Alberta — is offering up a version of the complaint Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon levelled at Carney, that Ottawa is being generous to Quebec to undermine separatism. (Translation: Stop showing federalism works! Just quit it!)

Arguably, that may be more of a problem for Quebec separatists — who can accurately argue Quebec has a distinct culture and language — than for divorce-minded Albertans. As Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet famously observed, a unique culture is something Alberta lacks in the North American context, the UCP’s best efforts to say that ain’t so notwithstanding.

To separate, Blanchet said, stingingly, “requires a culture of their own. I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture.”

So it is almost certainly true that if Albertans make the decision in their referendum this fall based on economics alone, they will vote to stay, as even Smith now concedes.

All that said, whatever Smith thinks, Manning has a different, in some ways more ambitious, agenda than the PQ leader. He doesn’t want to see Alberta break away from Canada so much as he wishes to see all of Canada turned into a neoliberal clone of the United States, right down to its sclerotic, rural-dominated elected Senate.

That is, in the words of Aurelien, the pseudonymous author of the Trying to Understand the World Substack: “The aim of neoliberalism, after all, is to reduce human beings to the unique status of interchangeable consumers, with no bonds of family, community, history, culture or language that might undermine their homogeneity, and make the markets that constitute their entire existence less efficient than they might be.”

In other words, the 51st state in all but the law.

As for the rest of our demands, Canada, we’ll get back to you.