The Alberta Transition Council released a report last week that outlines a provincial independence plan. The 214-page document covers a potential framework for immigration, policing, passports, the courts, health care and treaty rights. Around the same time, the Canada West Foundation released a report examining what it called the “economic, trade and constitutional realities” of Alberta separation ahead of an Oct. 19 referendum vote. Gary Mar, CEO and President of the Canada West Foundation, joins Alberta Primetime’s Michael Higgins to explain his group’s report. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Michael Higgins: Wednesday, we had Keith Wilson, independence advocate and lawyer on. He made the comment that with this transition document out for several days now, no one has come forward to say anything in it is wrong. How do you assess this roadmap to a “prosperous, independent Alberta”? Gary Mar: Canada West Foundation’s report talks about the challenges of going down the road of independence. We asked the question: What are the economic, legal, fiscal and business risks associated with being an independent country? What Mr. Wilson’s report talks about answering the question: Should Albertans choose independence, how could the transition be organized and implemented? I think the biggest difference between our report and their report is that we’re using data that actually estimates what the cost of the transition would be, the setup costs of becoming an independent country, which would range in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We estimate some $200 billion, plus ongoing operational costs that would be about $60 billion per year. I think the difference between their report and our report is that in many ways they just gloss over the challenges of the negotiations. They assume that Alberta would be able to negotiate transitions with the rest of Canada, and that those transitions would be recognized by external parties of Canada. For example, there is no provision that allows for an Alberta passport to be grandfathered into all of the advantages of having a Canadian passport. There’s no provision that would allow Albertans to be treated the same way as other Canadians under our health-care system. If you got sick in Ontario, you’d be treated like a foreign national and paying full freight for your services out there. There’s no provision for accession of Alberta to, for example, the advantages of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement (CUSMA). Mr Wilson’s report glosses over all of that and assumes that we will be able to negotiate those things. The reality is quite a bit different from that. It would provide years and years and years of uncertainty, fiscally, economically. It would hurt Albertans in the pocketbook, should we go down this road. MH: Contributors to the transition plan were largely anonymous. Who are you drawing on for your research and the report’s legitimacy? GM: There are grievances that Alberta has with the federal government, and they’re long-standing. They range from things like fiscal transfers, going back to the national energy program of the 1980s, or more recently the Trudeau government’s efforts to quash the development of natural resources in this province. Ted Morton, one of our contributors, lays out the case for how we got to where we are. Why are we having this referendum? What are the grievances? We acknowledge those grievances are real, and they shouldn’t be ignored. Then we go further to say what the realities are of doing this, from an economic point of view. We’ve had work done by Lenny Kaplan, a former senior official with the Alberta Treasury Department, we’ve got constitutional work done by Professor Dwight Newman of the University of Saskatchewan, who’s an expert in constitutional law. Paul Booth, an economist formerly based with the University of Alberta, who did a lot of work on the costs of setting up your own government based on the case study of what happened in the province of Quebec. We’ve looked at the issues of uncertainty that would be created should we go down the road. I guess I would ask people who choose to leave Canada, ‘You know who was the minister of economic development for the province of Ontario in 1995?’ It was (former Quebec premier) René Lévesque. Hundreds of companies left the province of Quebec. They never came back. These are the kinds of realities. It’s not fearmongering on our part; those are the realities of what’s happened in the past. If you believe what is past is prologue, then you should be paying attention. MH: We also asked Mr. Wilson for his estimate on how many Albertans would pack up and leave following an independence vote, and how that would factor into the equation. His response was that it’s not a concern, it’s more about managing the inflow of people wanting to come to Alberta. What’s your read on the risk of Albertans leaving? GM: Jeff McCabe, the president and chairman of TriMac, operates his business all across Canada and the United States, and he’s talked about the difficulties of operating across another international border, and the kind of barriers to expansion of the business that that would mean. Herb Emery, a professor from the University of New Brunswick, an expert in labour mobility, points out that in our labour force, about 40 per cent are people from Alberta. Another 30 per cent come from other parts of Canada, and the remainder come from outside of Canada. We definitely rely on people from outside of Alberta to make up our labour force, and I think that is a significant risk. Where do new Canadians come from? Did they come to be citizens of Canada, or citizens of Alberta? I think many people who are currently working here would actually move back to another part of Canada, not wanting to lose a Canadian passport, not wanting to lose all of the advantages of Canadian citizenship.
