It is one thing for the Liberals to have won the election. It is another thing to confront the onslaught of misinformation that is being fed to Albertans regularly by their own government.
By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on July 14, 2025.
The French have it right: Les absents ont toujours tort. The absent are always wrong.
If Prime Minister Mark Carney needs proof, just review the recent messaging coming out of the Calgary Stampede.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was given a hero’s welcome, with massive coverage of his pro-Alberta Stampede event speech.
In contrast, the prime minister was filmed flubbing a pancake flip. And that flub circulated through social media in case anyone missed the missed pancake toss. Apparently being able to flip a flapjack is a sine qua non for being an Alberta member of Parliament.
Carney can expect more of that one-sided coverage whenever he visits Alberta.
So, if his government intends to legitimately tackle Alberta’s alienation, it needs to be present and active in the province on a daily basis.
That means a resourced federal cabinet communications committee focused on telling the Canadian story to Alberta.
After Canada almost lost the last Quebec referendum in 1995, much was invested in figuring out what went wrong.
Surveys showed that almost 70 per cent of francophone Quebecers who knew an anglophone voted to stay in Canada. The conclusion is that the most alienated are often also the most isolated.
In Alberta, support for separation is higher in rural than in urban areas. Obviously, many farmers and ranchers have little idea of the benefits of belonging to Canada.
Again, that disillusionment is definitely present in other rural areas across the country. But the national government, secure in its power structure and identity, has never spent political or financial capital in selling the benefits of Canada to anyone with the exception of doing so after the near-death Quebec experience.
That job is left to the politicians. They fly in, host a press conference, drop a cheque, and then move on. That strategy does not work when you have a whole provincial government devoted to proving the federation is broken.
The Alberta government’s public relations department, with 288 employees, was moved into the premier’s office earlier this year.
In an April 29 order-in-council, the responsibility for communications and public engagement (CPE) was moved from the treasury board and finance departments into the premier’s office.
With an annual budget of $38-million, the CPE is supposed to promote “non-partisan” government advertising. Some recent examples include a campaign to “Tell the Feds,” and another to promote an Alberta pension fund to replace the Canada Pension Plan.
Not political? Hardly.
The province is spending millions of dollars, and the feds expect ministers alone to manage the onslaught of negativity coming daily from Alberta.
It is not enough for the prime minister to fly in and flip a pancake. The federal government needs a massive communications and strategic presence in Alberta to treat the separation question as the existential threat that it is.
Forty years ago, the federal budget to fight disinformation by the Quebec separatists was $25-million annually.
With the modern fragmentation of media, that number should be quadrupled. It should also fight the general malaise in other rural and remote parts of Canada.
To be fair, the vast majority of Albertans are Conservative, so it is not surprising that the Tory leader gets the most applause at any public event.
But it is one thing to win an election. It is another thing to confront the onslaught of misinformation that is being fed to Albertans regularly by their own government.
If the Canadian government does not fight back, it will see further fragmentation of the country caused by disinformation and misinformation.
While Carney’s Alberta provenance—the prime minister grew up in Edmonton—certainly helped him in the election, he could soon be faced with an Alberta-based Opposition leader in Poilievre.
Poilievre is expected to be buoyed by a significant win in the most Conservative riding in the country.
Meanwhile, the country will be dealing with a wave of Alberta separatism fanned by the premier, whose own political future depends on her support from separatists.
Canada has experienced decades of complaints about Western alienation. In reality, it is not Western alienation: it is Alberta alienation with a dose of Saskatchewan disillusionment.
Two other Western provinces—Manitoba and British Columbia—have a completely different perspective.
But Canadian politicians have never pushed back against the notion of western alienation and, as a result, the country is now facing the possibility of Alberta playing the separatist card.
It is about time the national government got into the game.
Otherwise, Alberta’s one-sided vision of Canada will continue.
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.
