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.

Hopefully, Quebecers will not fall for this blatant attempt to rewrite history.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on November 2, 2020.

OTTAWA—October is a huge month in Quebec history.

It has been a half century since the October Crisis, which saw a deputy premier murdered and a diplomat kidnapped by the Front de libération du Québec.

It has been a quarter century since the referendum which took Quebec to the brink of a divorce from the rest of the country. Historians and filmmakers are busy interpreting both those events through today’s lens.

It is not surprising that the Bloc Québécois is also trying to influence the narrative 50 years after the fact tabling a resolution calling for the House to “demand an official apology from the prime minister on behalf of the government of Canada for the enactment, on Oct. 16, 1970, of the War Measures Act and the use of the army against Quebec’s civilian population to arbitrarily arrest, detain without charge and intimidate nearly 500 innocent (Quebecers).”

The resolution was handily defeated Thursday, but it served the Bloc’s purpose. The debate gave the party an opportunity to cast the separatists in the victim role, victimization at the hands of the bully Canada, the behemoth that is responsible for all harm to the Quebec nation.

What the resolution fails to mention, and what separatists would like everyone to simply forget, is that the request for the army to intervene actually came from the City of Montreal and the Quebec government of the day.

It also fails to capture the feeling of fear that gripped the province when FLQ cells were working to plant mail bombs that killed several people and culminated in an explosion at the Montreal stock exchange that injured 28 people.

Instead, “You cannot pretend to be deeply in love with Quebec without respecting this desire of Quebecers to receive some apologies from Her Majesty’s government,” was the explanation given by Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet in defence of the motion.

Two elements of his statement bear analysis. First, his claim that it was the “desire of Quebecers” to receive apologi(es) plural.

The Bloc is usually very successful in portraying its views as the gold standard for the thinking of all Quebecers. But in this day of pandemics, I doubt very much that revisionist history is the primary preoccupation of the people.

Second is the reference to “Her Majesty’s government.” Last time I looked the Canadian government was led by a Quebecer who lives in Quebec, not England. But the reference to the Queen is just one more attempt by separatists to convince Quebecers that their destiny is still in the hands of the bloody English.

The same time the Bloc was debating its motion in Parliament, the son of one of the terrorists got sympathetic full-page coverage in The Globe and Mail covering a documentary he made about his “gentle” father Paul Rose.

According to Rose’s son, his killer instinct sprung from living in acute poverty while English-speaking neighbours were all living high off the hog. The story of Rose’s upbringing could just as easily have been the story of prime minister Jean Chrétien, who grew up in a family of 15 on the wrong side of the hill in Shawinigan.

Yet Chrétien turned those early years into leadership and did not set up a terrorist cell with the intention to inflict mayhem on anglos. My own father grew up in abject poverty in northern Ontario, complete with rickets, a bone disease caused by malnutrition. As a child in Hamilton, on my way to Catholic school I was spit on, beat up and called “cat licker” on a daily basis. But that experience made me believe more strongly in the power of diversity.

The Rose documentary views the FLQ from the sympathetic eye of a son. But there is zero recognition of the pain of Pierre Laporte’s family. That does not fit the narrative.

Fifty years ago, Quebec was a very different place, francophones were treated as second-class citizens in their own homes. The same could be said for other minorities in many parts of the country. Witness the shameful treatment of gays and lesbians in that period and later.

Now the same spurned citizens have been premiers and prime ministers.

The country has changed, and we do a disservice to history by rehashing one-sided old grievances.

The wedge politics strategy in the Bloc strategy is self-evident. But, as we have witnessed south of the border, wedge politics can work.

Hopefully, Quebecers will not fall for this blatant attempt to rewrite history.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.