Canada's Establishment: `The West Wants In'

REGINA, Saskatchewan - One single subject can make soul mates out of fractious western Canadian conservatives and liberals, farmers and oilmen, rich and poor, urban and rural, Albertan and British Columbian.

The East.

That means Ottawa in particular, Ontario more vaguely, and, lately, Quebec.

"They've got all the population so they've got all the power," says Saskatchewan Premier Grant Devine, a farmer and agricultural economist.

John Visser, an Alberta contractor, is a little more blunt: "The West has always been raped to supply the East."

John Derbowka, head of the Saskatoon office of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, notes that, "Ninety percent of the time, elections are decided before the polls even close out here. There is a feeling that elections are all decided in the East.

"Then there is the French issue, having French jammed down our throats."

Inhabitants of this vast, beautiful, sparsely populated land west of the Ontario border long have felt left out of the Canadian mainstream. They are isolated from the centers of decision-making. They note that the city of Toronto has three more seats in the House of Commons than the entire province of Alberta. They watch the national government trying to restructure the country according to Quebec's priorities. The Toronto-dominated national media largely ignore them. They don't feel the West and its problems are taken seriously.

"The line we always get from the feds is yes, Western concerns are important, but after we get all this other stuff settled, meaning Quebec, which is saying it isn't important," complains Stephen Harper, chief policy officer of the Reform Party of Canada, a new, Western-based populist movement that has exploded onto the national political scene during the past year.

Reform's very effective rallying cry has been: "The West wants in."

Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia make up an enormous and very diverse region. Many here in the West say they have more in common with people in Montana, North Dakota, Idaho and Washington than with folks in faraway Toronto, Montreal or Halifax.

Don Braid, a political columnist for the Calgary Herald, and Sydney Sharpe, another Western journalist, published a book earlier this year titled: "Breakup - Why the West Feels Left Out of Canada."

They paint the Western provinces this way:

"Manitoba, being in the geographic center of Canada, and closest to Ontario, tends to be the most centralist. Saskatchewan is the gentlest end perhaps the most civilized of the Western provinces, the least severe in its reactions, but still profoundly alienated from the federal system. Albertans are usually the angriest Westerners because they believe they have been robbed blind by confederation. British Columbians, secure and often oblivious in their glorious world beyond the mountains, are linked to Canada by the most fragile bonds of any province except Quebec."

The roots of Western disgruntlement, of course, lie in history.

For 200 years, the land that became Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba was owned by the Hudson's Bay Company and was an out-and-out commercial venture. When the brand-new Canadian confederation of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick bought the territory in 1868, that same attitude prevailed.

The policy of Canada's first prime minister, John MacDonald, was that the hinterland of the West was to provide raw materials for the industries and seaports of the heartland in the East and a market for Eastern products. It was not until 1930, long after the three provinces had been carved out of the Northwest Territories, that they gained control over their land and resources.

British Columbia, the most distant from central authority and influence, is different because it was a British colony and negotiated its own entry into the Canadian confederation. British Columbia has a much stronger, more mixed economy than the other three Western provinces and looks both south to the American northwest and to the Pacific Rim of Asia for trade.

"I learned from my grandfather that Easterners have always been exploiters of Westerners," says Dr. Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

Cooper maintains Canada's regions have different myths, resulting in differing attitudes.

"The myth of Ontario is that Canadians are somehow morally superior to Americans because they didn't rebel in the 18th century," Cooper says. "That's the loyalist myth. Our myth is one of frontiers."

A widely quoted authority on Canadian politics, Cooper feels no sense of identity with French-speaking Quebeckers, or even English-speaking Ontarians. "What gives you an identity comes from the myths you ingest as a child, and our myths are not their myths."

Sitting around the Chinook Grain Co., in Didsbury, Alberta, on a recent afternoon, the conversation turned to Quebec. There is not a lot of enthusiasm for official bilingualism, the federal government policy of making services available in both French and English throughout the country.

"When you go to Calgary airport, you have French and English signs. When you go to Montreal, you see only French," says Wendy Sorensen, a grain buyer.

That's because Quebec provincial law forbids exterior signs to be in anything other than French, an effort to fend off the English tide.

Separatist feeling is on the rise in Quebec. The provincial government is planning to hold a referendum on sovereignty next year unless Ottawa comes up with constitutional concessions giving the province special powers.

Westerners fail to see why Quebec should be treated differently than any other province.

What if Quebec pulls out of Canada?

"Just so they pay their damned tab before they do," lashes out Alex Pratt, a maintenance man who joined the conversation at the grain company. "You show me what Quebec has contributed to the rest of Canada and maybe I'll change my mind."

Bill Arsini of Macleod, Alberta, was angry during a recent political meeting in Edmonton, referring to Quebeckers as "Eastern parasites."

"Why don't you charge some of those guys with treason that are trying to split this country?" he shouted. "Why aren't they put in jail."

Gordon Ross, a farmer near Paynton, Saskatchewan, said, "We all have to be Canadians first and Quebeckers or Albertans second." But he understands the emotion and antagonism directed toward Quebec.

"I guess we felt we had a lot of French forced down our throats. They've also stirred up the French in the West, and now they want their own schools. Well, there's lots of Ukrainians around here too."

Special treatment or Quebec burns deep scars. It's been five years since the federal government awarded a billion-dollar maintenance contract for Canada's CF-18 jet fighters to Canadair Ltd. of Montreal over a cheaper, and some say better, bid from Bristol Aerospace Ltd. of Winnipeg, Manitoba. But Westerners still bring it up today as an example of unfairness.

"We aren't just concerned over natural resources," says Alberta Premier Don Getty, a former quarterback for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. "Other issues have deep historical roots and they range from tariffs to transportation to banking policies. They involve questions of political structure."

Relations between the West and the East have been strained in other ways.

"Farmers never could understand, in the old days, we ordered equipment from the East, we had to pay the freight," says Ross, the Paynton farmer. "Then, when we ship crops to the East, the freight was deducted here. Now why's that?"

Nobody in the West forgets Premier Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Policy born in the 1970s.

"The West was forced to sell oil and gas at less than the world price to central Canadian industry and consumers," says Reform Party leader Preston Manning in an interview at his Calgary office. "What people in Central Canada don't realize was there was a net transfer of wealth of $100 billion."

One of the issues Manning and his new party rail against is not just that kind of policy, but the kind of system that permits it.

With 62 percent of Canada's 26 million people living in Ontario and Quebec, and nearly 30 percent of all the people in the country in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, political power is naturally unbalanced.

"In the second-largest country on the face of the Earth, you've got to get some way of balancing the interests of the heavily populated regions with the thinly populated, resource-producing regions," Manning says.

For that reason, the battle cry of many Westerners is what they call a "Triple-E Senate." That is a Senate that is elected, equal and effective. The current Senate's members are appointed by the government.

Manning, whose 4-year-old party gets as much as 16 percent in national opinion polls, says they need a "new Canada," which "would have to be defined in a way that's viable with or without Quebec."

University of Calgary economist Robert Mansell publishes a report each year outlining how much each province contributes to the federal trough and how much each gets back in federal services or fund transfers.

In the years 1961 to 1988, only Alberta, with $145.7 billion, and British Columbia, with $9.3 billion, were net contributors. Quebec absorbed $136.5 billion more than it put in, Nova Scotia $74.7 billion and New Brunswick $46.9 billion.

"It's the big brother-little brother syndrome," says Dave Tindall, owner of the Wheatland restaurant in the small southwestern Saskatchewan town of Gravelbourg. "We don't control our own fate. Things important to our area don't seem to be heard."

Take interest rates, for example.

"Interest rates were put up to hold Ontario inflation down," Tindall claims. "We weren't in inflation. But we paid the bill."

Indeed, while Ontario slipped into recession last year and saw economic growth shrink 1 percent in 1990, Alberta's economy grew 3.7 percent and British Columbia's 3.5 percent.