Danielle Smith frequently purports to speak for all Albertans: “Albertans will not tolerate it,” she told reporters in December 2023 in response to the proposed federal oil and gas emissions cap. “Our province is simply done with what amounts to a steady stream of economic sanctions and punitive measures thrown upon our citizens and businesses to intentionally damage their livelihoods.”
During her campaign for the UCP leadership, and then in the 2023 election to lead the province, Smith presented a vision of Albertans as hopping mad and ready to fight for our rights against an unjust and oppressive federal government symbolized by Justin Trudeau. She equates oil and gas interests with all Albertans’ interests, attacking environmental measures to slow climate change. She speaks as if all Albertans have the same attitudes she has.
In her statement on the outcome of COP28 in Dubai, she made federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault out to be our enemy. Outrageously, she accused Guilbeault of “treachery” and implied that all Albertans think of him this way: “Although he ultimately failed in his ambitions to include language in the final COP28 agreement regarding the elimination of oil and gas production, Albertans will not forget his continued treachery against our province.”
Is this true? Do we all think this way? Are we a monolith?
I discovered I was an Albertan the year I lived in Montreal. Before that I thought of myself as a regular Canadian like every other Canadian in the country.
I was teaching on exchange at Vanier CEGEP. I came into my office one morning to find a cartoon pinned to the cork board above my desk: King Kong clutching in his fist a kicking and screaming Fay Wray (who hailed from Cardston). My office partner, Maurie Alioff, had drawn a speech bubble issuing from her mouth: “Take me back to Alberta!” I realized that I must have been expressing some dismay about being away from home.
I had arrived in Quebec with my two children only to be told that I could not send them to English schools. In Quebec I was considered an immigrant and the rules applying to immigrants applied to me. I felt indignant because I was, after all, a Canadian on Canadian soil. To preserve the French language, all immigrants must educate their children in French. The irony was that I had intended to send my kids to French immersion in Alberta. What annoyed me was that in Quebec I had no choice. I was further struck by how high-handed if not intrusive the PQ government was: all government correspondence addressed to women used their maiden names regardless of their marital status or preference. Elaborate directives about exactly what kinds of signs were allowed on shops seemed Kafkaesque to me. I wanted government to leave me and everyone else alone.
I was living up to the Alberta stereotype.
The Alberta stereotype goes something like this: Albertans are freedom-loving mavericks, rugged individualists who want nothing to do with socialism, eastern liberals or government bureaucracy. The rest of Canada views Alberta as Canada’s Texas: swaggering rich oil tycoons, cattle barons and their ilk, right wing or at least conservative ruralists. Geo Takach examined this stereotype in “Mythologized and Misunderstood” in the May 2009 issue of Alberta Views. He talked to people around the country about Albertans. He quotes a woman at Queen’s Park: “I live in Toronto and we’re multicultural,” she said, “whereas you guys have buffalo.”
Danielle Smith frequently purports to speak for all Albertans.
Well, we used to. The coastal Haida still fish, the eastern Iroquois cultivated corn, beans and squash, and the original inhabitants of the prairie hunted buffalo—until the herds were wiped out after the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived. Early settlers to northern Alberta were trappers and traders, and to central Alberta, farmers. Those to southern Alberta found the dry land unsuitable for crops but good for grazing cattle. Images of cowboys, ranchers and farmers are the bedrock of the stereotypical identity of Albertan. Since the 1947 discovery of oil at Leduc and the development of the oil sands in the 1960s, oil and gas have been the drivers of Alberta’s economy. Oil workers are now included in the image of the typical Albertan.
But Alberta was diverse from the get-go. The early European settlers were not just English-speaking. They came from French Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, Ukraine and many other countries. They forged an identity as Albertans out of the experience of living here, really of battling to survive in this landscape with this climate. What united them was their shared experience here. And the stories they told each other about that experience. From the stories the mythology emerges.
Takach argues that the real Alberta is infinitely more nuanced and absurd than outsiders—or even many Albertans—fathom. He emphasizes the contradictions between the myth and the reality: for example, the image of the self-reliant individual doesn’t fit with the ways settlers actually banded together to help each other. The maverick goes his own way, but historically our political culture has been highly conformist. Takach explored these ironies further in his film Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up?, which premiered at the Royal Alberta Museum in June 2009.
Over the years we at the magazine have reflected on the Alberta stereotype. In fact, one of the motivations for founding Alberta Views was to explode the stereotype. We were tired of hearing what people in the rest of the country had to say about redneck Alberta. Most of us live in cities! In our experience people here were more thoughtful, generous and concerned about justice than the stereotype allowed. For example, numerous polls over the years have shown that Albertans are strong supporters of public education and public healthcare.
Does being Albertan mean being a hyper-masculine conservative white male?
The section of the magazine that lists facts about the province was always showing Alberta as an outlier—often running counter to stereotype and in sometimes paradoxical ways. Twenty years ago, per student expenditure on K–12 in Alberta was the highest in the country, but the proportion of students here who were home-schooled was also the highest in the country. Alberta had the highest internet usage and also the highest truck sales. We had the lowest rate of religious observance. We had the highest per capita restaurant spending. Alberta ranked first in productivity. We also had the most expensive university tuition. The proportion of Alberta’s electricity produced by coal in 2000 was 90 per cent. In 2022 it was down to 7 per cent, with the aim of phasing out coal-fired generation entirely by the end of 2024.
In 2009 Sheila Pratt critiqued Ralph Klein’s portrayal of regular Albertans as the “severely normal” conservative rural couple “Martha and Henry” who revelled in the “Alberta Advantage.” Alberta, Pratt wrote, was more complex, diverse, urban and sophisticated. As soon as Ed Stelmach was elected, he retired the “Alberta Advantage” slogan and put $25-million into rebranding the province. It was a somewhat silly exercise that came up with an even sillier motto—“Freedom To Create… Spirit To Achieve”—but the handwritten logo intended to convey a “dynamic, diverse, open, young, modern, contemporary and forward-looking” image for the province is still in use. The CBC reported that Stelmach thought the money was well spent “to counter preconceptions about the province and recent international campaigns that paint Alberta’s oilsands as an environmental blight.”
In spite of all efforts to debunk the stereotype, the stereotype endures. University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley has been conducting research on the state of the West’s political culture as part of the Common Ground project. In late 2019, focus group participants in Alberta were asked to “draw an Albertan”: 77 per cent drew a man—a farmer, a cowboy or an oil and gas worker. The most frequently assigned name: Joe.
“When we asked them to ‘draw an Albertan,’” wrote Wesley, “we were very surprised at the level of consensus among our participants. According to them, the typical Albertan was a middle-aged man working in the agricultural or the energy sector. Regardless of their own backgrounds or political predispositions, most participants drew very similar characters, suggesting there is widespread agreement about what it means to ‘look Albertan.’”
This is a problem for educated young people in the province, according to Emily Williams, a former editor of the U of A’s student newspaper. In a 2021 piece for The Gateway, she cites a survey of students at U of A that found 61 per cent were not sure they would stay in Alberta. They did not identify with what it means to be Albertan. Williams refers to the Common Ground focus groups on university campuses:
“Wesley recalled a moment from a focus group at Grant MacEwan where two women on opposite ends of the room both drew a ‘plaid-wearing, baseball cap-wearing farmer.’ When he asked who they drew, they both replied at the same time, ‘That’s my dad.’ After establishing that the two of them were not sisters, he asked if they had mothers and, if they did, were they born in Alberta. They both replied yes. When asked why they hadn’t drawn her, they both said it was because they were supposed to draw an Albertan.”
If being Albertan means being a hyper-masculine conservative white male, it’s not surprising that many young people here find it difficult to feel they belong.
The persistence of the Alberta identity is understandable given our history. Indigenous people were here from time immemorial, but settlers saw this place as the last frontier. They did need to be resourceful and independent. They were farmers and ranchers, and eventually oil workers. However, as our economy changes, different forces will shape a new Alberta identity.
Last summer The New York Times published an article about two men who had been switched at birth and didn’t discover it until they were 67 years old. Richard Beauvais had grown up Metis and Eddy Ambrose, Ukrainian; but it was Ambrose whose biological parents were Metis and Beauvais with the Ukrainian background. When young relatives coincidently encouraged them to take DNA tests, they discovered that their ethnic backgrounds were not what they had believed. They connected with each other through the test’s website. Since both had been born within hours of each other in the hospital in Arborg, Manitoba, 70 miles from Winnipeg, they concluded that they must have gone home with the wrong parents. This discovery shattered their sense of identity and caused them to question who they really were.
“I’m 67 years old, and all of a sudden I’m Ukrainian,” Beauvais said. “I’ve never been around Ukrainian people… Just because I’m not Native now, in my mind I always will be.”
Is identity in our blood and bones, or is it in our culture—the way we are raised and what we believe? Obviously, it’s in the culture: These two guys were raised a certain way and taught certain things. Their sense of themselves was not in their DNA but in their upbringing. So, identity is not immutable. It is amenable to critique. It can change.
Like agar in a Petri dish, culture is the medium that shapes us. It is the unspoken and even unconscious assumptions of our parents about right and wrong, about how to behave, how to do things, what is appropriate. It is what we’re taught at home, at school, by media. It’s what our leaders say. It is the assumptions underlying what we’re taught and what we pick up from the people around us. To uncover these assumptions requires critique. We think our beliefs and attitudes are our own, when in fact we have been conditioned by the culture. In order to examine our assumptions, we first have to become aware of what our assumptions are.
Our UCP government is playing to a warped sense of Alberta identity—Albertans as hard done by, oppressed and aggrieved. When leaders promote a narrow stereotype of their constituents, it limits the possibilities for good government. Wesley says, “They are guided by a sense of what ‘Joe the Farmer’ or ‘Al the Oilworker’ will accept. Would Al or Joe—or ‘Martha and Henry’ or ‘Bernard the Roughneck’—accept a provincial sales tax? No? Then it’s not worth sticking my neck out to propose it.”
This is the great problem with unexamined assumptions and myths that no longer reflect reality. There may have been a time when it was justified to see Alberta as a monolith: for example, in 1982, when the PCs got 75 of 79 seats, or in 2008, when PCs got 72 of 83 seats. That time is gone. The NDP won a majority government in 2015. In the 2023 provincial election, the NDP won 38 of 87 seats and the UCP 49. Only 59 per cent of eligible voters turned out, and of those, 44 per cent voted for the opposition. Albertans disapprove of Danielle Smith (49 per cent) more than they approve (48 per cent) [Angus Reid]. In fact, 38 per cent strongly disapprove, compared to only 27 per cent that strongly approve. So it’s galling for Smith to speak for Albertans as if all Albertans agree with her.
We are not all of one mind.
Alberta is remarkably ethnically diverse. It is absurd to assume that the typical Albertan is a white male oil rig worker. According to the 2021 census, 35 per cent of Albertans are visible minorities, including Indigenous, Chinese, South Asian, Filipino, Black, Latin American, Korean. It is much more likely that an Albertan will be a healthcare worker (232,130) or a teacher (147,444) than an oil and gas worker (97,402) or a farmer (57,200). And anyway, now about one in three farmers is a woman.
Our UCP government is playing to a warped sense of Alberta identity.
The old, inaccurate concept of “Albertan” is entirely inadequate to deal with our present reality. The pandemic was a blow to Albertans who saw themselves as self-sufficient, independent, freedom-loving individuals. COVID was a plague, a social phenomenon that could not be dealt with through individual action. It required government action and a collective response. The global pandemic put the lie to Albertans’ belief in exclusively individual responsibility.
Similarly, the crisis of climate change is an existential threat to our oil and gas industry—the goose that lays the golden eggs for us. Al the Oilman is no longer a hero when his actions are destroying the planet. But if our sense of identity is bound up with seeing ourselves as oil and gas producers who bring only benefits to the world, we will be in denial about the reality of what’s going on around us.
That’s why it’s important to examine what it means to be Albertan right now. Our old identity no longer holds. We can be progressive and still be Albertan. We can be NDP, we can be LGBTQ, we can care about nature and endangered species. We can be environmentalists and still be Albertan.
My grandparents came to Alberta when it was a newly created province, my parents were Albertan and I am Albertan. When I was young, I felt I didn’t have the same views as other Albertans. I grew up under a regime I didn’t agree with—Ernest Manning’s Social Credit government. My school friends and I thought we didn’t really fit in Alberta. When Lougheed and the PCs won in 1971, after 36 years of Socred rule, we were elated. We laughed that only in Alberta could you elect a Conservative government and move to the left. Little did we know that the PCs would retain majority government for 44 years.
And little did I know how much of an Albertan I was. I didn’t think I fit the stereotype, but when I went to Quebec, the rebellious Albertan came roaring out. We’re all shaped by the place we’re from. But don’t let Danielle Smith tell you what you think or who you are.
Jackie Flanagan founded Alberta Views in 1997. Her book of short stories is Grass Castles (Bayeux Arts).
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