Coyne v. Wells: Looking west

On Jan. 20, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on “The West is in. Now what?” at Calgary’s Theatre Junction Grand, the third in a series of national debates. Broadcast live on CPAC, it will feature Nancy Heppner, Saskatchewan’s minister of environment, Lloyd Axworthy, the University of Winnipeg’s president, Lindsay Blackett, Alberta’s minister of culture and community spirit, and Melissa Blake, mayor of Fort McMurray, Alta. The event will be moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen, and include Maclean’s columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne as panellists. Tickets can be bought at macleans.ca/inconversation. This week, Wells and Coyne kick off the debate.

Andrew Coyne: Paul, I’ll start by softening you up with a barrage of statistics. In 1896, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier laid the foundation for a century of Liberal dominance with his first of four election wins, Quebec held 30 per cent of the population of Canada. The whole of the territory of Canada west of Ontario accounted for less than 10 per cent. As late as 1980, when the National Energy Program was launched, Quebec held nearly as many people as the four western provinces combined. Half the seats in Pierre Trudeau’s majority government that year came from Quebec.

But now look. As of 2006, the combined population of Alberta and B.C. alone was enough to surpass Quebec’s. (They still have 11 fewer seats, but with the coming redistricting that will be corrected.) And the trend is clear: where Manitoba and Saskatchewan used to be the laggards, all four provinces are now growing faster than the national average. The West is younger, attracts more migrants, and has more babies. By 2031, Statistics Canada projects the West will have nearly a third of the population of Canada; Quebec, as little as 20 per cent.

Bigger, and richer: in 2008, the West’s combined GDP outstripped that of Ontario for the first time, fuelled in part by skyrocketing oil prices. If predictions of continued rising world demand for oil and other resources hold true, that trend should also hold. And as the West’s wealth grows, so will its appeal to footloose workers from the rest of Canada.

I’m taking a risk, talking about the West as if it were one region. But in fact it is more possible to speak of the West as a cohesive entity than ever before. The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) between Alberta and B.C. will soon be expanded to include Saskatchewan, whose political and economic culture, with a per capita GDP that now exceeds Ontario’s, more and more resembles Alberta’s. Even my home province of Manitoba increasingly looks west, not east, for its interests and inspiration. As, for that matter, does Ontario.

The whole centre of gravity of the country, in other words, is shifting west, with implications we’ve only just begun to consider. For instance: in the century from Laurier to Chrétien, it was rare for a party to win a majority without carrying Quebec. In the next century, might the same be true of the West?

Paul Wells: Andrew, your last question implies a link, or rather an inverse relationship, between the rise of the West and the decline of the federal Liberals. I hope our session in Calgary on Jan. 20 goes well beyond that dimension, but it’s a handy gauge of how things have changed. Liberalism since Pierre Trudeau has meant a few things: a very urban perspective on social issues, a belief that a strong federal government is synonymous with the vigorous defence of the national interest, and so on. The Chrétien decade, based on a divided and perfectly conquered opposition in Ontario, masked the longer-term divergence between the way Liberals conceive the country and the way the West does.

Here, as you said, we run into unavoidable problems of definition. Vancouver, Edmonton, much of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, are hard to squeeze into a cookie-cutter conception of what “the West” thinks. Even in Calgary I know a lot of people who aren’t big conservatives. They just seem to be outnumbered, is all.

Anyway, in Calgary we’ll concentrate on the Prairie West and visit B.C. another day. And probably the smartest thing we’ll do is let our guests, who live there, do most of the talking.