Does the West Want Out?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

I lived in Calgary through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when discontent with the way governments in Ottawa seemed to neglect the West in favour of central Canada gave rise to small provincial separatist parties like the Western Canada Concept.

It also led to the rise of the federal Reform Party, with its slogan, “The West Wants In.” Leader Preston Manning’s party effectively destroyed the old Progressive Conservative Party and eventually became the nucleus of today’s Conservatives.

The 1993 federal election saw Reform sweep much of the West, while the newly formed Bloc Québécois took most of Quebec’s seats.

But here we are, three decades later, and western alienation has again brought out separatist sentiment in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, the resurgent Bloc again speaks for much of francophone Quebec. Canada seems to be a political version of the movie Groundhog Day.

Does the West now want out? For many in Alberta, whose oil sector drives its economy, the answer increasingly may be yes.

After all, as political scientist Albert Hirschman pointed out in his book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, if you feel you have little say in the governing of your country, you may feel you have no choice but to leave.

The Oct. 21 election saw the Conservatives sweep all but one seat across Alberta and Saskatchewan – the Tories have owned Western Canada since the 1950s – while Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were re-elected. Now, so-called “Wexit” rallies are planned in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton next month.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has said he’s going to hear out separatist sentiments in the province through public town halls and consultation. 

University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper has written that the divide between the Canadian prairies and the political hubs of Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal is as much cultural as geographical. 

While Alberta lacks the population to make enough of an impact electorally, the province contributes some 17 per cent to Canada’s GDP. Its residents have come to feel besieged by the rest of the country.

Albertans pay billions a year in federal taxes, but the province has not received equalization payments since 1965, despite its current economic recession.

Climate change is one of the top concerns across the country now. In the mouths of climate activists, Alberta’s oil sands are the enemy, yet in Alberta, they are the lifeblood of the economy. 

The federal government bought the Trans Mountain Pipeline in 2018, but it remains doubtful whether expanding it by building a second span will ever take place. Landlocked Alberta will need the permission of, among others, British Columbia to do so, and this seems unlikely. 

Defeated Liberal cabinet minister Ralph Goodale, who lost his seat in Regina, admits that his party has a lot of urgent work to do to prove to western provinces that the Trudeau government understands their needs. 

“It’s not healthy for the country to have a major national political party without elected representation across one region of the country,” he said. 

All Canadians should imagine what it feels like for Albertans when Ottawa treats them like a hostile foreign power, while the Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg is treated with more respect than Premier Kenney. 

Many Canadians can’t believe Alberta might one day secede. But plenty of people scoffed at the possibility of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union disintegrating. This country might not be as secure as we all think.

The Post-Colonial States of Southern Africa

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The former anti-colonial movements in southern Africa exercise, as governments, continued control over the sovereign states that emerged. 

The party-based regimes that emerged in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa were organized around ideology, ethnicity, or bonds of solidarity rooted in a shared experience of violent struggle. 

As such they have been able to survive economic crisis, leadership succession, and opposition challenges.

In effect, they would be, even though there were contested elections, effectively one-party entities.

In reality, therefore, a new elite secured through its access to the state a similar status to those who under the old system were the privileged few.

This was certain to breed dissatisfaction, of course. Because the majority of the electorate has now moved beyond the struggles to free their countries. 

Their expectations are measured against the promises and failures, rather than the expected reward for being liberated.

So these governments now try to claim that any form of injustice is rooted in the colonial past.

When the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe lost support among the majority of people, it declared the white commercial farmers to be the root cause of all evil and initiated expropriation of their lands. But the main beneficiaries of the land redistribution were members of the new elite. 

Indeed, Mugabe had publicly declared that he would never make room for a political opposition party by categorically stating that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would never be allowed to govern the country.

While Mugabe was finally ousted in 2017, his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) remains in power, following a disputed election that saw Emmerson Mnangagwa take over.

In Namibia, Sam Nujoma was president of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) from its founding in 1960 until 2007, and the first head of state of Namibia from independence in 1990 until 2005.

Another SWAPO freedom fighter, Hage Geingob, is now in office. He is the third SWAPO head of state. 

A survey conducted by the United Nations in 2016 showed that 37 per cent of the population was malnourished. Blame for this was placed on external factors.

Namibians are set to vote in the presidential and parliamentary elections in November this year. McHenry Venani, leader of the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), has warned of SWAPO’s “greed.”

He wants to end SWAPO’s privilege and elitism where one can only benefit if they support a certain faction within the ruling party. But he is unlikely to prevail against Geingob’s political machine.

In South Africa, the post-Mandela years has seen major economic and political corruption, well publicized around the world. Power struggles inside the African National Congress (ANC) finally removed President Jacob Zuma last year. 

Under fire for large-scale embezzlement and nepotism, Zuma tried to remain in power by posing as an opponent of “white monopoly capital.” He mobilised resentments to those associated with the settler-colonial past, and aimed at discrediting competitors as sell-outs.

His replacement, Cyril Ramaphosa, has allowed political credibility to be regained among ordinary voters. But he has amassed an estimated fortune of $450 million mainly through his involvement in mining companies, and the divide between rich and poor continues to grow.

An African State on the Verge of Violence

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many of us still remember the horrific genocide that occurred in Rwanda twenty-five years ago, in which upwards of a million people were slaughtered in just a three-month period.

Bu that little country in eastern Africa has a “mirror image” as its southern neighbor, one with similar ethnic turmoil. It leads to the same ever-present threat of massive violence.

In Burundi, like Rwanda, 85 per cent of the population are of Hutu ethnic origin, while 15 per cent are Tutsi. But unlike Rwanda, the country is run by an oppressive Hutu regime.

Since independence in 1962, there have been two events defined as genocides in Burundi: The 1972 mass slaughter of Hutus by the Tutsi-dominated army, and the 1993 mass killings of Tutsis by the majority-Hutu populace.

President Pierre Nkurunziza has ruled the country since 2005, winning election at the end of the 12-year civil war that killed more than 300,000 people.

Burundi is due to hold an election on May 20 next year, five years after President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term in office in 2015 sparked a wave of unrest.

Nkurunziza was controversially nominated by the ruling National Council for the Defence of Democracy-Forces for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD-FDD). More than two months of anti-Nkurunziza protests, which were often violently repressed, left at least 100 dead.

A coup attempt occurred while Nkurunziza was out of the country. Facing resistance from Nkurunziza loyalists, it collapsed. Independent media was shut down and many opponents fled.

Since that time, at least 1,200 people have been killed and more than 400,000 others displaced, especially in Tanzania, according to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has opened an investigation.

Relations between Nkurunziza and the Catholic Church, to which the majority of Burundians belong, have been tense ever since the church opposed his bid for the third term in 2015, claiming it was a breach of the constitution.

None of this seems to have had much effect. In March 2018, the CNDD-FDD named Nkurunziza the country’s “eternal supreme guide.”

A referendum two months later saw Burundians overwhelmingly vote for constitutional reforms that could allow him to stay in office until 2034, although he has said he wouldn’t seek re-election next year.

The Burundi government has also been highly critical of reports issued by international organizations. Last December, it shut down the UN Human Rights office in the capital, Bujumbura, after 23 years, branding their investigations into crimes against humanity as lies.

The ruling party’s youth league, the Imbonerakure, has been accused of carrying out killings, kidnappings, arbitrary arrests and acts of torture and rape. 

Since the Ministry of Home Affairs approved a new political party, the National Congress for Liberty, in February, its offices across the country have repeatedly been vandalized.

Nkurunziza has announced he will not stand for election in 2020, but whatever his decision, it is unlikely to resolve the problems plaguing Burundi.

There are mounting worries for Burundi’s economy, which is slowly suffocating under the impact of economic sanctions.

This may force the president and his hard-line supporters into reaching out to opponents in a bid to ease the deepening crisis.

Bloc Surge Portends Rough Ride for Canada

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
 

Like those proverbial creatures in horror films who never die, the Bloc Québécois, with its 32 seats following the federal election, is alive and well – yet again.

They were written off as dead in the last two elections, losing most of their seats to the New Democrats. The Bloc won only four seats in 2011 and 10 in 2015.

The tables were turned this time – the NDP went from 14 seats to two.

Disappointed Conservatives, who won 10, again failed to make gains in the province.

The result is stark: federal Liberals were left with 34 seats, while the nationalist blocquistes dominate Quebec’s 78 ridings.

It was also a contest between an ethnically diverse major city, Montreal, dominated by Justin Trudeau’s federalists, and a largely French-Canadian hinterland.

Nations don’t die, even when conquered by others. Ask, say, Poles or Serbs.

 “I find we are very much alive,” Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet remarked in reference to predictions the Bloc was dying. “We are coming back from far, and we will go still further.”

Nationalism is a critical concept that distinguishes how a community, group, or nation define themselves, their sense of belonging and allegiance, and distinguish themselves from others. 

The Bloc won big in the wake of last year’s victory by a nationalist party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, in the provincial election.

That government’s adoption of Bill 21, which enfored "state secularism" on government employees, reignited the nationalism versus multiculturalism debate. That evolved into the theme of defending Quebec’s interests.

It calls for teachers, police officers, and judges to be free of all religious symbols when on the job, and for those who provide or require formal identification to receive provincial government services to do so with their faces uncovered.

In the rest of Canada, which is now ideologically wedded to a civic liberal form of identity, one that shuns any forms of ethnic or religious collectivity, Quebec’s law was, not surprisingly, seen as a form of bigotry and racism (though religious symbols by themselves have little to do with “race.”) 

But for a national minority living in a compact “homeland,” one that has since 1759 seen itself as battling to keep alive its separate identity, it was a way of fending off its perennial fear – that it would eventually lose its identity and become a multicultural stew of people from anywhere and everywhere, as has become the case in the rest of Canada, which since the 1960s has jettisoned its British past.

Bill 21 is wildly popular in Quebec and francophones in that province are aware that no other federal party supports it. The rest is history. In effect, it was the ballot question.

The election provided other evidence of stark divisions in the country. The Prairie provinces voted overwhelmingly for the losing Conservatives. For Albertans, in particular, whose fossil-fuel economy is now under siege by the climate change activists, it was a disaster.

Calgary’s downtown towers are one-third empty. A minority Liberal government propped up by the NDP and Greens will never build another pipeline, nor will landlocked Alberta find much support from British Columbians, and certainly not from Quebecers, who are more concerned with environmental pollution than jobs in the oil patch.

A rough ride ahead, Canada.