Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Dear friends in Western Canada,

I was born in Manitoba and have lived in Alberta for about 10 years now. I write this letter not as a reprimand, nor as a defense of the political status quo, but as an invitation to think more carefully about the kind of power we wish to be part of and to wield.

There is no denying the reality of Western alienation. Many will dismiss this experienced alienation as “grievance culture”. It even took me a long time to take seriously. Many in Alberta experience Confederation as distant, dismissive, and extractive. Decisions that shape livelihoods often feel made elsewhere, by people who neither understand nor respect the social and economic fabric of the West. These grievances are real – especially if understood through the lens of a certain demographic of Albertans. They deserve to be named honestly and addressed seriously.

But acknowledging grievance does not require us to accept every political response as equally wise. Increasingly, Alberta separatism is presented as a solution. However, it isn’t a fully articulated country-building project. Instead, it is cast as leverage: a threat of exit meant to force recognition, concessions, or respect. Separation becomes a way of “taking our ball and going home,” of reclaiming agency by withdrawing cooperation.

Here is the hard truth I want to offer: exit is not power. It is a sign that power of Alberta separatist has begun to collapse.

In part one of this series, I argued, drawing on Hannah Arendt, that power does not arise from the instinct to dominate through coercion. Instead, power arises from people acting together toward shared ends. Arendt makes a distinction that is especially relevant now: power is collective and relational; violence and coercion are instrumental and substitutive. Where genuine power exists, coercion is unnecessary. Where force becomes central, power has already eroded. This insight applies not only to empires and presidents, but to provinces and premiers.

When separatism is framed as leverage (“do this or we leave”) it signals a shift away from persuasion and toward coercion. It treats political relationships not as shared projects to be renewed, but as transactional arrangements to be threatened. Cooperation cannot be extorted into existence. The cost of exiting in this regard is not so much in the negotiations of departure; the cost of exit will have been paid framing the relationship between Canada and Alberta as “leverage.” Once relationships are understood transactionally, the cost is already too high.

Too often, Alberta separatist rhetoric casts Confederation as a master–slave relationship: Ottawa as master, Alberta as servant. This framing is emotionally potent, but conceptually dangerous. Once politics is understood in those terms, cooperation comes to look like submission, compromise like humiliation, and dialogue like weakness.

When current Alberta premier Danielle Smith repeatedly says, “I support a sovereign Alberta in a united Canada,” it sounds vague and confusing. Giving it the benefit of the doubt though, if Alberta is supported as a conversation partner in a dialogue then “sovereign” identifies the identity of one who is responsible and who owns their outcomes. However, as I have argued elsewhere, sovereignty is more than ownership. Sovereignty requires others to recognize the one being called sovereign.

Paulo Freire warned about this dynamic long ago. Oppression, he argued, distorts the imagination of both oppressor and oppressed. Liberation cannot come from reversing roles or fleeing relationships, but only from transforming them through dialogue and shared responsibility.

The question, then, is not whether Alberta has legitimate grievances. The question is whether separatism, as it currently exists, actually addresses them. Or, does Alberta separatism suffer from a narrowing of political imagination at precisely the moment when it needs to expand.

Canada is not a perfect federation. But it is not a closed one either. It is a plural, negotiated, often frustrating political space in which power is renewed only through participation. Withdrawal does not purify this space; it abandons it.

Martin Buber once wrote that “all real living is meeting.” Politics, at its best, is a form of meeting: imperfect, conflictual, unfinished, but real. When political movements retreat into threat or exit, they trade meeting for monologue.

Separatism may promise clarity. It may promise dignity through distance. But it risks producing a thinner, lonelier form of political life—one that mistakes unilateral control for freedom and isolation for strength. Hannah Arendt warned that both physical and rhetorical violence can destroy power but cannot create it. A politics that relies on threat must continually escalate, because it lacks the consent needed to endure.

The danger Alberta faces is not simply separation, but imagining freedom primarily as exit rather than renewal.

Power worth having is not seized; it is sustained. It does not come from standing alone, but from standing with others in ways that change all parties involved. If Alberta is to flourish, it will require a politics that expands the shared world rather than abandons it.

This letter is not a call to silence anger. It is a call to aim it wisely. Alberta’s future does not depend on how loudly it threatens to leave, but on how convincingly it articulates a common good worth staying for—and reshaping together.

With respect,

Ray

For Part 1 of this series, “Beyond Mastery: Grounded Human Power“

For Part 2 of this series, “Donald Trump and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence: Power Without Power“