O4| OPINION OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY,NOVEMBER2,2019
P
olitical memory might be an
oxymoron – the equivalent
of a deafening silence, a civil
war or old news; it is surely a mal-
leable commodity, stretched to
serve radically different purposes
in a fight; and it might also be
true, as a 19th-century European
famously observed, that when
history seems to repeat, it’s trage-
dy the first time, farce the second.
Whatever the case, the spectre
of Western separatism has come
back noisily to Canadian political
life in the aftermath of an election
that, as in 1980, returned a Tru-
deau to the Prime Minister’s Of-
fice without a Liberal MP between
Winnipeg and Vancouver.
Prairie politicians have raised
the possibility of separatism as
early leverage against a minority
government in Ottawa, careful to
add that they are not advocating
it, just understanding the frustra-
tion that gives rise to it. Pundits
continue to speculate about
whether the anger is greater this
time, and therefore whether the
prospect of separation should be
taken more seriously.
I remember 1980. I want to set
the bar high for any comparisons.
I especially remember the rau-
cous night that November when
the dignified Jubilee Auditorium
in Edmonton was jam-packed for
a rally featuring Doug Christie,
the self-appointed leader of the
separatist Western Canada Con-
cept (WCC).
I was there as a newspaper
journalist.
I remember watching as cap-
wearing young men shouted ob-
scenities and spat in the direction
of the Edmonton city councillor
who had dared to stand vigil at
the doors, holding a Canadian
flag.
I remember the three-syllable,
Trump-style chant – “free the
West, free the West” – that rocked
the building whenever the crowd
was roused, as it was again and
again. Later that night, I could
scarcely steady my fingers to
punch a story into the clunky
teletype machine at the legisla-
ture media gallery. This, I wrote,
had been no symphony crowd.
Even now, I cannot recall that
night without an involuntary tin-
gle in my spine.
My editors, wary of their read-
ers, decided the next morning
that my straightforward account
of events, right down to the man
in the back who shouted “Sieg
Heil” with full Nazi salute, could
not run on the front page without
a warning label that it was com-
mentary rather than news. Those
were sensitive and dramatic
times.
In 1980, Premier Peter Lough-
eed had responded to the Nation-
al Energy Program with a tele-
vised address in which he warned
Ottawa to get off the front porch,
to keep its hands off the resources
that were rightfully a matter of
provincial jurisdiction. His gov-
ernment partly shut off the taps.
The few opposition politicians in
the legislature worried that in his
attempt to harness popular an-
ger, he had started to sound too
much like a separatist himself.
One of them, voice quavering,
propped on his desk the official
portrait of Frederick Haultain, the
last premier of the Northwest Ter-
ritories before Alberta and Sas-
katchewan were carved out of it
in 1905, to encourage Mr. Lough-
eed to be a statesman of similar
stature. But when Mr. Lougheed
negotiated an agreement on en-
ergy pricing and taxation with
the Trudeaugovernment, the re-
sulting oil patch backlash against
his “betrayal” gave a short politi-
cal life to the WCC, which elected
its only MLA in a by-election in
central Alberta in 1982.
Those were the days when itin-
erant constitutional messiahs
drew earnest crowds to small-
town halls to disclose the truth,
duly recorded in my notebooks,
that Canada had never been le-
gally constituted and therefore
could be remade, or not, accord-
ing to the people’s demands.When I wrote a three-part series
on Western separation, I got an of-
ficial letter from the prime minis-
ter’s principal secretary, Tom Ax-
worthy. The letter masked its
warning – don’t give these guys
any oxygen! – with faint words of
appreciation, which mattered to a
young journalist partly for the
realization that I’d made the clip-
ping service in Ottawa.
That’s how I remember the
politics of 1980. I’m not eager to
relive anything like it.
So what’s changed in 2019?
Better to start with what
hasn’t.
First, Alberta then and now is
an anxious place. The price of the
province’s reliance on hydrocar-
bon wealth is the constant inse-
curity that it will be stolen away –
by a government in Ottawa, by
foreign-funded “eco-terrorists” or
even by a fundamental shift in
energy technologies.
The insecurity is tied to real
livelihoods, expectations and
communities, and to the very real
fiscal limits of a provincial gov-
ernment committed to restoring
Alberta’s status as a low-tax re-
gime underwritten by roller-coaster resource revenues.
Second, the separatist cause
still creates all kinds of room for
self-appointed champions and
political entrepreneurs. It ob-
scures their other ideological
commitments.
Third, the advocates of inde-
pendence remain concentrated
in Alberta, mostly in the south,
perhaps with more enthusiastic
support now out of Saskatche-
wan. But they still presume that
the rest of the West will simply
follow their lead. More critically,
and inexcusably, in 2019, they
presume that independence can
happen as if treaty relations with
Indigenous peoples are legally
and politically inconsequential –
as if Indigenous peoples can sim-
ply be moved like furniture into
whatever new political entity is
imagined on their traditional ter-
ritories.
History, of course, does not
simply repeat itself. If it did, my
own uneasiness about the future
might be assuaged.
So what’s changed?
For one thing, the fight in 1980
was about policy jurisdiction and
the distribution of non-renew-able resource wealth – not about
whether the energy economy
represented an unconscionable
threat to the future of the planet.
The stakes were not so existen-
tial. Both provincial and federal
governments were direct inves-
tors in energy production. They
were untroubled by the global
politics of climate change or the
continental politics of building
pipelines to reach markets. They
counted on the return of boom-
times. A deal could be done.
For another, the anger and fear
of 2019 have been informed and
amplified exponentially by social
media. In 1980, when most peo-
ple still read the daily paper, my
front-page story might have pro-
voked a couple of letters to the
editor, but not a torrent of threat-
ening tweets.
Moreover, Western separatism
in the last round was largely
home-grown, informed by histor-
ic regional grievances. In 2019, it
borrows freely from the symbols
and language of a global populist
surge: “Wexit,” MAGA caps, yel-
low vests. Aware or not of the
darker tendencies of that pop-
ulism, it risks becoming the kin-
dling for a bigger, more danger-
ous fire.
Finally, Canada’s politicians
have yet to show that they are up
to the current challenges of lead-
ership. If anything, in this age of
permanent elections and fun-
draising, the rewards of high of-
fice go to the campaigners, not
the conciliators or the brave
thinkers.
In Alberta, in particular, as the
new economic realities persist,
pipeline or not, politicians will
have every incentive to deflect re-
sponsibility to external enemies –
and also internal ones – rather
than lead an honest conversation
that engages what is a diverse,
complex province. Someone will
have to be to blame. Or, from an
Ottawa vantage-point, some
provinces might still need to be
written off to preserve a progres-
sive minority government.
All of this suggests that Alber-
tans, Westerners, indeed all Cana-
dians will be tested severely in the
months ahead, whether through
the polarized politics of pipeline
construction, or the shadow-box-
ing of an equalization referen-
dum, or some other crisis that is
still to appear on the political ho-
rizon. The common life is at risk,
and not just in the gap between
Ottawa and Calgary. Within Al-
berta, we will be reminded regu-
larly how divided we actually are.
For my part, I’m grateful not to
be that young journalist who
draws the assignment of covering
the Jason Kenney government’s
“expert panel,” which was estab-
lished last week to hear out the
frustrations of Albertans and turn
their preferred futures into rec-
ommendations for action. No
doubt that journalist will be more
precariously employed than I
was. The experience won’t be a
high-minded one.
But I hope she takes good
notes, writes what she sees and
hears and draws cautionary les-
sons from the assignment in bet-
ter times, four decades from now.ALBERTAMUSTNOTRETURNTO1980
Historydoesnotsimplyrepeatitself.Ifitdid,myownuneasinessabouthowthiswillturnoutmightbeassuaged
ROGEREPP
OPINIONProfessor of political science
at the University ofAlberta
C
hanging our clocks twice a
year has little benefit, eco-
nomic or otherwise, so isn’t
it time to stop this antiquated
practice? The good news is that
some provincial legislatures
agree and are currently consid-
ering bills to adopt permanent
time.
As experts on biological
rhythms, we support the switch
to a permanent time. However,
in doing so, we must adopt Stan-
dard Time (ST), not Daylight
Savings Time (DST, or “summer
time”).
There is general agreement
that getting rid of the time
switch twice a year would be a
good idea. After time switches,
particularly the “spring forward,”
there are increased rates of car
accidents, heart attacks, strokes
and workplace injuries. So why
does it matter whether we adopt
permanent DST or permanent
ST?
All the processes happening
in our bodies are co-ordinated by
our biological clocks, located in
our brains and all other organs.
The argument in favour of per-
manent DST is that there would
be more light in the evening.
While this is true, we can’t
change the number of hours of
light in the day. More evening
light means less morning light.
But importantly, it’s the light
in the morning that is most im-
portant in resetting our biolog-
ical clocks.
Consider this: If we all spent
our time outdoors getting plenty
of natural light, and could
choose when to get up and go to
sleep as our ancestors did, our
internal clocks would be set by
the sun so that we would tend to
wake up at dawn, and then, de-
pending on the time of year, stayawake for a while in the evening
after dark. Our body clocks
would be in sync with the sun
clock. The problem is that we
live in societies that force us to
get up and go to work or school
at times that we don’t get to
choose.
Chronobiologists, the name
given to scientists who study bi-
ological timing, call this situa-tion “social jet lag,” when the
body clock doesn’t match the so-
cial clock. Just like the jet lag you
get when you fly across time
zones and find yourself out of
sync with the new local time, so-
cial jet lag can cause many prob-
lems, including disrupted sleep,
increased risk of accidents, lower
productivity at work and in
school, and increased risk of neg-
ative health effects. Permanent
ST would move “social time”
closer to our natural “body
time,” while permanent DST
would move social time further
away.
Can just one hour make such
a big difference? We already have
evidence from a huge natural ex-
periment that we are all part of:
the difference between people
living on the western and east-
ern edges of any time zone. The
sun moves continuously across
time zones, but we are arbitrarily
divided up into one-hour blocks.
People on the western edge are
forced to get up an hour earlier
than people on the east, accord-
ing to sun time. Analysis of
health data from millions of peo-
ple shows that people on the
western edges of time zones get
about 19 minutes less sleep every
night than people on the east,
and also have significantly high-
er rates of obesity, diabetes and
heart attacks than people on theeastern edges. Even scarier, can-
cer rates significantly increase
when the sunrise is later on the
western edges. Permanent DST
would make sunrise even later
for everyone, while permanent
ST would make sunrise closer to
body time.
Permanent DST was tried in
the United States in the past cen-
tury, but was quickly repealed
when the public found that wak-
ing up in the dark is hard, and
energy savings were negligible.
Let’s not repeat that failed exper-
iment in Canada. Since Cana-
dians live even further north, the
challenge would be even more
profound in our country. Recent-
ly, several provincial legislatures
have considered stopping the
switch, with a bill currently on
the table in British Columbia,
but in all cases the plan is to
switch to DST, not ST.
Scientists around the world
support this initiative to adopt
Standard Time, and statements
have been issued by the U.S.-
based Society for Research on Bi-
ological Rhythms, the European
Biological Rhythms Society, and
the European Sleep Research So-
ciety.
As Canadian biological
rhythm researchers supporting
evidence-based policy, we
strongly recommend a switch to
permanent Standard Time.NICOLASCERMAKIAN
PATRICIALAKIN-THOMAS
TAMIMARTINO
OPINIONNicolasCermakian is an associate
professor in the department of
psychiatry atMcGill University and
the director of the laboratory of
molecular chronobiology in the
ResearchCentre of theDouglas
MentalHealth UniversityInstitute.
PatriciaLakin-Thomas is an associate
professor in the department of
biology at York University.
TamiMartino is a professor and
the director of theCentre for
CardiovascularInvestigations at
the University ofGuelph.
They are writing on behalf of the
Canadian Society forChronobiology.
Permanent [Daylight
Savings Time] was tried
in the United States in
the past century, but
was quickly repealed
when the public found
that waking up in the
dark is hard, and energy
savings were negligible.
Let’s not repeat that
failed experiment
inCanada.TurnbacktheclockonDaylightSavings
BumperstickersaresoldataconventionfortheWesternCanadaConceptpartyinRedDeer,Alta.,inJuly,1982.
DAVEBUSTON/THECANADIANPRESS