“I’m having a feeling of déjà vu.”
That’s how Ian Cooper, a senior research fellow at Dublin City University’s Brexit Institute, describes the political discourse around Alberta’s upcoming referendum on the future of separation.
“When I watch what’s happening in Alberta with the movement towards Alberta separatism, that reminds me a lot of Brexit,” said Cooper, who grew up in Alberta before going abroad to study European Union politics.
“And so I feel a compulsion to speak out about making the comparison between these two political movements.”
“I think that Brexit has a lot of lessons to teach Albertans about the dangers of … a referendum on separation,” Cooper said.
Cooper said he sees parallels between Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the U.K.’s then-prime minister David Cameron, who called the Brexit vote in 2016.
“He was a conservative, and he was in favour of ‘remain,’ but he called the referendum thinking that that would put the issue to rest for a time,” Cooper said. “But also he was trying to appease the hardliners in his own party.”
The referendum for the U.K. to leave the European Union passed with roughly 52 per cent of the vote, and Cameron stepped down as prime minister shortly after.
“A lot of what David Cameron did is he made choices in the referendum campaign that made it harder for his side to win,” Cooper said. “And I can see Danielle Smith making similar moves.”
Smith has said she and the United Conservative Party caucus are in support of Alberta remaining in Canada, and that’s how she would vote in the referendum.
“She certainly should be looking at what happened to David Cameron and taking that as a cautionary tale. Otherwise, she’s sleepwalking into trouble.”
Alberta premier defends referendum question after Carney criticism
Cooper said public opinion can be unpredictable when it comes to votes such as referendums.
“David Cameron was pretty confident that his side would win the referendum, but of course then ended up losing.”
Cooper said “other kinds of events can intervene in ways that you don’t expect,” pointing to Europe’s 2015 migration crisis as an example.
“That actually had nothing to do with the question that was on the ballot, but it made people kind of feel nervous and it gave them a reason to vote to leave,” he said.
With that in mind, coupled with what Cooper called the “very convoluted” 37-word question on Alberta’s ballot, he says people who don’t actually want the province to leave Confederation could vote for that regardless.
The official 37-word question will ask, “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?â
Some Albertans find separation referendum question ‘confusing’: new poll
A referendum like Alberta’s is “giving people an invitation to send a message,” Cooper said.
“So even if people don’t actually want, in their heart of hearts, for Alberta to leave Canada, well, it is a cost-free way of sending a message that they’re unhappy with the terms of Alberta’s relationship with the federal government,” he said.
“They don’t realize that they’re opening up a can of worms, and it’s likely to lead to years of chaos and confusion and indecision and negotiation without resolution.”
Brexit is a subject Prime Minister Mark Carney is all too familiar with.
“I saw first hand what happened in the United Kingdom, when the view was ‘vote for this, it’ll be soft, and then we’ll negotiate,” Carney told reporters Monday in Ottawa during an unrelated media availability.
Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. During the Brexit debate, he came under fire for saying that the U.K. leaving the European Union was a major risk to the country’s economy.
“They’re still, 10 years later, trying to undo what people didn’t think they were voting for, but what they ended up having,” he said.
Carney says Alberta separation question is a ‘dangerous bluff’
Andrew Percy, who served as a member of parliament with the British Conservative Party from 2010 to 2024, says “the Brexit analogy doesn’t quite work in this context.”
“We weren’t voting to leave a country. We were voting to leave a trading bloc,” he told CBC’s Ian Hanomansing on Monday.
Percy, who voted in favour of Brexit during the 2016 referendum, said Carney’s language when discussing separation, such as calling it a “bluff” during his remarks on Monday, could be perceived as “insulting voters or telling them that what they want to vote for is stupid or silly or ill-educated.”
“That’s what, in both the Scottish independence referendum [in 2014] and the Brexit referendum â the remain side … made the mistake of doing,” he said. “And the consequence of that seemed to be to push more people towards those two leave options.”
The political impact of Brexit and the deep-seated political division behind it have continued to have repercussions in the United Kingdom, Percy said.
“The number of prime ministers we had afterwards, I think, tells a story on just how hard it became to manage all of these competing different agenda,” he said.
“People were very in favour of leaving. People are very in favour of remain,” he said. “Those divisions didn’t go away, and it ultimately ended up with the Conservative Party being booted out of office, of course, because we were seen as not able to get our own act together following all of those divisions.”
Cooper also pointed to the “chaos” caused by Brexit after the vote passed.
“People didn’t really know what they were voting for when they voted for Brexit,” he said.
“In some cases, they thought that they were voting to negotiate a new arrangement with the European Union or change the terms of Britain’s membership of the European Union, rather than a full separation.”
Cooper says he hopes to be in Alberta this fall to “observe” the referendum campaign and “speak out” on his perspective.
