Morton: Yes or No separation question wrong way to hold referendum

Calgary Herald

2 days ago

The First Ministers' conference in Saskatoon has come and gone. Premier Danielle Smith says she was 'encouraged' by Prime Minister Mark Carney's remarks.
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Maybe because Carney stated that there is 'real potential for an oil pipeline to tidewater.' But later, he qualified that it would have to be 'decarbonized oil.'
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What will that mean? We just don't know.
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What we do know is that if Quebec were treated like Alberta has been treated, it would have separated long ago. And if Albertans had the opportunity to renegotiate the terms of our relationship with Canada, we would never consent to the status quo.
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This does not mean Alberta (or Western Canada) should secede from Canada. But it does mean making the rest of Canada understand that for Alberta — and really all of Western Canada — the status quo is just as unacceptable.
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There is a lot of room between these two extremes for constitutional reforms to strike a fairer balance. Finding that balance, defining it, will be the challenge for Smith in the coming months.
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Which brings us to the referendum. It's going to happen.
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The UCP's new rules for initiating a citizens' referendum can and will be met by separatist groups such as Alberta Prosperity Project (APP). But there are good ways and bad ways to use referendums to inform public policy. And right now, we are headed in the wrong direction.
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The APP's referendum question is blunt: 'Do you agree that Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada? Yes or No.' The APP claims that it already has 220,000 'pledges.' And the No forces are already mobilizing and fundraising to defeat them.
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A referendum framed like this would be a waste of time. It would simply tell us what we already know: that about 20 per cent of Albertans are ready to leave now. It also ignores the 60 per cent of us who are neither separatist nor status quo, and would undermine Alberta's efforts to persuade Carney to roll back the Trudeau anti-oil and gas policies.
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The right way for Alberta to hold a referendum on this issue would be to use the referendum model that New Zealand used to replace its first-past-the-post electoral system.
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The New Zealand referendum presented voters with two questions. The first was do you support the status quo? In New Zealand, 85 per cent said no. This vote then triggered the second question: Which of the following alternatives do you support?
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Of the four options, 70 per cent favoured mixed-member proportional. And that is what New Zealand now has. The details are not relevant to us. What is relevant is that this two-question referendum model would empower the majority of Albertans to have a meaningful say in what comes next.