Just days after Quebec voters chose that their province should remain part of Canada by a very narrow 54,000-vote margin in 1995, Canadian Pacific Railway announced it would move its head office from Montreal to Calgary. The CPR had enough of turbulent separatist politics—energized by former French President Charles de Gaulle’s 1967 war cry “Vive l’Quebéc Libre!”* CPR established its headquarters in Calgary in 1996.
Now, 30 years later, the much bigger, more globalist Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) finds itself in the vortex of another separatist storm, this time in petroleum-rich Alberta, of all places, where the big anti-Canada grievances are that the province must share its enormous oil and gas royalties and taxes with less wealthy provinces and can’t always get its way on pipelines and environmental protection. Ironically, Quebec has become the leading champion of Canadian patriotism as a defense against the current U.S. President’s declared intent to take over Canada.
Defying the surge of Canadian unity, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith declared in a May 5 social media livestream that separation will be put to voters in a referendum next year. The separatists would first have to meet a threshold of 177,000 petitioners for a plebiscite, an ante they will achieve easily after Smith a few days earlier dropped the threshold and increased the time window for signature collection.
Smith herself professed to oppose outright separation, just as former British Prime Minister David Cameron said he opposed Brexit when he called his referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016. When he lost, he had the decency to resign, literally whistling on his departure from the podium.
The Brexit referendum left Great Britain in economic shambles and generational political upheaval in which the far-right Reform Party is ascendant. In Quebec, two successive referenda stripped Montreal of its status as the financial capital of Canada and ignited a flight of corporate head offices to Toronto and Calgary, among them Canadian Pacific’s.
Alberta is faithfully following the Quebec and Brexit playbooks—apparently without reading them through to the outcomes. Smith’s oxymoronic mantra—“a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada”—is a direct steal from the Parti Québécois’ “Sovereignty-Association” sloganeering of the 1970s.
Alberta too, risks being profoundly divided for a generation and a flight of capital to more stable jurisdictions. Popular support for Alberta separation runs about 25% according to polls, not enough to win but easily enough to make the province politically and economically unstable, just like 1990s Quebec and the United Kingdom to this day.
So, what’s transnational railway CPKC to do, buffeted by trade-killing tariffs in the U.S. and the political capture of its home base by separatists? Will the railway quietly pack up again and shift head office functions to stable Kansas City, leaving corporate home only nominally in Canada to satisfy its Canadian charter?
The sad irony is that CPKC under the leadership of American-born Keith Creel had devised a promising strategy to deal with the trade-killing POTUS 47 tariffs: He packaged CPKC’s north-south route as a “land bridge” directly connecting Canada and Mexico through customs-free, bonded railcars.
Just days before Danielle Smith’s surprise promise of a separation referendum, Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a praiseful feature article on Creel’s land-bridge strategy: “The CEO of Canadian Pacific Kansas City, the first North American railway, is pitching his trains as a way for businesses in Canada and Mexico to bypass [POTUS 47’s America.
“‘This crisis has created uncertainty but, at the same time, it has been a huge motivation to create new trade opportunities that frankly would not have occurred for a decade or even longer,’ said Mr. Creel. So, after years of shipping Canadian and Mexican goods into the U.S., ‘now we’re connecting the bookends.’”
Both Canada and Mexico will benefit from their unwelcome alienation by the U.S., Creel told the newspaper:
“‘ … the dynamic between the U.S. and its trading partners will be changed by [POTUS 47],’ Mr. Creel predicted, with each country becoming ‘stronger and more independent.’ And CPKC can ‘uniquely enable and uniquely facilitate’ that body-building exercise with its single-line rail network, allowing shippers to seamlessly move bonded freight across the U.S. without the need to clear American customs, faster than trucks or rival railways can.’”
Now Creel and CPKC must evade radicals even on their home territory, with a separatist-sympathizing Premier pushing to isolate Alberta from the rest of Canada in an unsustainable, land-locked homeland.
David Thomas covered the Quebec separatist movement for Montreal’s Gazette and the national newsmagazine Maclean’s from 1974 to 1981. He now covers Canada for Railway Age from his home in Alberta. Thomas has covered government and society since graduating from Ottawa’s Carleton University with degrees in political science and journalism. He has written for National Geographic, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The Gazette, and The Canadian Press news agency from postings in Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and London, England. “Railroading has been a personal fascination since a childhood timed fortunately enough to witness the golden years of steam on the late-to-dieselize Canadian National and Canadian Pacific,” he says.
*From Wikipedia: “Vive l’Quebéc libre!” (“Long live free Quebec!”) was a phrase in a speech delivered by French President Charles de Gaulle in Montreal on July 24, 1967, during an official visit to Canada for the Expo 67 World’s Fair. While giving an address to a large crowd from a balcony at Montreal City Hall, he uttered “Vive Montréal ! Vive l’Québec !” (“Long live Montreal! Long live Quebec!”) and then added, followed by loud applause, “Vive l’Québec libre!” (“Long live free Quebec!”) with particular emphasis on the word libre. The phrase, a slogan used by Quebecers who favored Quebec sovereignty, was seen as De Gaulle giving his support to the movement. The speech caused a diplomatic incident with the Government of Canada and was condemned by Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who said, “Canadians do not need to be liberated.” In France, though many were sympathetic to the cause of Quebec nationalism, De Gaulle’s speech was criticized as a breach of protocol.
