“Did you guys register to vote?”
I no longer live in Alberta, so I cannot vote in next month’s independence referendum. No matter — my parents could be my proxies, right?
My sister piped up with some amusement into our family Zoom call. “I don’t think you want Mom to vote.”
A semi-incredulous “What do you mean?” was soon followed by, “Mom, how are your church friends voting?”
My parents immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong. They didn’t, like the parents of a university classmate, randomly stab a pin onto a map of Canada and end up in a small town in Saskatchewan. My dad went to university in Ontario; my parents met in Manitoba; and a few weeks after I was born, my parents moved west from Saskatchewan to Alberta, on the basis of my dad’s premonition that Alberta’s economy would take off. He was right.
When people ask about my family’s immigration history, they want to know when we landed in Canada, not when we moved to Alberta. The major decision was always Canada versus the rest of the world; we could just as easily have ended up in Vancouver or Toronto instead of in Calgary.
Immigrants and their children talk about how grateful they are to live in Canada, not Alberta in particular. I simply assumed that all immigrants — including my mom’s church friends — would vote for Alberta to stay in Canada. Surely, they didn’t move to Canada in order to no longer live in Canada, and surely, Alberta separation was a problem wrought by others.
According to my mom, the independence supporters at her church fell into two camps: (1) those who didn’t really want to leave but wanted to use the referendum as leverage against Ottawa, and (2) those who had been unable to immigrate to the United States, saw Canada as the next best option, and thought that Alberta independence would make it easier to achieve their original goal.
Surprisingly, to me at least, a poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research showed that immigrants and native-born Canadians didn’t differ too much in how likely they are to support independence. When I went back home this summer, I set about trying to understand those immigrants and visible minorities.
In a fit of racial profiling, I looked at two of the largest pro-independence Facebook groups, Alberta Separation and Alberta Independence Movement, and sent messages to some members with promising-looking names.
I was expecting to get all sorts of crazy and combative responses. Some of my interviewees did not disappoint. (One “applied health scientist” originally from India claimed to have healed a patient with Stage 4 brain cancer, yet he couldn’t remember what year it was.)
But then there’s Hong Wang. She moved to Ontario in the early 1990s and came to Calgary five years later, where she now works as a realtor.
“It’s ironic. When I left China, I saw no hope in our country,” because of a corrupt government, the lack of freedom, and a system that forced her and her then-husband to live apart from one another.
“I gave up everything, just hoping for a better life, and now I see this country is going down the drain. In the meantime, China’s GDP grew (often by 10 per cent or more per year). The country I left became a different country; the country I came to became a different country. I’ll be damned if, at the end of the day, I realized it was all a joke — if it was such a mistake to leave China.”
Immigrants, by definition, have experience elsewhere and thus often a different — and perhaps wider — perspective than many native-born Albertans, who might never have lived outside the province, let alone the country. Many of my interviewees compared Canada to their home countries in an unfavourable way.
Back in the Philippines, they could say anything they wanted to without worrying about being convicted in court (as long as it wasn’t intentionally offensive), claimed Luis Aragon, who immigrated with his wife and children in the early 2010s. (Aragon’s name is a pseudonym; many of my interviewees were hesitant to use their real names or to have their pictures taken, given the polarizing nature of this topic and, often, a desire to protect their children from having to explain their parents’ values and opinions.)
“Here, there are so many words I cannot say even if I don’t mean them in a bad way,” said Aragon. “Tell me, who’s really free?” (For context, the Philippines ranked 114th out of 180 countries in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, while Canada ranked 20th.)
“I wouldn’t know whether life in Canada (today) is better than that in the Philippines because I left it long ago. I didn’t like the corruption, the politicians leaving the people hungry. That’s the reason I thought it wasn’t a good place for kids, and suddenly I’m seeing that here.”
Wang’s justification for leaving was entirely economic, and the prospect of prosperity through Albertans taking control of their own economy and resources was almost universally important among the pro-independence immigrants I spoke to. Aragon, for instance, had worked for more than a decade in oil and gas in the Middle East, and moved to Alberta with the initial goal of staying in that field.
“Look at the conversion rate,” he said. “We send money to the Philippines but compared to our relatives from the U.S., we feel ashamed” at how much less it is.
“During the time of Harper and when Trudeau started, I was so proud to tell everyone I was Canadian but right now, I tell them that I’m not Filipino any more but I cannot be proud to say that I’m Canadian.”
Aragon said he began to feel the increasing cost of living around 2015, but only started seriously considering independence after the worst of the COVID pandemic, when the idea seemed more realistic. “I didn’t agree with much of what the left is doing. We are basically for common sense.” He cited, for instance, restricting Alberta’s oil development.
Anand Chetty, who moved as a child from South Africa to British Columbia in the mid-1970s before coming to Alberta in the early 1990s, also blamed the federal Liberal government for “very deliberately continuing to harm Alberta.”
“There could be substantial development and substantial economic benefits and that was stymied. The spending that the federal government has done is out of control. Somebody is going to end up paying and it’s not going to be me — it’s going to be the youth.” Chetty has supported independence from the start of Justin Trudeau’s time in office, deeming his economic policies “irresponsible.”
The bristling about the federal government strikes a familiar chord with Thomas Lukaszuk, a former deputy premier of Alberta who came to Canada as a 12-year-old from the then-Communist Poland. “There’s a segment of the (immigrant) population that I would call anti-establishment, anti-system,” he said. “I often heard Polish people saying that Justin Trudeau was just as bad as the Communists (in 1980s Poland).”
Lukaszuk, the leader of Forever Canadian, a pro-unity initiative, says that like pro-independence immigrants, their pro-unity counterparts also have an incentive to not speak up too loudly.
He believes that, just as a certain segment of immigrants who have experienced repression in their homelands will fight against any perceived repression in Canada, another segment has a lingering fear of doing anything to oppose what they think the government wants them to do — and he added that there is a perception that Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith supports independence, even though she has publicly and repeatedly said that she opposes it.
The provincial government also funds initiatives such as weekend language schools or faith-based schools, and “those ethnocultural groups are unlikely to cause any waves with the government because they feel obliged,” said Lukaszuk.
Earlier this summer, Rishi Nagar, a morning show presenter on Calgary’s RED FM, whose tag line is “Reflecting Ethnic Diversity,” hosted 10 days of discussions about the Oct. 19 referendum, devoting a day to each question and breaking down the issues to a listening audience that was majority South Asian. (The other nine questions deal with immigration and citizenship, and with efforts to amend Canada’s Constitution.)
The station reported that none of the 42 people who responded during the program said that they wanted to separate from Canada, though any biases that Nagar might have held could have affected his listeners.
Wang, the realtor in Calgary, doesn’t suffer from being uninformed or from being swayed by ethnic media. “I support the Conservatives but I don’t (want to) defund the CBC,” she said. “I listen to CBC Radio all the time. I’m not sure where to get Chinese news — even on social media, only a very few (things I watch) are Chinese videos.”
She said that she loves Canada — and I believe her. She might have wanted to get out of Toronto, but she liked Ottawa (where she first lived) and thought that living in Montreal might not have been “a bad idea,” with its “beautiful houses,” liveliness, and culture. She didn’t want Canada to become the 51st state.
Aragon, on the other hand, said that he’d thought about moving to the United States, but his children vetoed the idea. He didn’t see this as disloyalty to Canada. Instead, he thought that “Canada is betraying immigrants with a promise of a different world from where we came from, (but it keeps) changing for the worse, and that’s not the expectation of those who work hard.”
“I didn’t turn my back on the country,” said South African-born Chetty. “The country turned its back on me.”
Most of my interviewees started by talking about their strong support for independence and their intent to vote “yes” next month, but almost all of them — more emphatic voices like Aragon and Chetty included — didn’t believe that Alberta would separate from Canada during their lifetimes. Over the course of our talks, most gradually moderated what they said, telling me that they really just wanted more leverage for Alberta, like the first group of my mom’s church friends. (Chetty is still an ardent separatist.)
Ranj Shergill (another pseudonym), a Sikh lawyer and entrepreneur in his mid-30s who has lived and worked in rural Alberta and is now in Calgary, told me in late July that he wanted to use the referendum to renegotiate Confederation and give Alberta more of a say in how the country is run.
“I would definitely characterize myself as a Western Canadian,” said Shergill. “I think there’s a unique set of values and a way of life in the Canadian West … that is more pro-freedom and pro-enterprise, that’s more rugged and more pioneering.
“The Canadian experiment allows me to live my faith in a way that’s aligned with my values, and I think Alberta (wants) the same sovereignty and a way of living that’s aligned with its values.”
After the Canada-U.S. trade war intensified, though, Shergill told me that he no longer intends to vote for Alberta independence, as the world is too uncertain now and “entertaining these questions (about independence) right now … creates jeopardy for what kind of future we might have.” He thought that some parts of the Alberta independence movement were coalescing with Trump’s MAGA movement and that there was a risk that it might take on some of MAGA’s more ethnonationalist and anti-democratic elements.
Writing this article has actually forced me to re-evaluate why I want Alberta to stay in Canada, especially since I don’t even live in Canada right now and don’t have concrete plans to return. I want to say it’s because I think that Canada is a family — diverse ethnoculturally and also ideologically, but a family nonetheless — and that it’s both Alberta’s responsibility and Alberta’s privilege to contribute to the welfare of the rest of this vast family.
Maybe, though, it’s just because I grew up loving Canada and can’t imagine returning to something that is no longer Canada. As another Chinese-Canadian man abroad once put it to me, “My heart bleeds red and white.” (I realize, of course, that I am not living through any economic pain in Alberta, nor can I personally feel it if the rest of the country is taking advantage of or not listening to us.)
Even if we might disagree about the way forward, I respect how much these pro-independence immigrants and visible minorities want to improve their adopted land, whether that be Alberta or Canada as a whole. As Wang said, “This is my patriotic act (for) Canada.” Perhaps it sounds counterintuitive, but I believe she’s sincere.
I just hope my parents’ votes will reflect what my patriotic act for Canada would be — and, for decency’s sake, that those in my mother’s congregation who don’t even want to be Canadian don’t vote. Let them vote with their feet and just leave.
Jeffrey Mo is a Canadian freelance writer based in Taipei.
