In the Spring of 1975, my family moved to Alberta.

We took the train from Montreal. My brothers and I would look out the windows as the country sped by in the dark, wondering what lay ahead for us.

All of us were Montreal-born Irish Catholics. We had lived outside Quebec before – a couple years in Dallas, a few more years in Kingston – but Montreal lured us back.

Montreal had it all: great culture, great restaurants, great schools. People came from all over the world to live in Montreal, and it made the place better.

If you were English, you knew how to get by in French. If you were French, you knew how to get by in English. It was really, really good – until it wasn’t.

Quebec had always had nationalists and xenophobes and separatists. Everyone knew that – the October 1970 FLQ crisis had made that very clear. But in the early 1970s, those angry people were starting to get closer to power.

The Premier, Liberal Robert Bourassa, tried to beat the separatists by accommodating them, by coddling them.

Among other things, English-speaking people were increasingly unwelcome. My Dad saw what was coming. So we left.

Arriving at the train station in Edmonton, I can’t remember my parents’ reaction. But they told me later they wondered whether we had made a mistake. Going from a diverse, vibrant bilingual city of three million people to Calgary, a much-smaller place, a place we didn’t know.

Calgary had just under 500,000 people in 1975, and I guarantee you that no Calgarian was proclaiming that it was the next Montreal. The city’s official slogan in 1975 was “Something to Smile About,” which is a catchphrase that works in two directions.

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New home in Alberta

So, Calgary wasn’t Montreal. But it became home.

In time, we discovered Calgary – Alberta – had great culture and restaurants and schools, too. It had a welcoming, entrepreneurial spirit that was completely absent in other parts of the country. It had the Rocky Mountains, just a short drive away. It had clean water, it had clean air, it had limitless skies. It had people who welcomed us into their homes and their lives.

And it had stability.

Under Peter Lougheed and his Progressive Conservatives, Alberta became an economic superpower, one that lifted up the circumstances of the entire country. Under Lougheed and his government, research and investment and learning flourished.

Back then, Alberta wasn’t just a Canadian success story – it was the Canadian success story.

But back East, resentment grew. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals concocted a policy that was effectively a mugging of Alberta with a benign name: the National Energy Program, the NEP. The NEP pretended to be an energy policy, but it was really about bringing Alberta to heel. It was about punishing Alberta for its success.

At my Calgary high school, kids I knew just disappeared – their families forced to sell their homes, forced to move away. Stores and businesses closed up. There was a real estate crash. There was massive joblessness. There was an actual recession, directly caused by Trudeau’s NEP.

Alberta separatism rises

And then, we started to see the same thing happen in Alberta that we’d seen in Quebec.

Nationalists and xenophobes and separatists started to pop up, like weeds. One of them – a guy in Olds-Didsbury who ran under the separatist Western Canada Concept banner in 1982 – actually won a seat in the Legislature.

He didn’t hold it for long – he lost his seat during the general election that followed. But after that, “Alberta separatism” became a thing. It was always there, after that, just below the surface.

Danielle Smith’s mistake – like Robert Bourassa’s mistake in Quebec, 50 years earlier – was trying to beat the separatists by accommodating them, by coddling them. I was on Jean Chretien’s staff: trust me, coddling separatists doesn’t ever work.

And, these days, Alberta federalists think Smith’s a separatist, and the separatists think she’s a federalist. She doesn’t have many friends anymore.

And the beast of separatism, which Smith recklessly unleashed in Alberta’s backyard? It’s bitten her, it’s mauling her, and it’s probably doomed her to political defeat.

Danielle Smith’s only legacy, like Robert Bourassa’s, will be legitimizing separatism. No matter how resoundingly it is defeated in tomorrow’s referendum, separatism will not now die in Alberta. It will continue. It will never go away.

If my parents were still here, I wonder what they would think? My Dad would probably shake his head and laugh. We moved to the promised land to escape separatism, he’d say.

Turned out that separatism was on the train, too, heading West.