Omayra asks an important question, especially given the current political climate in western Canada. Whether or not you agree with or believe in it, it holds power in its ability to stir people's emotions. https://twitter.com/OmayraIssa/status/1323016302831706113

It's first and foremost a concept tied most closely to western non-Indigenous settlement and extractive industries eg agriculture, timber, mining -- though Ottawa has it's own terrible history with Indigenous peoples.

Often, Louis Riel and both the 1869 and 1885 resistance movements have been (rightly or wrongly) classified as examples of eruptive sentiments of western alienation -- people whose needs, wants and rights were ignored by Ottawa.

Western alienation is inextricably tied to Canadian identity-- Canada as a nation that has grown and changed over time. That's how it's studied, as if Canada in today's form is the apex. But within that narrative, struggle and colonization are visible scars.

An example of colonization is the annexation of Rupert's Land, sold by the Hudson's Bay Company to Canada. It wasn't their land to sell, of course, but British law said otherwise.

With the purchase and annexation, western Canada became the scene of Ottawa attention. Treaties. Resistance movements. Surveys. Railroads. Law and order via NWMP. Really: tools of brutal subjugation and destructive colonization of Indigenous peoples; wholesale remaking of west.

Sir JA Macdonald and his National Policy -- every Canadian kid learns it in high school as a tale of nation building, vision, unification, progress and triumph.

(Aside: it's hugely ironic that many who ardently defend JA Macdonald and oppose toppling his statues turn around and vote Wexit, with great anger at Ottawa, just as ardently. My eyebrows rise).

The National Policy writ large combined high tariffs (to allow eastern Canadian manufacturing to boom) with building a railroad and encouraging immigration to western Canada. This was unabashedly designed to create wealth, for people and companies mostly in eastern Canada.

Railroad and tariff policies didn't elicit support in western Canada, since they kept cost of goods high out west. Yet the Territorial Gov't and postage stamp Manitoba didn't have a lot of political weight.

Did you know that when Saskatchewan and Alberta were created as provinces in 1905, they were not granted the right to control the Crown land within their borders? Second class provinces. That rankled -- badly -- and still resonates. (Rights handed over in 1930.)

Western populist parties, movements and organizations used the litany of grievances against Ottawa to build support. You see it everywhere from Grain Growers associations to wheat pools to political parties. It's Politics 101 in western Canada: 1000 Ways To Be Mad At Ottawa.

Another issue that contributes to western alienation is the sheer political scale and size of Quebec and Ontario. So many times throughout our shared political history, an election was finished and won before any vote west of Ontario was even counted.

The imbalance in voting power matters somewhat less when a lot of western ridings are won by the same party that is shaping up to take power in the east.

But when a party gets power in Ottawa -- majority or minority -- with no or few western ridings, there is an *immediate* surge in western alienation, including calls for separation.

The Liberal govt of Pierre Trudeau of 1980 is a strong example -- only 2 Liberal seats between Ontario border and BC, both in Manitoba. There were *immediate* cries of 'taxation without representation' and 'disenfranchisement of the west'.

That led to the rise (and subsequent fall) of a number of separatism parties, such as Western Canada Federation (West-Fed) and Western Canada Concept parties.

Western Alienation was used during the 1990s Reform and related movements, but rebranded not as separatism but via the slogan "The West Wants In" to an equal partnership in Canadian federalism, support, power and future.

In their push, western alienation was a tool to gain widespread support, which launched a huge dynasty of Reform and Canadian Alliance MPs.

The current eruption of western alienation-- again, following a Trudeau Liberal win with no usable number of seats in western Canada -- more closely follows the separatism movement of 1980-81, when West Fed and WCC flourished for a moment.

With Wexit re-branded -- as the Buffalo Party in Saskatchewan, for example, plus Maverick and Wildrose and others in Alberta, all with slightly different agendas -- it will be, in part, a race to see what group can capture and collate the energy, provincial or federal.

(They have to figure out what their movement wants, or they will disintegrate, but that's another thread).

In the end, history has been pretty clear: western alienation is a force that political parties fuel, flame and fight. It has been used to both enter more completely into Canadian decisionmaking, change it, or to leave it via separation.

Yet it's also a quality of the western Canadian consciousness: western alienation becomes so much a part of you as to be bred in the bone, so invisible that it can be hard to explain.

We recognize it, 'see' it every time the west is passed over, dismissed, or a policy is created or a TV show produced that dismisses, ignores, belittles or simple forgets about the west. Those incidents, deliberate or not, add to the litany of grievance. #westernalienation