Separate out May 16, 2025 Letters to Editor, Globe and Mail
Re “We wasted 60 years indulging secessionist fantasies in Quebec. Must we make the same mistake in Alberta?” (May 14): Columnist Andrew Coyne argues there is no moral case for Alberta separating from Canada, and there is no legal case to do so. The political process seems intractable.
There is another complication for Alberta’s project: While Danielle Smith has said Alberta would honour treaties with Indigenous peoples, they are actually treaties with the Crown, signed before Alberta became a province.
Many of the treaties cross over boundaries with other jurisdictions. Is the Premier suggesting that Alberta has the right to sever a treaty?
I doubt the Supreme Court would not think the treaties are single entities and thus not divisible.
Peter Woolstencroft, Department of political science, University of Waterloo
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Danielle Smith says she doesn’t want Alberta to separate, but then makes it sound like there is a crisis in Alberta. She talks about giving separatists their voice, yet I believe their position is a direct result of her actions.
She can’t tell people how badly they’ve been treated, take the feds to court when she doesn’t like a national policy, then act like she had nothing to do with the rise of separatism.
It would take years and millions, if not billions, of dollars to negotiate even a shortlist of what these separatists are asking for (and for which a majority of Albertans never asked for). And what about First Nations lands, which cover a huge portion of the province?
Danielle Smith seems to love making demands.
Well, I have a demand for her: Quit wasting our time, money and energy, and start working within the Canadian framework.
Leona Yez Edmonton
@watershedlab.bsky.social May 16, 2025:
Alberta Premier demands @mark-carney.bsky.social build a pipeline to Prince Rupert. Besides the childish demanding, there are important marine geohazards reasons why that could be a spectacularly foolish idea
Canada’s west coast is inundated with narrow, steep-sided glacially carved valleys called fjords.
Glacially oversteepened rock walls have a bad habit of collapsing. And when that happens over water, tsunamis are often generated. Check out this mini documentary about one such event a decade ago, featuring yours truly and a bunch of my colleagues www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwjO…
Now, most tsunamis are triggered by particular kinds of earthquakes and when they happen in the open ocean, the resulting wave is generally small (tens of cm) until it reaches the coast, where it grows to tens of meters, like we saw in 2004 in Sumatra and Thailand and in 2011 in Japan (and others!)
However, in fjords (which, recall, are narrow and steep sided) the water can’t displace outwards very easily, so it moves upwards. In some cases, HUNDREDS OF METERS upwards. www.nature.com/articles/s41…
The 2015 landslide and tsunami in Taan Fiord, Alaska
The most famous example, was at Lituya Bay, Alaska, where a landslide in 1958 triggered a >500m-high landslide. Think about that for a second.
1958 Lituya Bay earthquake and megatsunami
OK, let’s get back to the story. Have we had large landslide-triggered tsunamis on Canada’s west coast historically? Yep. Sometimes in lakes, like in Elliot Lake, in the Bute Inlet catchment.
And sometimes in marine settings, such as in 1975 in Douglas Channel near Kitimat (just one fjord south of Prince Rupert)
What about older than historic? As geologists, we are acutely aware that recurrence intervals for large catastrophic events can be greater than human timeframes. Well, yep there are some of those too.
Following the proposal for Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline corridor to Kitimat, marine surveys were conducted and two very large submarine landslides were discovered (each >30,000,000 m3) and thought to be between 5000 and 10,000 years old.
“So what” you might say. “That’s TEN THOUSAND YEARS ago!” Well, 10,000 isn’t really that long in geological time. And I suspect there are more slides to be discovered. We need complete multibeam sonar and seismic surveys of the entire west coast to really nail down the recurrence intervals.
The environmental risk – to ecosystems, to traditional Indigenous ways of life, to recreation along the coast, to fisheries, etc etc – is simply too great to fathom without substantially more data. And of course that ignores the massively stupid idea of pumping yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. End
In case it isn’t startlingly obvious, think about what would happen to an oil tanker (or two or ten) if they were in a fjord and a 100m-high tsunami ripped through.
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Jann Arden: “You guys are a bunch of creepy little pricks. Alberta will never separate from Canada.”
@888lin.bsky.social:
Right on Jann!!