National self-determination is no bad thing. After World War I, during which imperial powers such as Britain, France, and Germany squandered millions of lives for nothing, President Woodrow Wilson called for an end to the old order. In his speech of January 8, 1918, to a joint session of Congress, he said: “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by.” His famous “Fourteen Points” articulated a vision of a world in which old empires respected the sovereignty of nations, secret deals were banished to the past, diplomacy was conducted in the open, and the interests of national populations were afforded just as much consideration as the territorial claims of their leaders. Although the United States ultimately failed to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s intellectual framework helped lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of the United Nations and the era of liberal internationalism that followed.

Among today’s sovereign nations — many of them, in various respects, beneficiaries of Wilson’s vision — where does Canada stand? And, more pointedly, what is the place of the prairie province of Alberta within it? Roughly the size of France but home to only five million people, and landlocked to boot, Alberta is considered by some to be a victim of the bad old colonial ways. The province, along with neighboring Saskatchewan, was carved out of the North West Territories by an act of the Canadian Parliament in 1905. Prior to that, for much of the colonial period, its vast land mass had been controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, exploited through the fur trade — beaver pelts, pemmican, and the wider provisioning economy that sustained it.

That same year, Sir Clifford Sifton, Liberal minister of the interior and superintendent general of Indian affairs, said publicly: “We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire, that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work, and in every legitimate way to our prosperity.” More than a century later, these words are far from forgotten. Those who nurture Western grievances see the province as having been established rather like the provinces of the old Roman empire. In a provocative article published in the wake of the anti-vaccine, anti-Trudeau “Freedom Convoy,” David Solway wrote for C2C magazine that “the Prairie provinces were regions dominated by the ruling, administrative center to whom they owed fealty and paid tribute.” On this view, Ottawa is Rome, in the grip of the patrician “Laurentian elite,” and Alberta is a mere tributary.