western alienation

The new cabinet includes representation from Canada's prairie provinces - a minister and secretary of state - where there are growing musings about separation amid a broader sense of western alienation from the power centre in Ottawa.

This sense of "western alienation", a term used to describe the feeling that the region is often overlooked by politicians in Canada's capital, is nothing new.

A populist, the brother of the Ontario Premier Doug Ford, was once mayor of the country’s biggest city, Toronto, and for years, the Reform party rallied around a sense of Western alienation and socially conservative values.

For a native Albertan to address Western alienation is a challenge, said Michael Hawes, executive director of Fulbright Canada, “but she is a successful and purposeful politician, she has entered into negotiations that were difficult, she doesn’t suffer fools easily and she clearly has the ear of the prime minister.”

But western alienation — the sense that the rest of Canada has stacked the deck against the country’s west — is as old as the country itself.