The Toronto Star offers his column which misses the big picture.

The referendum in Alberta showed a lot of things. Number one: The movement skews in isolated areas with an aging population, and even then, the sum total was a mere vocal minority.

The Alberta separatists hung among themselves, and developed an Us versus Them mentality where they saw themselves as being superior to the rest of Canada. Being rural, they owned more land than urban voters. This was the opposite of what happened in the former Yugoslavia: the urban dwellers voted to leave. The rural voters wanted to stay. The actual fight was that the urban voters wanted the whole they were not entitled to owning. The ones who wanted to stay were farmers and they had much more land than the city dwellers. Neither side had a pulse on the other.

In this case, the vocal minority didn’t have the numbers and they didn’t have a pulse on the whole. That ignorance proved to be fatal to the cause.

But it goes even deeper than that.

The column excuses the separatists as being “frustrated,” except that it assumes that frustration is the defining impetus of wanting to secede. The referendum never asked, “Are you frustrated?” because if it did, it would have found a lot more people who would have said, “Yes!”, but they had no intention of tearing down what took decades to build, risk a civil war, and weaken themselves for a pipe dream.

And if you gave that referendum to the entire country, there would a lot of people saying “Yes!” but savvy enough not to weaken their standing by removing access and resources that took a long time to build.

Frustration is a real emotion, but it’s not one that is confined to one side of an issue.

The separatists talked themselves into a simplistic solution: if they only left these losers behind, they would do so much better, and all their problems would be magically solved. It is one in-group who is primed to look down on an out-group.

The separatists were like the unhappy spouse who wants to leave, thinking they can just not have anything to do with their former partner again, except there is property to divvy up, child support and alimony to pay, and having to deal with your vindictive spouse weekly who has the means to make your life miserable and has more resources do to it than you.

All of a sudden, you can’t realize your plans because your resources have been cut off from you, and the person you dumped your spouse for had no interest in you: they just wanted to stick it to you and your spouse and drain your resources.

It’s not frustration. It is a failure to see the reality of the situation, and maybe the problem is that you didn’t exactly exhaust your other options.