Alberta separatism has a uniquely large and immovable gender gap compared to other issues, according to a researcher who has studied the topic since 2019.
“This is actually a rare instance where men and women — controlling for all other factors — do tend to think about separatism in different ways,” said Jared Wesley, a professor in the University of Alberta’s political science department.
Wesley runs Common Ground, a research project about public opinion and political polarization in Alberta.
Thirty-five per cent of Albertans want to start the process to hold a binding referendum on separation, according to recent polling by the Angus Reid Institute.
But this number is higher among men and lower among women: 39 per cent of males want to start the process compared to only 31 per cent of females.
Men and women often answer questions about politics differently. For example, the same Angus Reid poll found that Albertan women were more likely to say their top issues were the cost of living or health care.
More Albertan men than women chose the economy or immigration and refugees as their top issues.
Once surveys control for other factors such as partisanship, socioeconomic status, and occupation, however, it is usually those variables that drive gender gaps rather than gender itself, said Wesley.
Wesley has conducted 12 surveys with nearly 15,000 Albertans over eight years. The first time his research revealed that 30 per cent of Albertans wanted to separate from Canada, he was shocked.
It “made us really think: ‘Have we got our methods right?’ because that’s a very high number,” he told The Maple.
Nevertheless, Common Ground’s ongoing research has found that support for separatism is stable — as is the fact that more men than women support it. “It is actually very rare to find a gender gap of this magnitude and this level of stability over time.”
The real drivers of separatism
Common Ground’s research, Wesley said, has found that the best predictors for separatism are the consumption of right-wing news, yearning for a better past, support for anti-establishment views and belief in conspiratorial thinking on issues like vaccines and global organizations.
“We know that all four of those things tend to be more prominent among men,” he said.
The Alberta separatist movement is also cultivating support among men more than women through its messaging and images, Wesley said.
“The stuff that gets shared through social media tends to be very masculine,” he said, describing images of mostly men who are usually wearing cowboy hats or working on the oil rigs. “By all accounts, it’s not really reaching mainstream women in Alberta.”
These images draw on “frontier masculinity,” said Wesley, which is a specific idea of masculinity that is linked to white settlement of Western Canada and the United States. Frontier masculinity emphasizes endurance, stoicism, and risk taking.
“When women are featured in that propaganda, it actually takes us back several centuries to early immigration posters,” he said.
“Women are usually pictured in white dresses that are flowing in the breeze in the middle of a wheat field, and those kinds of images that really reinforce a traditional sense of family values and what sociologists call frontier masculinity.”
Sara Dorow, another researcher who has studied mental health and concepts of gender among oil sands workers, points out that Alberta’s oil industry employs far more men than women.
“The best estimates are something like only about 13 per cent of the oil industry workforce is female or identifies as female,” she told The Maple. Given that fact, she said, it follows that industries based on resource extraction like Alberta’s oil industry come with a “masculinized culture.”
The separatist movement is also stressing economic issues, which research shows men are more likely to care about than women.
Then, there’s the “disconcerting” ways that Alberta separatists portray the province as an abused woman, Wesley said.
One image shared by a separatist Facebook page portrays Canada as a muscular man (with features reminiscent of Prime Minister Mark Carney) grabbing the arm of a woman with a black eye who represents Alberta.
Leaders of the movement like Mitch Sylvestre also reinforce traditional gender roles by making comments about getting “girls making more babies.”
“Those kinds of comments reinforced traditional gender roles that are off-putting to mainstream women in Alberta,” said Wesley.
