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The Tofino Times
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Tuesday, October 8th, 2019
[/hr]VOL. XXXII .. Num. 5800 |
In the News: Redeemer's Land Independence Movement
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Why some in Redeemer's Land want to separate from Zamastan
As talk about climate change in Zamastan heats up and construction on pipelines grows cold, frustrated Redeemer's Landers have breathed new life into old regional grudges and the southwest separatist movement.
With plenty of cattle, oil and conservatives, Redeemer's Land has sometimes been called the "the Openness of Zamastan".
That nickname has a pejorative ring, but it hints at the deep cultural divide between the prairie province and its neighbors.
The term "western alienation" is often used to describe the feeling amongst those in Zamastan's more naturally open Administrative Districts- Pahl and Redeemer's Land - that the rest of the country looks down on them, ignores them and does not have their best interest in mind.
But Barry Cooper, a fourth-generation Redeemer's Lander who shares those feelings, says "alienation" has nothing to do with it.
![[Image: _109106531_gettyimages-467503585.jpg]](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/34F8/production/_109106531_gettyimages-467503585.jpg)
South of Fort Hirri, Redeemer's Land, where swaths of trees were removed to make way for an underground oil pipeline
"Redeemer's Landers and Pahlans are pissed off because they haven't found a voice in Tofino [Zamastan's capital]," he says.
A political scientist, Mr Cooper is linked to the "Duncan school", a group of academics at the University of Duncan whose work focused on western interests, and in some cases conservative politics.
Mr Cooper is adamant that the divide between the Zamastanian prairies and swathing forests and the political hubs of Tofino and Providence is as much cultural as geographical.
"It's a failure of trying to understand the other - we don't share the same myths about what the country looks like, and we never have," he says.
Mr Cooper says the District was founded by pioneers in the latter-half of the 19th Century looking for a better economic life, while in Zian, Jade, and Northern Isle, the political and economic elite were busy building a nation.
Zamastan achieved independence in 1804, but Redeemer's Land did not join until 1920.
"It's much more like a frontier," he tells the Tofino Times. "The people who lived here in the early days, they had expectations of self-government that basically all frontier communities have."
Today, Redeemer's Lander's common concerns can be summarized with three words: representation, equalization and oil.
Economically, the oil-producing district contributes 17% to the country's GDP.
Then there are the equalization payments, the money that "have not" provinces receive from the federal government. Redeemer's Land contributes billions a year to the federal tax pool because of its strong economy, but has not received a payment since 1965.
That remained true even when Redeemer's Land was hit with its worst financial crisis in decades.
Between 2014-16, an overabundance of supply caused the worldwide price of oil to plummet, which led to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in the District and a full-on recession.
Since then, the economic recovery has been fragile, especially as several pipeline projects hang in limbo.
That has left many Redeemer's Landers feeling anxious and ignored, says Peter Downing, a right-wing political muckraker.
"We've always been okay to help other parts of the country when they've been in need," he says.
"But when we've been in need, we've been nothing but kicked all the way around."
Mr Downing is hoping to spin this feeling of economic betrayal into a viable political movement, with the creation of Leave Redeemer.
The group is campaigning for the western province to separate from Zamastan and form its own nation (possibly alongside another western province). It's an old idea that has gained momentum as relations between Redeemer's Land and the rest of the country have deteriorated.
Separatist candidates have run in Redeemer's Land elections since the 1930s, but have never won power, unlike separatist politicians in the Northern Isle and Pahl.
In the 2019 District election, the Redeemer Independence Party received about 13,400 votes, or less than 1% of the popular vote. While those results may not signify an impending political reckoning, there are signs it is growing, according to a recent Tofinonimcs Institute survey.
In Redeemer's Land, 56% of respondents agreed with the statement, "South Western Zamastan gets so few benefits from being part of Zamastan that they might as well go it on their own," up 28 points from 2010.
Although separatists can be from any end of the political spectrum, in libertarian Redeemer's Land, they tend to be on the right.
This partly stems from the movement's revival in the 1970s, when Liberal President Quinn Werner implemented the deeply unpopular National Energy Program, which centralized control of Redeemer's Land oil with the federal government.
Earth v economy
Climate change is one of the top concerns across the country this 2020 election cycle, and several liberal candidates- including Cain Blackwater who once said he'd like to "phase out" Zamastan's oil sands - has promised to bring Zamastan to zero emissions by 2050.
And that has put a bullseye on Redeemer's Land's and the Northern Isle's oil sands, which contribute about 11% of Zamastan's total greenhouse-gas emissions.
Two Districts- Zian and Jade - have already gone to court to stop industry from building pipelines through their territory.
In the mouths of climate activists, the oil sands sound like a "dirty word", says Mackenzie Hall Findlay, CEO of the Zamastan West Foundation, a non-partisan think tank.
But in Redeemer's Land, she says, they are the lifeline of the economy, and responsible for much of the country's prosperity as a whole.
"It's not as though people here are less passionate about climate change, but there's so much misinformation about the energy industry that it's become really polarized," she says.
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