British Columbia Loves Playing the Anti-Ottawa Card

Successive provincial governments have played the anti-Ottawa card over and over again. Duff Pattullo did so in the 1930s, first over the high cost of social expenditures for the unemployed, then over the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois Royal Commission report in the late 1930s that greater powers be given to the federal government. “We who are beyond the Rocky Mountains want to be left free to act ... we do not want to be hogtied and hamstrung, and that is exactly what will happen if this report is implemented.” W.A.C. Bennett wrapped himself in the flag of defender of provincial interests when it came to the development of electricity on both the Columbia and Peace Rivers, picking fights with the federal government and powerful Vancouver-based economic interests, and winning... Glen Clark attempted to mobilize regionalist sentiments in the summer of 1996, taking on the federal government in his defence of BC fishermen caught up in a dispute with their Alaskan counterparts over diminishing salmon stocks: “British Columbia is going to have to demand more jurisdiction over fisheries. We just cannot rely on the federal government ... They just don’t understand British Columbia.”

--Philip Resnick, The Politics of Resentment: British Columbia Regionalism and Canadian Unity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 3-4.
 

I Would Not Object to a Little Revolution Now and Again in British Columbia

British Columbia has been a province of Canada since 1871, but it has always been an awkward partner in Confederation. From the very beginning, its political leaders threatened to go their own way if Ottawa failed to live up to the terms of its agreement to build a railway to the Pacific within ten years. “I would not object to a little revolution now and again in British Columbia, after Confederation, if we were treated unfairly; for I am one of those who believe that political hatreds attest the vitality of the state,” argued Amor de Cosmos, one of BC’s early premiers. In 1876, the BC legislature, unhappy with delays in the construction of the transcontinental railway, passed a motion threatening secession from Canada. Not for nothing did John A. Macdonald come to describe British Columbia as “the spoilt child of the dominion.”

--Philip Resnick, The Politics of Resentment: British Columbia Regionalism and Canadian Unity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 3.