I was in Vancouver the day Paul Martin’s government fell. It was only mid-afternoon there, but in Ottawa the votes had already been tallied, the deciding done. All a little disconcerting for a Nova Scotian inured to the inevitability that critical parliamentary votes must happen in prime time, which is to say Ontario time.

The clock wasn’t the only indicator that, while I was still in my country, my country is very different on the other coast. Consider the sign beside the elevator in my hotel warning me not to use it in the event of an earthquake. Or the city’s ubiquitous café culture with its competing Starbucks outlets staring across the street at one another. Or bilingualism. Officially, it means English and French there too, of course, but savvy Vancouver shopkeepers knows it makes good retail sense to advertise their wares in Chinese as well.

Joe Clark was right. Canada really is a community of communities. But these days, the walls separating those silo-ed, bricked-in communities often seem higher and more impenetrable than Mount Robson, British Columbia’s highest peak.

If you want to understand what I mean in political terms, consider Alberta, the province to the right of B.C. (and much of the civilized world).

One of the benefits of the fact the Daily News now posts my ponderous ponderings on its web pages is that people in places I wouldn’t expect — like Alberta — sometimes read what I write. And, often as not, disagree with it. Sometimes vociferously.

In a couple of pre-confidence-vote columns, for example, I mused about the dilemma facing many Canadian voters as we head back to the polls. While “we would love to kick the Liberal bastards out,” I wrote last month, “we wake up the next morning and smack up against the frightening reality of what doing that could actually mean. Stephen Harper as prime minister! So we swallow our bile and go back to the Liberals.”

That prompted a number of unamused emails from western Canadian readers, including one from Patrick Carroll of Red Deer, Alberta, who summed up the prevailing winds in his community of communities by arguing that the very idea of my suggesting the Tories could be more frightening “than the arrogant, corrupt and incompetent Liberals [is indicative of] the debased character of Canadian voters and the sorry state of our society’s moral compass.”

In truth, he wasn’t referring to generic “Canadian” voters so much as to those of us in the east who appeared to him to lack even a reality compass. “Do eastern Canadians wish to see the country run into the ground before making the switch,” he demanded, “or do they believe that there is no level of corruption and incompetence high enough to eject the Liberals in favour of the ‘scary’ Conservatives?”

Perhaps, he added, with what seemed a mixture of bitterness and menace, we in the handout-dependent east with our embedded culture of defeat should consider the potential for western alienation to morph into support for outright separation if we keep making such wrong and wrong-headed choices at the ballot box.

“Albertans are becoming very receptive to the idea of becoming a separate country to get away from the stifling collectivist views of the eastern-centric Liberal power base,” he wrote. “If the Canadian federation cannot be amended to restore the more equitable distribution of powers that came with Confederation, then the reaction of Westerners will eventually be that the federation can’t be fixed and should be abandoned. The first step to renewing the federation will thus be to send the Liberals packing. Otherwise it could be game over for the country as we know it, and sooner than you think.”

It would be a mistake, of course, to see this as simply a geographical divide.

There are plenty of Atlantic Canadians who would agree with another of my western correspondents, Edward Bopp of Tsawwassen, B.C., who wrote that Canada’s real problem is that it is “precariously held together by our collective hand-wringing about universal health/day care, same-sex marriages, pot decriminalization, equalization payments and other assorted so-called Canadian ‘values’ … all defining our moral ‘superiority’ over the great unwashed south of the border.”

Just as there are plenty of western Canadians who share my fear of Stephen Harper for all of the same reasons, and more.

But the divide is also, in part at least, geographical. Albertans, still nursing a sense of grievance against the Liberals for the long gone but never forgotten nor forgiven National Energy Program, can’t bring themselves to credit the Liberals with doing even a few of the things — balancing the budget, paying down the debt — they claim to want.

Atlantic Canadians, on the other hand, can’t get past Stephen Harper’s Alberta-centric, socially conservative world view, even when some of what he says is worth considering.

Harper, who is often his own worst enemy, did not make us any less frightened when he opened his campaign by reopening, unprompted, the already-settled marriage debate. Though he came up with a considerably more universally popular (though no less questionable) vote-getter when he pledged a Tory government would cut the GST, the fear of what a Harper administration might really mean for this country’s (and this region’s) collective sense of itself is still alive and well.

At least it is in this particular community of communities.

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel and nine books of non-fiction, including the best-selling Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair...