Queen's University law professor Bruce Pardy says the only serious plan to fix Canada runs through an Alberta exit.

Pardy, who is also executive director of Rights Probe, joined Sheila Gunn Reid and Lise Merle on Wednesday's Buffalo Roundtable to explain why he has taken up the cause of Western independence. His answer? “Because they're right.”

“Canada as a country has become unhinged,” Pardy said. “The Canada that people have in their heads is not the one that now exists. And if anything, Albertans may be more Canadian in the traditional sense than any other place in the country, but that Canada is gone.”

That led him to what he admitted sounds like a contradiction: “To save Canada, Alberta has to leave Canada.” Whether that straightens out the rest of the country is beside the point, he added. “That's not Alberta's job to fix the rest of the country. Alberta's job is to save itself.”

“There is no other plan that I have heard of to reform Canada in any kind of fundamental way other than a border separation,” Pardy added.

Sheila said most independence-minded Westerners aren't anti-Canada. “I wish them the best of luck with their terrible choices, but they shouldn't be the anchor around my leg when I'm trying to swim to shore,” she said, arguing that federalist arguments in the West rest on nostalgia for a country that now survives mainly in places like Alberta.

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Pardy warned that nostalgia is the trap. “Some Albertans may believe that the Canada that they have in their head still exists and that's what they're reluctant to give up,” he said. “If they understood what the rest of Canada has become, they would understand that that's already gone.”

To federalists urging loyalty to country, he offered a rejoinder: “Loyalty is reciprocal. If your country is disloyal to you and your interests and you are still loyal to it, then you're not a patriot.”

Pardy pointed to the Maritimes, where he said people describe their own culture as communitarian, “not a far cry from communism, socialism and all the things that we've come to associate Canada with.”

“I have come to the conclusion that the political cultures in these places is not just different. It is incompatible,” he continued. “This federation no longer makes sense because you have peoples in it that see things in a completely different way.”

Sheila, a sixth-generation Albertan, noted Quebec is credited with a distinct culture while Alberta's own is dismissed as “quaint and hickish.”

“Alberta has always been a resource colony of the Laurentian Empire,” responded Pardy.

The Buffalo Roundtable streams live Wednesdays at 11 a.m. MT / 1 p.m. ET.