Regional Outlook : Disillusionment on Canada’s Prairie : A new political party’s message is ‘west first.’ And that theme is catching on in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

When Canada-watchers look north for clues on how well this vast, diverse nation is holding together, they usually set their sights on Quebec, the French-speaking province in the east that periodically makes noises about independence.

These days, though, they might just as well turn their gaze west, toward Canada’s prairie heartland.

Here in this tiny town in Alberta province, for instance, about two dozen citizens turned out on a recent evening in the local recreation center to discuss, amid the crashing of bowling balls, the need for a thorough revision of the national agenda. They had not a good word to say about the policies emanating from Ottawa, Canada’s capital. In their own way, they expressed convictions just as strong as those of the French-speaking supporters of sovereignty in Quebec, 1,500 miles to the east.

“We’re bankrupt. We’re broke. We’re in a mess,” said Bob Slavik, a retired physician and activist for the Alberta-based Reform Party, who co-chaired the meeting. Slavik called for massive changes in the way Canada operates: constitutional amendments, a restructuring of the Parliament, deep budget cuts, the scrapping of all Indian treaties. His listeners seemed to like his ideas; a number of them plunked down a small membership fee and joined the Reform Party at the end of the meeting.

The scene in Thorsby is being repeated in town halls, living rooms and hockey arenas all across the West as fed-up locals give traditional Canadian parties the slip and rush to join the Reform Party. Unlike the backers of sovereignty in Quebec, the Reform Party isn’t calling for separation outright. But all the same, Canadian federalists are worried about the party’s rapid growth, since its West-first message--coming at a time of heightened regional tension--promises to drive this country’s geographic wedges even deeper.

The burgeoning Reform Party isn’t the only sign of the West’s growing alienation from the rest of Canada. Treasury officials in Alberta and British Columbia have lately been trying to find legal ways of collecting taxes themselves, to keep the federal government from taking the money away. In Saskatchewan, Premier Grant Devine has been battling the federal government--successfully so far--for the freedom to build a huge dam complex without completing strict, federally mandated environmental impact studies.

But for all this high-level regionalism, the strongest sign of western alienation comes not from officials working within the system but from ordinary people on the outside--the disillusioned citizens flocking to join the Reform Party.

“They believe the (ruling Progressive) Conservatives have sold them out,” says Alan Tupper, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alberta.

The Reform Party didn’t even exist until October, 1987. Now it claims more than 52,000 members, with 3,000 more signing up each month, many of them disgusted defectors from Canada’s governing party, the Progressive Conservatives. When the Reform Party ran its first slate of candidates in 1988 federal elections, it didn’t win a single parliamentary seat. But soon afterward, a member died in office, a by-election was held, and a Reform Party member won handily.

Six months later, another Reform Party candidate was elected to the Canadian Senate, the upper house of Parliament, by defeating the closest of his six opponents by a 2-to-1 margin. (The Canadian Senate is, in fact, an appointed body, but Prime Minister Brian Mulroney accepted the vote and nominated the winner eight months later.)

Political analysts are predicting that if another parliamentary election were held today, the Reform Party would win up to 40 more seats in the 295-member House of Commons, Parliament’s lower house. Although that is far from enough to make a majority, such a showing could give the pro-West party significant influence in today’s Canada, where the two main traditional parties--the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals--are fast losing ground.

Neil Weir, a Reform Party executive in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, offers what he calls “a very likely scenario” for the next elections, which must be held before November, 1993.

In this scenario, neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the Liberals get enough votes to form a majority government, but the Socialist New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Quebecois don’t really flower either. If the Reform Party could win 40 seats in such a Parliament, Weir says, it would hold the balance of power and the ability to force its agenda on any mainstream party trying to govern.

“If you can’t be the prime minister, the next best thing is to be the party holding the balance of power,” he says. “The party with the balance of power can bring down the government, virtually at any time.”

Such a prospect is daunting to the many Canadians--especially eastern federalists--who consider the Reform Party a reactionary movement, out of sync with what it has always meant to be a Canadian. By tradition in Canada, the federal government takes money in taxes from the wealthier provinces, such as oil-rich Alberta, and applies it toward helping the poorer provinces, such as Newfoundland. To Canadians brought up in this tradition, Reform Party influence would mean not a fair shake for the West but neglect for the marginal everywhere else.

In addition, the Reformists want to cut welfare payments, end the funding of public-interest groups and screen foreign immigrants on the basis of their economic potential. They even want to forbid immigrant Sikhs to wear their turbans if they join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“They know what they’re against, but there’s no positive platform,” the University of Alberta’s Tupper says of the Reformists.

Reformists don’t like being characterized as negative reactionaries, though, and they point out that their platform also includes restructuring Canada’s discredited Senate, making members of Parliament more accountable and shrinking the budget deficit.

One of the Reform Party’s most cherished goals is the end of official bilingualism in Canada. At the moment, Canadian law requires government offices throughout the West to retain French-speaking employees who can deal with the Francophone public--even though there are few unilingual Francophones west of Quebec. Westerners have long considered this a waste of money, and now that the Canadian economy is in a recession, Reform Party calls to trim the linguistic fat fall on receptive ears.

In Edmonton, pro-West activist Alan Clark tells a story that sums up the mood. A woman in British Columbia started a small business making jam at home and selling it to health-food stores, he says. She was eventually arrested by bilingualism authorities for not listing her ingredients in French on her labels--even though French is spoken by only a tiny fraction of the British Columbia population.

Clark is the president of a group that predates the Reform Party by about a decade, the Western Independence Assn. He takes a harder line than the Reform Party, arguing that Canada doesn’t “work,” that no amount of electoral politicking can save it and that the four western provinces should split off and form a new country on their own.

Westerners are now flocking to the Reform Party instead of his Western Independence Assn., but Clark says that’s fine with him: The Reform Party “duplicates our agenda almost perfectly,” he says. He thinks every angry new westerner the Reform Party organizes brings his goal a little closer.

“The Reform Party is doing a fantastic job of educating people,” he says. “We (western separatists) are in an ‘up’ phase--not in terms of membership or money, but because our movement is so close to its conclusion.”