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I'm not that familiar with the culture of western Canada, but don't people there have very shallow roots? Aren't most of them, if they're not foreign, from eastern Canada within a few generations? I find it hard to believe that such people would separate. It's a totally different situation in Quebec.
It would also become harder to sell their oil unless British Columbia left with them.
Well, that depends on where you go in Western Canada- even those provinces are not the same.
For instance, if you go to Manitoba (and to a point, Saskatchewan) there's a significant chunk of that population with native ancestry that goes back to the earliest French contact (which is why the word that describes being a half-breed, 'métis'(1), is French), and this faction was politically powerful enough in the late 1860s to rebel hard enough to force the newly-created government of Canada to create the province as a distinct entity in the first place. So ancestral roots of a non-trivial portion of the people who live there run a bit deeper than those of the average western US state, and that's reflected in its governance even today.
Manitoba doesn't have many resources as the land to its West does, mainly because the province is one giant peat bog whose total theoretical arable land is basically 50% underwater (so... not great for farming)- Minnesota may be the land of 10,000 lakes, but Manitoba's title of the land of 100,000 lakes is actually kind of underselling it given its three largest bodies of water are roughly the size of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. If you want a better look at where economic activity is possible in Manitoba, it is illustrative to look at its 1870 border... which to this day, still encompasses every city and town in the province with a population over 15000; this further speaks to a shockingly bad distribution of resources.
The land gets easier to work as you go west to Saskatchewan; which had fewer people and was populated later by the typical settler population one would expect to see in western US states. Most of its land is above ground this time (it is the flattest province) and the granite slab ends in this province- plus, it has some oil, so while there are less people they're wealthier on average. Most famous for its universal healthcare system (which would be used as a model for every other province) and competently-run government; traditionally a purple state like the Dakotas and Montana, much like Manitoba, for the same reasons (and the same kind of immigrant population).
Alberta is a different animal since it actually has economic opportunity thanks to its oil fields; both of its major cities contain an order of magnitude more people than those in Saskatchewan. Cold Texas is the right way to describe it- the land in Alberta is 1/6th desert, 1/3rd mountains, and the growing season is much shorter around the major population centers due to their latitude, but the province has managed its wealth well enough to diversify (the existence of non-resource-extraction jobs being something that, along with the relative ease of building homes on its land, have kept prices to reasonable levels while still allowing rapid expansion).
BC is... well, a lot like Washington in that the two major cities on the ocean and the rest of the province tend to find themselves at odds politically, for most of the same reasons.
If push came to shove separation-wise, I think BC could quite easily be torn in half more or less along the 52nd parallel- Vancouver is probably powerful enough, and its culture common enough, to retain both the cities below that line and the various islands that depend on Vancouver to survive, but I don't think it's powerful enough to keep Kitimat (which is currently the sea route Alberta is already using to sell its oil).
I do too, but for the exact opposite reason: it's that significant sections of Upper Canada are generally, by and large, OK with rule by Western Canada. It's both Lower Canada (that is to say, Quebec) and the Maritime provinces that generally aren't- the latter are relevant because they're essentially the Rust Belt of the nation and fully dependent on handouts ever since the Grand Banks were destroyed... which naturally puts them at odds with provinces that would like to keep more of their own economic output. They've been in decline for the past 3 decades and the average resident age of the province that took the brunt of it is pushing 50, with the others not fairing much better at an average of 45.
As far as Quebec goes... well, I defer to Kulak on that one, though I think the bureaucracy in Ottawa (and to a point, Toronto) also counts as intentionally hostile. Perhaps the attempts to inculcate hostility in these power bases against the rest of the country actually was an attempt at long-term strategy?
(1) Pronounced the way a pirate refers to his crew, not "meh-tiss".
Wait, what? I've never heard it this way. (4th gen Western Canadian checking in -- I guess that's more than 'a few' but considering that people were still going overland in wagons 5 generations before my birth it's indeed rare to be much higher without native ancestry)
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