western alienation

This sense of "western alienation", a term used to describe the feeling that the region is often overlooked by politicians in Canada's capital, is nothing new.

A populist, the brother of the Ontario Premier Doug Ford, was once mayor of the country’s biggest city, Toronto, and for years, the Reform party rallied around a sense of Western alienation and socially conservative values.

For a native Albertan to address Western alienation is a challenge, said Michael Hawes, executive director of Fulbright Canada, “but she is a successful and purposeful politician, she has entered into negotiations that were difficult, she doesn’t suffer fools easily and she clearly has the ear of the prime minister.”

But western alienation — the sense that the rest of Canada has stacked the deck against the country’s west — is as old as the country itself.

Voters there turned away from Mr Trudeau's party amid complaints that the region's interests are not represented in the capital, Ottawa, and growing talk of "western alienation" in Canada's oil-producing heartland.