For more than a century, the Prairie West has powered Canada's economy while wrestling with a persistent question: who truly governs the federation?
In this deeply researched and analytically rigorous work, Elias Trent examines the structural foundations of Canada's political architecture - from the absorption of Rupert's Land and the Red River Resistance to modern equalization formulas, Senate imbalance, carbon pricing battles, and demographic divergence.
This is not a book of slogans.
It is a structural audit.
Drawing on constitutional law, fiscal data, demographic trends, and comparative federal systems in the United States, Germany, and Australia, Power, Sovereignty, and the Future of Confederation asks difficult questions:
- Were Alberta and Saskatchewan integrated as equal partners - or incorporated on unequal terms?
- Does the current structure of federal taxation and representation adequately reflect Prairie contribution and growth?
- Can meaningful decentralization occur within Confederation?
- What would independence actually cost - in debt, trade, currency, and geopolitical risk?
- Could U.S. statehood ever be viable?
- And how do treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty reshape every version of this debate?
