A person wears an Alberta First hat while taking part in signing a petition that seeks to have a referendum on Alberta separation in Stony Plain, Alta., on Jan. 22.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Jerry White is a professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan and, for winter term 2026, a visiting professor at Université Laval. He is the author of It’s Nation Time: A Progressive Defence.
Alberta separatism is extremely strange. That’s not because Alberta doesn’t have legitimate grievances against the federal government or a distinctive culture that is different from other parts of Canada. It has both those. What Alberta doesn’t have is a national identity.
The Wild Rose province isn’t like Scotland, Quebec, or Catalonia. Everyone can more or less agree these are “stateless nations.” Maybe you think those nations should have their own state, maybe you don’t, but they follow a well-worn political pattern. Albertan separatists, on the other hand, are trying to create a state with no nation. That does not follow a well-worn political pattern. Nobody has ever done this.
The definition of the word “nation” is famously the subject of an entire academic library worth of theorizing. We can summarize by saying that nations are communities of people where, even though everybody could not possibly know each other personally (something that the most widely read theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, mentions), there exists a powerful sense of a shared history and a shared future. This is an identity that is visible to and affirmed by insiders and outsiders alike, an affirmation that is legitimized by what the French thinker Ernest Renan, in his 1882 address to the Sorbonne, famously called “a daily plebiscite.”
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That affirmation can come through more formal kinds of plebiscites too. To keep matters close to home, recall that in November, 2006, Stephen Harper’s government introduced a motion to “recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” It passed overwhelmingly, 266 to 16. This followed a 2003 motion in Quebec’s legislature (what’s that called again? Ah yes, the Assemblée nationale) which stated “que l’Assemblée nationale réaffirme que le peuple québécois forme une nation.” (“The National Assembly reaffirms that the Quebec people form a nation.”) That one passed unanimously.
That is a key point. The Quebec government was then led by Jean Charest’s Liberals. It was federalist. The idea that Quebec is a nation is not divisive in Quebec, not an idea that separatists think is super and federalists think is dumb. It is basically a matter of consensus among political actors there. What they disagree on is whether the Quebec nation is better off inside or outside of the Canadian confederation.
This affirmation goes back a ways. In 1839, Lord Durham, tasked with writing a report on the causes of the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, worked on the assumption that there was a conflict between two nations who had trouble living under the same Crown. Writing early in the report in terms that anticipated Renan’s “daily plebiscite” metaphor,” Durham marvelled that, “The national feud forces itself on the very senses, irresistibly and palpably, as the origin or the essence of every dispute which divides the community.” The terms “nation,” “national,” and “nationality” were on basically every page. Durham was no friend to that distinct nationality, which he saw as destined to pass into assimilation. But he could see it.
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Who sees that in Alberta? When has any elected deputy of Alberta’s legislature, let alone literally every single one of them, loudly and publicly affirmed that on behalf of their constituents they perceive Alberta as a nation? Are there any historical instances whatsoever of outside observers seeing Albertans as a nation that would compare to such seminal documents as the Durham Report?
The Buffalo Declaration, written by four Alberta members of Parliament, speaks of Alberta as a “subnational” state, which only affirms my position; in that document “national” implicitly but clearly refers to Canada. Even separatist leaders use the word “nation” sparingly. The Alberta Prosperity Project’s manifesto, The Value of Freedom: A Draft Fully Costed Fiscal Plan for an Independent Alberta, lives up to its title by speaking in exclusively financial terms; even then it can only refer to Alberta as a nation using somewhat sideways language. When it states that “a sovereign Alberta could become one of the lowest taxed and regulated nations in the world, rivalling jurisdictions similar to Dubai and Monaco,” it could just as easily substitute “state” for “nation.” That document actually does a better job being clear about Indigenous nationhood, like when it speaks of “ensuring [that] Indigenous nations fully control their own lands in perpetuity and achieve sustainable independence.” But it doesn’t explicitly present this as a nation-to-nation matter, something that is the hallmark of Indigenous political negotiation. Oddly, though, the Indigenous end of that hallmark is present in the document. Even in separatist discourse, it’s the Alberta nation that dares not speak its name.
Again, a Quebec comparison is relevant. The website of the Grand Council of the Crees describes their 2020 MOU on James Bay this way: “La Grande Alliance is an agreement for collaboration and consolidation of socio-economic ties between the Cree and Quebec nations to connect, develop and protect the territory.” Do their Cree brethren further west speak so easily about their connections with “the Alberta nation”?
It’s clear that Alberta (the place where I have lived longest in my life) is not like Ontario, any more than the Maritimes are (I also lived eight years in Dartmouth). These places are all homes to distinct cultures. But in none of those three places do we find sustained instances of diverse groups of both insiders and outsiders clearly referring to them as repositories of a national identity other than “Canadian.” Before she became Premier, Danielle Smith published an opinion piece in the Calgary Herald suggesting that Alberta might become a “nation within a nation.” In November, 2021 Scott Moe deployed the same formulation. Neither one publicly used that expression again, no doubt because both could see that the word “nation” had little purchase on the Prairies apart from meaning “Canada.”
Alberta separatism, then, is something new: an attempt to build a nation-less state. This absence does not seem to be a matter of utopian globalism. Rather it seems born of indifference, as the movement’s leaders blow right past the fact that nobody (including them) speaks of Alberta as a nation and try to jump straight to the business of cutting pipeline deals and sucking up to Central American dictators. But this could very well backfire. If Albertans declare that they are not Canadian, but nobody either inside or outside of Alberta really recognizes the existence of a concrete and definable Alberta nation, then is it really so hard to imagine (as some separatists have been clear that they do) the neighbouring giant national formation rushing to fill that vacuum and being very happy about getting their hands on all that oil while they’re at it?