Tyler Dawson is an Edmonton-based editor in The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section and the former Alberta correspondent for the National Post. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away.
There was a surreal scene at the Alberta United Conservative Party’s annual convention last November. The Premier, the leader of the party, got a frosty reception from the people who ought to have been her most fervent supporters. It didn’t even happen just once.
Three times, Danielle Smith either got booed (at worst) or a mixed reaction (at best) when she said she was feeling confident Canada works, that she supports a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada – her standard line – and when she implored the party’s membership to not “throw in the towel” on the country. At the same time, the crowd, frothing as they were with separatist enthusiasms, hooted and hollered for secessionist Jeffrey Rath when he asked the audience to show their support for an independent Alberta.
It didn’t matter that the Premier recovered from the boos during her keynote address, and won the crowd back over with some good conservative red meat. The headlines were set: the provincial conservative party, which in one form or another had governed the province for most of the past 50-odd years, had a separatist problem.
The support for separatism in Alberta peaks at just shy of 30 per cent, a number that has been found fairly consistently by pollsters over the past year. But the hardcore supporters, the ones who believe that Alberta should separate, whatever the consequences, are a much smaller group. The Angus Reid Institute says about eight per cent of Albertans are in that group. Ipsos pollsters, when they conducted a “stress test” on separatist support earlier this year, found that support dropped from 28 per cent to 15 or 16 per cent, as poll respondents decided they would stop supporting separatism if costs were sufficiently high.
Yet, this small group seems to have an unusual amount of power. By any stretch a minority of the provincial population, they’re on the verge of forcing the province into a divisive and damaging referendum on secession. Perhaps it’s not quite a causal relationship, but it surely can’t be a coincidence that that’s the case, and that most – probably all – separatists are conservatives. Angus Reid pollsters found that a plurality of UCP voters support separation: Sixteen per cent say they would definitely vote to leave, and a further 41 per cent say they lean that way.
That is, once you run the math, 57 per cent of UCP voters who are willing to embrace the prospect of breaking up Canada.
Jason Kenney, when he resigned as leader of the United Conservatives after failing to receive a resounding endorsement in a leadership review, lost his job in large part over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic; there was deep grassroots opposition to public-health measures within the party. Ms. Smith, when she became leader, rode that wave of populist outrage to power. In a very real sense, she owes her job to the people within her own party who hold the most extreme views. And she knows that the angriest members are capable of removing her from office; Alberta’s conservatives semi-routinely depose their own leaders.
If there’s a separatist problem in Alberta – and it looks very much like there is – it doubles as a problem for the governing conservatives. And it’s one that Ms. Smith has largely declined to address, beyond trying to tackle some of the friction points that exist between Edmonton and Ottawa. She is, to some extent, trapped, between the party membership that holds her key to office and an Alberta public with little interest in leaving Canada.
Whatever’s going on within the United Conservative Party, it is looking reasonably likely that there will be a referendum held on Alberta’s secession from Canada on Oct. 19, just one question among a suite that the provincial government intends to put before Albertans. That depends a bit on simple arithmetic. Under Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act, roughly 178,000 signatures on a petition are needed to force a referendum question. Stay Free Alberta, a separatist group, has been canvassing for more than five months; in early April, they announced they had eclipsed the threshold.
There’s the possibility that not enough signatures will be validated by Elections Alberta, bringing the whole affair to a close. The more likely path to the end of the separatists’ hopes and dreams is that the courts, which are currently weighing legal challenges to the secession referendum procedure brought by Alberta First Nations, rule against the separatists, bringing the process to a screeching halt.
Indigenous groups, which argue that Alberta separation would breach their treaty rights, have secured an initial court ruling that blocks chief electoral officer Gordon McClure from certifying the signatures or referring them to cabinet, which would then decide about holding a referendum. Although that case is in limbo, a separate petition initiated by a federalist former politician Thomas Lukaszuk could still conceivably lead to a secession referendum. Or, in theory, the Alberta government could simply call one as it has on a number of other issues.
Whatever happens, Alberta is the closest it’s ever been to a referendum on secession. It raises some tough questions about the province, about its political culture, about its relationship with the rest of Canada and what the future of Confederation might look like.
Here’s the simple reality: even if a vote is held, the separatists are unlikely to win. For those who care about Canada, that’s unquestionably a good thing. There are other questions about how damaging a divisive referendum period might be, or what effect separatist agitating could have on the investment climate in the province, but the cold reality is that if a vote’s held, the separatists are probably going to come out of it looking pretty foolish.
But given that we’re even having this discussion, something has changed. Alberta separatism is no longer a view (solely) associated with crackpots and racists. Research from the University of Alberta’s Common Ground project suggests that the average Albertan is probably what they call “separatist-curious.” They’ve internalized the historical, multitudinous grievances that the province has long nursed and are perhaps willing to hear the separatists out.
There are many potential reasons why. After all, Albertans in particular and Westerners in general have been grousing about treatment at the hands of Ottawa for well over a century.
These grievance politics are baked into the province’s culture. This didn’t stop when Alberta became a province in 1905; it spent the next couple decades feuding with Ottawa over who got control of the province’s resources. As early as 1911, Alwyn Bramley-Moore, an Alberta Liberal, was warning that secession was a risk unless Ottawa treated Alberta differently. The idea resurfaced in the 1930s when Alberta’s Social Credit government butted heads with the feds over banking regulations. And, as everyone remembers, there were reasonably influential separatist organizations that plowed fields made fertile by Pierre Trudeau’s national energy program; one of them, the Western Canada Concept, secured nearly 12 per cent of the popular vote in the 1982 provincial election.
In more recent years, there are a litany of grievances that stemmed from the policies put forth by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. While it’s poorly remembered compared to the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” to Ottawa, in 2019 aggrieved Westerners mounted a truck convoy that drove across the country to protest Liberal immigration and energy policies.
Alberta has always had an extensive populist strain running through it. And while the overwhelming majority of Albertans aren’t separatists, there is a widespread sense that Alberta is treated poorly and disrespected by the rest of the country; as recently as 2019, that was the view of 71 per cent of Albertans. Given that, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that there’s at least some curiosity about what an independent Alberta might look like. This, of course, presents an enormous risk: 30 per cent of Albertans say they’re willing to vote for an independent Alberta, but if you start asking people whether they’d vote to leave just to poke Ottawa in the eye, as Pollara Strategic Insights just did, suddenly 42 per cent of Albertans say they’d consider voting to make for the exits. That may well be a bit too close to 50 per cent for comfort, and there are a lot of these people – pro-Canada but frustrated with Alberta’s treatment.
As for the scores of thousands of Albertans who are willing to put their name on Stay Free Alberta’s petition to hold a secession referendum, at least some will have been part of the vibrant right-wing protest culture that has formed in Canada over the past decade.
These are the people who may have been at the anti-farm safety bill protests in Alberta during Rachel Notley’s tenure as premier. They may be the people who attended the Yellow Vest protests – the movement that eventually turned into that first convoy. They may be the people who were involved in the Wexit movement, or the Maverick Party, or who’ve laboured quietly in the background for decades in Alberta’s tiny separatist parties.
They may be the people who went to Ottawa in 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, or who donated, or who sympathized with the aims of the movement, skeptical of church shutdowns and vaccine passports. They may be the same people who, in 2025, protested against the slaughter of hundreds of ostriches at a B.C. poultry farm. They may see separatism as the only way to protect themselves from the Liberal government in Ottawa or from the nebulous threat of “globalism.”
Indeed, this is an albatross for the separatists. There are, surely, regular people who are separatists. But the leadership, and much separatist messaging, gets bogged down in conspiracy theory and outright falsehood. The Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), in its document setting out a budget for an independent Alberta, imagines mass deportations, a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and the absence of mRNA vaccination as a positive attribute in prospective Alberta immigrants. This sort of stuff is unlikely to sell secession to most of the province.
Certainly, there is some overlap between these various movements. When the Public Order Emergency Commission was studying Mr. Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the 2022 convoy, University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley found that nearly three-quarters of separatists supported or sympathized with the convoy; 46 per cent of convoy supporters were also separatists.
So: there’s a long-running strain of grievance that provides the backbone (intellectual and emotional) to the separatist movement, which was reinforced during the Trudeau years. Even federalists, such as Mr. Kenney, spent a great deal of time criticizing Mr. Trudeau’s policies as they pertained to Alberta. Ms. Smith, too, has had repeated fighting words for Ottawa.
Stoking outrage against Ottawa was, and is, a potent force for any Alberta politician, and it benefited Ms. Smith and Mr. Kenney (and their predecessors) mightily. It’s just that now, it’s spiralled out of their control, and reasonable people can argue over what responsibility Alberta’s leaders bear for stoking the flames of what’s become a separatist conflagration.
At the end of the day, it’s also quite simply become far easier for political fellow travellers to find one another, and this has been a potent force in building the modern separatist movement.
Time was, if you had fringe or unusual political views, it took some serious work to find community and other true believers. You would have been cut off had you phoned in to local talk radio to expound upon your politics. The letters editor at the local paper would’ve tossed your dispatches in the bin and gone on with her day. Perhaps you would have signed up for a mailed newsletter or attended the odd event; perhaps that event even got some coverage on the local evening news. But it was hard – far harder than it is now.
It’s almost too cliché to say, but it’s the truth: social media, in all likelihood, changed everything. People now have, at their fingertips, constant contact with people like them, people who think like them, who love and hate the same things and the same people. The separatist and right-wing social media ecosystem has allowed for the organization of dozens of events, the sign-up of volunteers, the emergence of podcast networks that broadcast separatist views. In a very real sense, this is as much an online community as it is a grassroots movement.
Today’s separatist movement is in almost every respect more powerful than it was decades ago, even during the NEP. Two rallies last year, one in Calgary, one in Edmonton, saw thousands of Albertans in attendance, and separatists held dozens of smaller events around the province. The leadership of the APP has boasted of meetings with U.S. administration officials south of the border, and American politicians have expressed interest in Alberta seceding from Canada. The APP, probably the most powerful separatist organization in the province, has buttressed the age-old Alberta grievances with genuine, if of debatable quality, attempts to write a budget for an independent Alberta and lay out the rationale for secession. Some not-inconsequential percentage of the ruling party’s membership are supporters of separatism. And there is a government in the province that, while it believes in a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada, has made it much, much easier for the separatists to actually get a referendum question put before Albertans.
The Overton Window – the political science term that captures the acceptable range of conversation – has shifted. And secession is, apparently, well within the range of what’s acceptable.
In fact, Ms. Smith and her party have brought this all about. Without their efforts, the separatists would likely not have gotten this close to holding a referendum – they would, rather, have remained fringe political parties or agitators holding events at community halls, and little more than that. They may have gotten loud, but they would have had no formal mechanism for forcing a referendum.
Since 2021, Alberta has had a system that allows members of the public to try and push for a referendum. They need only conceive a topic, pay a fee, and collect signatures. A year ago, a petitioner who wanted to get a referendum question before the public had to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures. But last spring, Ms. Smith’s government moved to lower that bar. They set it at 10 per cent of people who voted in the last provincial election, which amounts to just shy of 178,000 signatures. That was the first step in aiding the separatists.
Mr. Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative deputy premier, attempted to scoop the separatists in early June, by proposing his own question, framing it in a pro-Canada fashion. Mr. Lukaszuk, once his petition was approved, set out to gather signatures under the old, far higher, threshold – the legislation lowering the threshold had yet to come into effect – and he had hoped to take advantage of the rules that existed a year ago that prevented multiple petitions on the same subject. Ultimately, 438,568 Albertans signed Mr. Lukaszuk’s petition, which asked: “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”
When Mitch Sylvestre, the CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project, had his first petition approved in July, 2025, he was halted by a provision of the legislation that said a referendum question had to be constitutional. The province’s chief electoral officer was unsure of that, so he asked the court to weigh in. The United Conservative government publicly opposed this referral to the courts. And in December, the government introduced legislation, Bill 14, that kiboshed the rule saying that a referendum question had to be constitutional, and the rule that said there couldn’t be two petitions on the same subject. The bill would’ve halted the court analysis of the separatists’ question. But before it could become law, Colin Feasby, a Court of King’s Bench judge, ruled against Mr. Sylvestre’s question.
That wasn’t the end of the road, though. Bill 14 was enacted into law anyhow, and Mr. Sylvestre was once again cleared to submit a question and begin collecting signatures.
If the UCP hadn’t made it easier for Mr. Sylvestre last spring, the separatists would have had to collect a far higher number of signatures. And even after Ms. Smith and her team gave them that first leg up in the spring, Mr. Sylvestre’s quest should have died in December, thanks to the court ruling. It took not one but two boosts from the provincial government for the separatist petition to get properly off the ground. And this, you’ll recall, is a provincial government that isn’t officially separatist. It just happens to be helping out the separatists.
And so, barring another ruling from the courts that puts an end to the Sylvestre signature-gathering, and assuming Ms. Smith holds to her vow to hold a secession referendum in October, and not kick it down the road until after the 2027 election, Alberta will be the first province, other than Quebec, to formally contemplate leaving the country. Even if the courts rule against the separatists for a second time, Ms. Smith’s government could simply decide to craft its own referendum question, although there’s been no indication yet that’s the sort of thing the Premier would do.
And for what?
To metastasize grievances into a potentially nation-shattering vote? To open up the country to extensive foreign interference on an existential question? To put Alberta at risk of absorption into the United States? To make the province, contrary to what the separatists are saying, a poorer, meaner place to live? To pit neighbour against neighbour in a high-stakes vote that could, just maybe, if those who believe in Canada but are so sick of Ottawa that they cast their vote to leave, actually win?
It’s a baffling state of affairs, but also one that was entirely predictable. For years, decades, even, Alberta’s politicians have warned in apocalyptic terms against Ottawa’s encroachment. They have shored up their own power within the province by casting themselves as the last, best hope of protecting Alberta from a predatory federal government.
It should be no surprise then, to find that some Albertans – tens of thousands of them, at least – have taken this to heart. How did we get here? Well, we slow-walked into it.
It’s just that maybe the separatists were clever enough to see it coming.