Canada is one of history’s most successful countries. Here’s a look at who’s trying to destroy it, and how

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The recorded history of Canada stretches back more than 500 years; the unrecorded history, many thousands.

It is one of the world’s oldest continuously existing democracies, with a Constitution whose principal features – monarchical, federal, parliamentary, with an independent judiciary and (ahem) an unelected Senate – have remained unchanged since 1867.

It has the second-largest land mass in the world. With a population of nearly 42 million, it is in the top 20 per cent of all countries. It ranks in the top decile for standard of living, for social development, for civil rights, for the rule of law, for educational attainment, for life expectancy, and more.

In a world that seems to grow more unstable by the week, it stands as a beacon of stability, safety, and sanity. For all of its imperfections, it remains one of the highest achievements of human statecraft – among the most successful societies in all of history.

And in a few months it could all be blown apart. As of October, we may be staring at the end of the Canadian experiment, with the abrupt detachment of one part of the country, possibly followed by another, forcing the remaining fragments to consider how to carry on, separately or together, independently or as applicants for admission to the United States. Divided, indebted, consumed with the details of our own dismemberment, we would have little to offer investors, even less to our young.

Editorial: Looking beneath the myths of Alberta separatism

But, you see, we would have no choice.

There was a vote. A vote of all Canadians, a national decision to pack it in? No. A referendum in one province. A few thousand votes either way might decide it. And the rest of us, well, we’d just have to accept it: accept the destruction of our country, the impoverishment of its people, the end of our long national story.

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That, at any rate, is the ambition of the people behind the current campaign for a referendum on secession in Alberta. Recent events have given us all a good look at these modern-day Bolivars, their aims and methods.

There was the scandal over the alleged leaking of the province’s voter list, including the names, addresses and phone numbers of nearly three million of its citizens, to the Centurion Project, which has been gearing up as the organizational and technological “ground game” of the separatist movement. Several thousand people are now thought to have had access to the list, for who knows what purpose.

Nearly 600 people had unauthorized access to Alberta’s electors list, watchdog alleges

Alberta judge throws out petition for separation referendum

Already hopelessly compromised, the petition has been thrown into legal limbo by an Alberta Court of King’s Bench decision this week finding the government had failed to consult with the province’s First Nations on how the transfer of sovereignty over seven per cent of the territory of Canada would affect their treaty rights.

Then there’s the report of a group of internet researchers finding the online campaign in support for secession was aided by a network of fake “homegrown” YouTube accounts, peddling propaganda intended to “normalize the prospect of secession and U.S. annexation.”

Another report by another group found evidence of substantial efforts by U.S. and Russian sources to spread disinformation, again with the intent to “normalize separation, amplify distrust, portray Canada as internally divided and politically unstable, and create uncertainty.”

And of course there were the earlier reports that separatist representatives had been clandestinely meeting with officials in the Trump administration, some of whom have openly encouraged the separatist cause.

Foreign actors exploiting Alberta separatist debate to stoke discord, researchers say

What has been the response to these various developments from leading figures in the separatist movement? Police are investigating the data leak, as is Elections Alberta and the provincial privacy commissioner. The organization’s founder, David Parker, is refusing to co-operate with the Elections Alberta investigation.

Mr. Parker is no stranger to controversy, legal or otherwise. Take Back Alberta, another organization he founded, which has successfully infiltrated the province’s United Conservative Party and converted it to its various causes, was previously fined more than $100,000 by Elections Alberta for multiple violations of provincial election-finance laws; Mr. Parker himself was fined for knowingly making false statements on financial reports and exceeding contribution limits.

He has a long history of using apocalyptic language to describe relatively mundane political controversies and abrasive insults to describe his enemies. It was Mr. Parker who allegedly demonstrated the wonders of the voter list to his followers by putting Jason Kenney’s name and home address up on a screen. He railed against Alberta Health Services for its “hostile and communist ideology” – over a COVID masking directive. He has attacked Pierre Poilievre in particularly ugly terms.

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Meanwhile, Mitch Sylvestre, leader of Stay Free Alberta, which is behind the referendum petition, is promising to appeal the judge’s decision invalidating it.

Mr. Sylvestre is an adherent to many strange beliefs, beyond separatism. As reported by the Toronto Star’s Richard Warnica, he is convinced, among other things, that King Charles is “running a multibillion dollar transnational criminal enterprise that is systematically stripping the Canadian state of cash,” which he would say more about were he not afraid the King would have him killed.

Mr. Sylvestre also has interesting views on immigration. He told a Didsbury, Alta. audience in January, in the words of the Edmonton Journal, that the APP “shouldn’t apologize for being a white movement.”

“We don’t have to apologize for this room being filled with white people,” he is reported to have said. “This used to be what Alberta was. We’re not apologizing for being ourselves.” He pronounced himself a believer in “replacement theory,” the conspiracy theory that federal immigration policy is designed to replace white Canadians with other races.

“They’re going to replace the people of Alberta,” he told the crowd. Whereas, “if we have control over immigration, we can control who comes here.” In an independent Alberta, he said, citizenship rights would be granted “only to people who are born here.”

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And of course, there’s Jeffrey Rath, legal counsel to the Alberta Prosperity Project: cited by the Law Society of Alberta over several incidents, including one in which he threatened federal and provincial health officials with war-crimes charges for having approved COVID vaccines; peddler of wild conspiracy theories; and enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump’s hemispheric ambitions (“If the United States is creating a new world order, we want to be part of that order. We don’t want to be on the outside.”)

These are the people leading the charge. These are the people at whose behest Canada would be obliged to dismantle itself. But of course they couldn’t be doing any of this without the help and support of Danielle Smith, the province’s Premier.

It was Ms. Smith who slashed the number of signatures required to trigger a referendum by two-thirds. It was Ms. Smith who changed provincial legislation, after a previous court ruling that the proposed referendum on separation would violate the province’s existing referendum law, to allow it.

And it is Ms. Smith who now rails against the most recent adverse court ruling as “anti-democratic.”

Which is perhaps the tell of tells. Had she the slightest inclination, Ms. Smith could have taken the occasion to announce that the secession question would not be added to the October referendum ballot, clogged as it is with nine questions of her own.

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Some would empower her government to do things it already has the power to do, such as deprive recent immigrants of social benefits. Others would assert her government’s claims to powers it does not possess under the Constitution, such as the power to appoint what are now federally appointed judges.

So it would have been the easiest thing for the Premier to declare that the court had settled the matter. To her separatist supporters, she could have said it was out of her hands. Instead, the betting line is that she will add the question to the ballot on her own initiative.

Opinion: Premier Danielle Smith leads a separatist party

At which point the question becomes: Why should anyone pay any attention to this madness? No one voted for Ms. Smith’s party in the expectation that it would hold a referendum on separation, as they might for the Parti Québécois in Quebec (actually, people generally vote for the PQ in the expectation that it will not hold a referendum, though that might be about to change).

So she has no mandate to put the province, or the country, through this ordeal. Probably the referendum would fail, but by then enormous damage would already have been done. And for what? To satisfy the demented ideologies and vainglorious personal ambitions of a relative handful of malcontents – anti-vaxxers, white nationalists and separatists – who have been able to take control, by means of the usual lax membership requirements, of much of what remains a nominally federalist party.

I am reminded of a quote Mr. Parker gave to a sympathetic interviewer a couple of years back. “I always had this – my wife calls it a messianic complex,” he allowed. “Perhaps. But I always had the idea to be great.”

“In my boyish, childhood mind … I wanted to be a great knight, a general, a hero-like character. And obviously the modern world doesn’t provide very many opportunities for people to do that.”

On a personal level, one can sympathize. But why on Earth should the fate of the country be put at the disposal of one man’s psychological need for self-affirmation?