The Alberta separatist movement is a guerrilla faction of the global far right which is attacking open societies across the world, Patrick Lennox writes.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Patrick Lennox is the author of On Treason: Alberta Separatism, Foreign Interference and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age.
Treason is an ancient, awful word. It draws urgent attention to a grave, unsettling threat from within. It sounds an alarm and initiates a people’s defence against an internal threat through its collective identification. To use the word in a country like Canada, a country that prides itself on civility and toleration, will make many uncomfortable. But these, it must be conceded, are not normal times. And what’s happening in Alberta is, in fact, an aberration which must be named if it is to be meaningfully mitigated.
Canadians and interested onlookers abroad are asking: How is it possible that the most prosperous province in one of the most successful democracies in the world is on the precipice of a secession referendum at the same time as the country to which it belongs is squaring off against a once-allied superpower now seeking its subordination?
How is this provincial experiment in direct democracy – which includes 10 anti-Canadian questions – being staged by a nominally federalist government which was not elected in 2023 to do anything of the sort?
How is it possible that the Canadian polity is being exposed to this intentionally and intensely divisive exercise without meaningful provincial capacity to insulate or defend it against dangerous forms of foreign interference and targeted disinformation from the United States, Russia, China and other state adversaries seeking to weaken the last beacon of liberal democracy in North America?
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The short answer is that none of this is coincidental and we must become enlivened to the stark reality that a treasonous movement has come to hijack the national agenda at a moment of great consequence when our attention should be elsewhere and our unity unshakable.
There is a surreal dimension to this situation which has caused many to react with either diffidence or toleration in the hope that the separatist movement will collapse under the weight of its own conspiratorial and xenophobic prejudices. Many have been quick to concede “legitimate grievances,” which they presume must be animating this movement which has been gifted a democratic instrument that could cost the province $130-million.
This is an error in judgment; it misses key facts.
First, the governing United Conservative Party was not formed in 2017 as a separatist party, and it did not run in either of the general elections it has won since as a separatist party seeking to bring about a secession vote.
Second, in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected Liberal victory in the last federal election, Alberta’s UCP government, in pure reactionary fashion, set about making significant legislative changes designed to bring about an independence referendum.
Third, when First Nations challenged the constitutionality of holding such a referendum in a province that came into existence after the treaties, and they won two landmark democracy cases, the UCP government decided to ignore the court rulings and add a 10th secession question to the ballot through an order-in-council.
No, the Alberta separatist movement is not a grievance movement seeking to make our society more tolerant, more accepting of difference, more egalitarian. They are not seeking a renewed federalism. The separatists seek not to make Canada a better place, but to tear it apart and to transform the province of Alberta into an untaxed, unregulated, “faith, family, and freedom” libertarian fantasyland.
Alberta separatists seek not to make Canada a better place, but to tear it apart.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Many of the leaders of the separatist movement are from the same cast of characters we first met during the “Freedom Convoy.” They failed to topple the federal government then but are engaged in a similar exercise now. What they are seeking is a coup by other means. This separatist movement is a guerrilla faction of the global far right which is attacking open societies across the world.
They have captured the province’s centre-right party, which has traditionally governed the province, and have now availed themselves of a direct democratic instrument which they intend to leverage to overthrow the duly elected federal government – at least within their own self-assumed territory.
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Meanwhile, the rest of Canada remains mired in a paradox, wondering whether to tolerate this, or to push back somehow. The 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper identified what he called the “paradox of tolerance” in his 1945 treatise The Open Society and Its Enemies. “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them,” he wrote.
Mr. Popper had, of course, borne witness to this precise phenomenon as German democracy was overrun by the Nazis. Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels cynically noted “it will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” The democracies of the Western world got the last laugh on Goebbels. They fought like hell for freedom in the face of the evil forces of fascism.
Almost a century on, those forces are back. We must recognize them. Mr. Popper and other theorists of the time like Karl Loewenstein encouraged open societies to define the limits of their toleration; to enshrine in their constitutions a “militant” form of democracy, that enabled their defence against tyranny, against illiberal forces that would seek their undoing.
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Treason has traditionally been one of the lines across which the tolerance of an open society cannot extend. If you turn against us, if you set us back, if you sell us out to our enemies, there are consequences.
These ancient, potent words – treason, traitor – ought to be held in the closest reserve. It is nevertheless vital to know when they ought to be applied in moral judgment. Not all secession movements deserve the labels. If a people are systematically oppressed, marginalized violently or otherwise, then by no means could their efforts to become self-determining be deemed treasonous.
A motorist passes by an Alberta government sponsored digital billboard on the QEII highway. Less than 1 per cent of people voted for one of the fringe separatist parties in the last provincial election.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
The Alberta separatists do not represent a systematically oppressed people. Albertans clearly enjoy the full suite of freedoms and entitlements common to all Canadians. The vast majority of Albertans want nothing to do with the AI-hallucinated, far-right separatist vision of a sovereign Alberta. Less than 1 per cent voted for one of the fringe separatist parties in the last provincial election, and only once in provincial history has an open separatist been elected, and that was in a by-election way back in 1982.
This referendum is without precedent in the democratic world. Never has a subnational government, without mandate, staged a quasi-secession vote; let alone at a time when the rest of the country was fighting a multifaceted assault on its sovereignty by a rogue superpower next door.
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Treason is the serious setting back of a people’s ability to remain self-determining by those who owe them a duty of loyalty. Deciding if our toleration extends to the Alberta separatists or if this referendum and their actions constitutes treason requires us to understand its conspiratorial foundations, its connections to the global far right, and its malign intentions for the future of Canada.
This cannot be done with a skim of the headlines and a rush to judgment through the assumptions baked into the paradigm of grievance politics. Something far more sinister is at work in Alberta.
Civility and toleration are Canadian virtues core to our national identity. But we must define their limits. This referendum should not be happening, not at this time, not without a previously won democratic mandate. Albertans have not gone willingly into this experiment. Canadians have not.
There is a word for this sabotage, for this reckless imposition of the tyranny of a small minority. We must not be afraid to use it, and reclaim it from the authoritarians of the far right.