Alberta separatists gather at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton on Saturday, for a protest organized by the Alberta Prosperity Project.Amanda May Erickson/The Canadian Press
Tyler Dawson is an Edmonton-based editor for The Globe and Mail’s Opinion section. He is the author of The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away.
The Alberta separatist movement is behind the Quebec sovereigntists by decades when it comes to elucidating their ideas, their philosophy, their vision for an independent Alberta. There is so far no livre bleu, the 500-plus-page document laying out the foundations for a sovereign Quebec that the Parti Québécois released in June.
However, the Alberta sovereigntists are catching up, or at least trying to.
Some effort has previously been made; this isn’t entirely new. The pro-separatism Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) attempted to put dollars and cents on independence in a document entitled “The Value of Freedom,” which, incidentally, gave a candid view into their ideology. The writers might have chosen to elide specifics in regard to the “immigration” line item, but instead, they explained in detail just how much a program of mass deportation could be expected to cost (up to $2.7-billion annually) and how the points-based immigration system in an independent Alberta would penalize those who’d received an mRNA vaccine.
This is useful insight into what some separatists believe.
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Elsewhere, other separatists are authoring a white paper on everything from currency to foreign affairs to defence and health policy.
The APP has now released a draft constitution. It previewed the document at events in mid-August, and has posted the entire proposal on its website. It seems, judging from media reports, that much of the work was done by a group that briefly achieved prominence in 2024, the Black Hat Gang. The Black Hat Gang had put forward a draft Alberta Bill of Rights, which was debated by the party’s membership at the party convention that year. It proposed, among other things, the right to bear arms and declared (somewhat contradictorily) that life begins at conception but that “the right to life is voluntarily forfeit” during the commission of a violent crime and that “lethal force” could be used to stop crime. Echoes of that work remain in the new draft constitution.
So, what does it tell us?
Well, the right to bear arms is still in there: sheer lunacy, requiring an utterly willful blindness to the routine carnage to our south. There are some fairly unobjectionable, and indeed surprising bits. The Charter right “security of the person” is in there, even though that’s the sort of Charter right that has, at least in part, allowed all sorts of things conservatives find objectionable, from supervised drug-use sites to assisted suicide to abortion. There is, however, no obvious parallel to Canada’s Section 1, which allows that the rights contained therein are subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In fact, it takes pains to say rights could not, in an independent Alberta, be easily abrogated.
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It also lays out a vision for government: a republic, led by a president, with the three normal branches of government (executive, legislative, including a senate, and judicial) but also a fourth, an “oversight” branch that would ensure government complies “with this Constitution in word, spirit, intent and deed.” Judges, by the way, would be elected. The vision of Indigenous relationships is woefully inadequate, saying little more than the treaties that exist now would continue in an independent Alberta. The constitution would also compel governments to keep budgets balanced, not incur debt for operating expenses and ensure freedom from discrimination based on “medical choice.”
You don’t need to squint hard to get a sense of what the folks behind this believe.
Look, it’s unlikely that this is ever going to matter. There is a risk the separatists win the referendum-on-a-referendum on Oct. 19, but the prospects are vanishingly small. The only way they come within striking distance of 50-per-cent support is if pro-Canada Albertans are so apathetic that they simply don’t show up and cast a ballot. Now, there is always the possibility of an internal United Conservative Party fight, in which Danielle Smith becomes a casualty and finds herself replaced by an ardent separatist, which means we’d get to do this whole thing again down the road. That’s a lot more likely than a straight-up separatist win in seven weeks’ time.
But ultimately, the separatists have told us who they are and what they believe. They are not, in other words, conservatives of the uncle-at-Thanksgiving variety. They are conservative in a way that seeks to fundamentally unmake our province.
That’s not the kind of Alberta many – perhaps most – of us have any desire to live in.