“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” — Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America.
~ ~ ~
Before I turn to Alberta and the East-West divide that is threatening to tear Canada apart, I want to begin with a brief story from another time and place to bring some of the complex ideas contained in this essay into focus.
In 1864, three years into the bitter U.S. Civil War, as that war was turning increasingly barbaric, Abraham Lincoln allowed Colonel James Jaquess and another colleague to secretly slip across enemy lines to travel to Richmond, Virginia, to meet with Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, in an unofficial effort to negotiate for peace. The full exchange, originally published in the September 1864 issue of the Atlantic (Vol. 14, No. 83 — also available on Project Guttenberg), is extremely eye-opening — I recommend reading the full exchange, but will reproduce the key points below:
Early in the conversation, Colonel Jaquess asks Davis:
“Our people want peace,—your people do, and your Congress has recently said that you do. We have come to ask how it can be brought about.”
“In a very simple way,” replies Davis. “Withdraw your armies from our territory, and peace will come of itself. We do not seek to subjugate you. We are not waging an offensive war, except so far as it is offensive-defensive,—that is, so far as we are forced to invade you to prevent your invading us. Let us alone, and peace will come at once.”
“But we cannot let you alone so long as you repudiate the Union. That is the one thing the Northern people will not surrender.”
“I know. You would deny to us what you exact for yourselves,—the right of self-government.”
As the conversation evolves it becomes clear that to Colonel Jaquess, it is perfectly moral, just, and natural for the minority, even a distinct geographic minority, to willingly subordinate itself to the democratic outcomes of majority rule. When you’re part of the numerical majority, this view is as natural as the sun rising in the East.
In this context, an exasperated Davis delivers one of his most famous quotes as he touches upon a theme that ultimately underpins virtually every separatist movement and civil war in history, that the South’s minority was not willing to allow itself to be further subjugated to the will of the North’s numerical majority:
“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came.”
In Davis’s view, the idea that culturally and economically distinct sovereign states should subordinate themselves to the will of the numerical majority of the United States as a collective whole was a repudiation of the principles upon which the Republic was founded, which viewed each state as a sovereign entity, free to govern their own affairs within their own state borders, united only as a Republic as a means of securing their borders against foreign aggression and to regulate interstate commerce, NOT so that other states could override the local sovereignty of individual states via the national ballot box.
In short, Davis and his Southern peers viewed the American Republic as a collection of united yet sovereign states, each with their own distinct peoples. Whereas Colonel Jaquess, Abraham Lincoln, and their Northern peers had come to view the United States as a single united entity, one people united as a single nation.
Colonel Jaquess tries to impress upon Davis that the Union far outnumbered the Confederacy (4.5 to 1) and that within the Union exists the “unanimous determination to crush the Rebellion and save the Union at every sacrifice.” However, Colonel Jaquess points out to Davis that if the rebel Confederate government could be dismantled via an immediate cessation of hostilities and the Southern states returned to the Union, now, before the growing barbarism of the war caused such resentment that all of the Southern leaders would assuredly be hanged if the South loses the war, then peace and harmony could be restored and the North would even willingly welcome the South back into the Union, forgive the bloodshed, and help the South rebuild the destruction caused by the war.
Davis turns him down.
“There are some things worse than hanging or extermination. We reckon giving up the right of self-government one of those things.”
“By self-government you mean disunion,—Southern Independence?”
“Yes.”
“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.”
“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.”
Colonel Jaquess turned the conversation to whether the conflict can be settled by letting the combined people of the United States (Union and Confederacy together) decide the contentious questions that led to the fracture of the Union by putting those questions to a nation-wide referendum, such that the South commits itself to accepting the wishes of the democratic majority, whichever way these questions are decided. To which Davis replies:
“That the majority shall decide it, you mean. We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.”
“But the majority must rule finally, either with bullets or ballots.”
“I am not so sure of that. Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule. The contrary, I think, is true.”
Colonel Jaquess is dismayed.
“But, seriously, Sir, you let the majority rule in a single State; why not let it rule in the whole country?”
“Because the States are independent and sovereign. The country is not. It is only a confederation of States; or rather it was: it is now two confederations.”
“Then we are not a people,—we are only a political partnership?”
“That is all.”
Davis concludes the meeting with Colonel Jaquess and his colleague, stating that:
“I am glad to have met you, both. I once loved the old flag as well as you do; I would have died for it; but now it is to me only the emblem of oppression.”
“I hope the day may never come, Mr. Davis, when I say that,” said the Colonel.
After they left President Davis, Colonel Jaquess’ colleague was asked about the outcome of that meeting, to which he replied:
“Nothing but war,—war to the knife.”
The philosophical divide could not be bridged. The North could not compromise on a fractured Union that would result in the continental power of the United States to splinter into independent parts. To them, the republic created by the “united states in America” had become a single indivisible nation inhabited by a single indivisible people — a single nation called the United States OF America.
By contrast, the South could not compromise on subordinating itself to the majority rule of the greater whole at the expense of losing the state sovereignty that allowed each state to pursue its own destiny within its own borders according to its own local culture and local economic needs, as the Republic’s Founding Fathers had originally intended. And so, the bid for peace failed and the war ground onwards into its final brutal year.
As Davis makes clear during this extraordinary historical exchange, the moral and economic issue of slavery was merely the trigger — underneath it all was the bigger question of state sovereignty and self-governance, and the choice between a decentralized republic versus a singular all-encompassing nation.
Abraham Lincoln later complained that Jefferson Davis’s only terms of peace were the independence of the South — the dissolution of the Union. And Navy Secretary Gideon Wells later wrote in his diary about Colonel Jaquess’ attempt to reach out to Davis, stating that:
“Colonel Jaquess is another specimen of inconsiderate and unwise, meddlesome interference. The President assented to his measure and gave him a card, or passport, to go beyond our lines. There is no doubt that the Colonel was sincere, but he found himself unequal to the task he had undertaken. Instead of persuading Jeff Davis to change his course, Davis succeeded in persuading poor Jaquess that the true course to be pursued was to let Davis & Co. do as they please. The result was that Jaquess and his friend Gilmore who went to Richmond to shear, came back shorn.”
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It may surprise some readers to see me start this essay about Alberta’s struggle to assert its sovereignty within Canada with a story about the leader of the Confederate South from the U.S. Civil War era. This is a different era with different issues at stake, and most view Canada as a completely different and morally upright country that prides itself on its politeness and on its cultural and economic diversity as it avoids the raw, snarling, uncompromising politics of our American neighbors. Besides, the dividing line is East vs West, not North vs South. Surely, our divisions can be overcome with civility, grace, and appeals to unity within our larger Canadian family?
Yet once again, beneath it all, we see a country rupturing along a fault line defined by two incompatible moral world views, as incompatible as oil and water, a divided economy that reflects that moral divide, and the age old question — are we one indivisible people in one indivisible nation, or does the provincial sovereignty that’s so clearly defined in our Canadian Constitution still mean something?
What is the purpose of Canada, and who is it meant to serve? In short, this rupture isn’t merely a difference of opinion; it represents an existential philosophical rift. And that makes it very difficult for either side to back down.
The Eastern side of this Canadian fault line is dominated by a world view that is partially ideological, but mostly it is driven by self-serving self-interest and the appetite for control. Theirs is the view that emerged long before Canadian Confederation itself as Upper Canada (Ontario) set about establishing political control over British North America after the American War of Independence.
These founders of our Canadian nation sought to bind together what remained of Britian’s colonies after America’s independence to create a single nation designed to serve the needs of the Laurentian heartland of that emergent Canadian nation, while doing their best to shield Canada from dangerous democratic ideas about representative government that had seduced America to embrace republican democracy. 😱 In effect, Canada was never a bottom-up Union between free and equal provinces, but rather a top-down nation-building exercise by the center to exercise control over the extremities.
Within the parliamentary democracy that emerged, “some are clearly more equal than others” (as George Orwell might say) in the nation’s decision-making process. And provincial sovereignty, while written into the constitution, tends to get steamrolled whenever it emerges as an obstacle to Ottawa’s centrally planned agenda — the tools by which the provinces can defend their sovereignty against central overreach are lacking, by design. The Senate, the House of Commons, judicial appointments, the Privy Council, the powers vested in the Prime Minister, and so much more were all crafted to allow the Laurentian East to impose their will onto the lesser regions — in effect, Canada remains a kind of colonial project of the periphery by the elites of the heartland.
Complicating it all is the fact after 158 years of this parasitic relationship, a vast patronage network has evolved in the East (and throughout the country as a whole), which depends on maintaining that strong, centralized federal control — this patronage network uses its numerical advantage to leverage majority rule as the key strategy to impose its interests upon the rest of Canada and, when necessary, to steamroll regional or provincial sovereignty if it conflicts with their interests.
Any effort to change that oppressive constitutional status quo, which would give greater autonomy to sovereign provinces, represents an existential threat to their parasitic way of life. The moral question of oil and gas may be the trigger of the current rift, just as the moral question of slavery was the trigger in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War, but beneath it all is a broader question about how to balance provincial sovereignty against the political will of the national majority.
On the Western side of the divide are people driven by existential concerns about their ability to safeguard their local economies, their freedom, their way of life, and their prosperity after more than a decade of sustained and unrelenting economic attacks by Ottawa. And this isn’t the first time. Indeed, this fault line has been a major thorn in the West’s side from the very first day of Canadian Confederation, 158 years ago. This is merely the latest chapter in that troubled history as the Laurentian East steamrolls western provincial sovereignty to impose its globalist anti-oil-and-gas world view onto the West.
That philosophical and moral divide is now boiling over as the aftermath of the 2025 election opens an extremely dangerous new chapter in Canada’s evolution, with ramifications not just for Canada but for the whole of Western Civilization. The ideological battle between local sovereignty and centrally-controlled global socialism is coming to a head out on the Canadian prairie.
~ ~ ~
Separatist movements rarely end successfully. Most are frustrated, strangled, or crushed by the dominant power in various devious ways prior to achieving their objectives. Jefferson Davis is one of the lucky losers of history — he was spared the noose and was left in peace to write his memoires in his old age and in the comfort of his own home. All too often, separatist leaders end up suffering terribly along the way as repayment for their efforts.
One current example comes from the leader of the modern-day independence movement in the Catalonia region of Spain, who now lives in exile in Belgium — more on that specific example later). And an example from Canadian history is Louis Riel who led the Red River Rebellion in 1869-1870 in what has become Manitoba today, and then North-West Rebellion in 1885 in what later became Saskatchewan. Even though Louis Riel was fighting to address broader regional grievances, defend his people’s land rights, and achieve meaningful political representation for his people within the Canadian Parliament, but was not seeking full independence from Canada, Louis Riel was still ultimately sent to the gallows after tensions spiralled out of hand.
A smaller number of separatist movements achieve a greater degree of regional sovereignty — a limited victory — their leaders tend to fare better even as these movements as a whole fall short of their goal of full independence (i.e. Scotland, Greenland, Wales, Quebec, Basque Country, etc.). With the exception of independence movements in post-Soviet and post-Warsaw-Pact nations, not a single independence movement in any Western nation has achieved full independence since the end of the Second World War. Later on in this essay I’ll be looking at some of the tools that Canada uses to frustrate efforts to pursue separation, pioneered during Quebec’s struggle for independence.
A significant number of independence movements devolve into full scale civil war somewhere along the way — the American War of Independence, the U.S. Civil War, the complex Rhodesian Bush War that erupted following Prime Minister Ian Smith’s Universal Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965 (a story I’ve written about in my essay The Great Unravelling, Why Democracy Failed and How to Fix it (Amazon Affiliate Link), the Irish War of Independence, the Sudanese Civil War, the Yugoslav Wars, the Eritrean War of Independence, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Chechen Wars, the Donbas War in Eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022, and so on. Croatia’s bid for independence from Yugoslavia involved heavy fighting. Bosnia and Herzegovina devolved into full-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide as tensions came to a head.
On very rare occasions, full independence is achieved with minimal bloodshed, like in Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia (minimal fighting), mostly because of strong internal cohesiveness and intense pressure from outside nations to keep a lid on violence.
Still others get trapped somewhere in between, like Taiwan, Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Transnistria, which are de-facto independent but have been unable to rally sufficient international support to achieve full UN recognition as independent countries, reflecting the unresolved international issues that could still lead these countries into full-scale war at some later date.
And even when independence is achieved, internal divisions and conflicts about what to do with that independence all to often erupt into civil war after independence as different factions compete over what comes next and which faction gets to control the newly liberated throne, with examples ranging from Nigeria after independence from the UK, South Sudan after independence from Sudan, Rwanda after independence from Belgium, Mozambique after independence from Portugal, and so on.
In short, what Alberta faces is not for the faint of heart and is a lot more complicated that simply conducting a successful separatist referendum. The mother country rarely lets her children leave peacefully. And the children need to come to a unified agreement about what independence means once they achieve independence from their parent.
And so, it’s time for a Deep Dive into the storm that’s brewing in the West.
~ ~ ~
On May 5th, Premier Danielle Smith addressed her province and laid out a set of political demands in order to fix the broken relationship between Alberta and the federal government in Ottawa. What’s different about this demand and the many fruitless attempts that have come before is that, for the first time, the possibility of national divorce is now openly and firmly out on the table, with a clear ultimatum set for a referendum (in 2026) and a clear path that citizens must follow to gather the necessary signatures for a citizen-led petition to put that fateful question to the Albertan people.
I’ve included a link to her full 19-minute speech below (on YouTube) and encourage you to watch it before we dive deeper in this essay. The comments for her video are turned off on YouTube, but she also posted her video address on X (Twitter) where the comments section is already filling up very, very fast.
It summarizes the issues fueling the conflict in our current era as provincial sovereignty collides with national majority rule, and allows you to hear her lay out Alberta’s demands of Ottawa in her own words, all of which provides context for the deeper dive that follows in this essay as it becomes clear why, despite how reasonable Alberta’s demands are, those demands will be virtually impossible for Ottawa to fulfill. This is the beginning, not the end, of a fractious divide that is threatening to cleave Canada in two.
To briefly summarize her video address, Premier Smith discussed a lost decade during which Ottawa has engaged in sustained economic attacks against Alberta’s economy by systematically weaponizing malicious regulation and using a host of other devious strategies to block pipelines, cancel oil and gas projects, ban the tanker ships that are required to get oil to international markets, and made the approvals process for new projects so onerous and expensive that they have effectively throttled investment in the region, especially in the oil and gas industry but in many other industries as well.
Furthermore, Ottawa has cynically placed a cap on oil and gas industry emissions and hammered the industry with crippling carbon taxes. They’ve even imposed net-zero mandates on the power grid, which makes the power grid in the province increasingly unreliable and even dangerous. And so far the courts have not put a stop to any of it despite the fact that Ottawa is clearly in violation of Alberta’s provincial sovereignty, as defined by our constitution.
As Premier Smith points out, “this onslaught of anti-energy, anti-agriculture, and anti-resource development policies has scared away global investments to the tune of half a trillion dollars, driving those investments and jobs out of Canada to much more attractive climates in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East.”
The prairie provinces are Canada’s economic engine. Yet after a decade of ideological Liberal rule, Canada is now dead last in economic growth among industrialized nations.
Premier Smith laid out Alberta’s four unconditional demands to end this assault and restore Alberta’s constitutionally guaranteed provincial sovereignty:
a guaranteed corridor and port access to tidewater off the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic coasts for the export of oil, gas, critical minerals, and other resources, in amounts supported by the free market, rather than by the diktats and whims of Ottawa. (in other words, free access to world markets and no sneaky ways of imposing production caps by Ottawa — we’ll talk about the implications of her demand to access the Atlantic coast shortly)
the federal government must end all federal interference in the development of provincial resources by repealing the No New Pipelines Law (bill C-69), the oil tanker ban, the net-zero electricity regulations, the oil and gas emissions cap, the net-zero vehicle mandate, and any federal law or regulation that proports to regulate industrial carbon emissions, plastics, or the commercial free speech of energy companies (this final point is in reference to an attempt in 2024 by Parliament to pass legislation that would criminalize speaking well of fossil fuels!).
the federal government must refrain from imposing export taxes or restrictions on the export of Alberta resources without the consent of the government of Alberta. As she says, “Frankly, all provinces should be given that same respect for their resources.”
and finally, the federal government must provide to Alberta the same per capita federal transfers and equalization payments as is received by the other three largest provinces, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. (In effect, this is an end to the massively abused system of Equalization Payments, retaining the system only as a way to help the smallest and weakest provinces and territories while putting a stop to Quebec and Ontario using it to plunder the West).
As she said, if these points are agreed to, this would eliminate the doubts that many Albertans feel about the future of Alberta as a part of Canada. If passed, Alberta could continue on as a sovereign province under a de-fanged Canadian federal umbrella.
She’s not the first to demand some version of these things, but this time there’s an ultimatum looming over her words that provides real consequences if Ottawa resorts to its usual strategy of simply ignoring anything it doesn’t like or steamrolling over Alberta as it has over the past decade. This time national divorce is on the table.
Premier Smith explained that she is putting together a number of judicial, academic, and economic advisors to create a new “Alberta Next” panel to discuss Alberta’s future in Canada, and explore the steps Alberta can take to protect itself against the current or future hostile policies of the federal government. Some of the more popular ideas from that panel will be put to a provincial referendum in 2026 (the ultimate form of direct democracy). These new ideas would build on reforms that are already underway like the effort to create a provincial police force to end Alberta’s contract with the federally-run RCMP, thus mimicking the system that Quebec has as it too seeks to exert its own provincial sovereignty.
But there’s more. It’s what comes next that actually matters.
She emphasized that her government will not take steps for a government-led initiative to put a vote for separation on the referendum ballot. However, and this is the important part, “if there is a successful citizen-led referendum petition that is able to gather the requisite number of signatures requesting such a question to be put on a referendum, our government will respect the democratic process and include that question on the provincial 2026 referendum ballot as well.” Translation: if there is to be separation, it will come in the form of a citizen-led national divorce.
This comes on the back of a new Albertan law announced only a week earlier, reducing the number of signatures required for a citizen-led petition to trigger a constitutional referendum (i.e. for a separatist referendum). This new law reduces the threshold to trigger a referendum to only 177,000 signatures, down from the previously required 600,000.
The message is clear.
Nonetheless, she laid out reasons why she feels that Alberta still has plenty of tools to fend off Ottawa’s attacks and why she feels that a joint and prosperous united Canada that honors its Constitutional limits is still the best way forward, and that she will do everything in her power to negotiate a fair deal for Alberta.
In other words, she is not a separatist, something she emphasized repeatedly. This is a wise move at this stage of the game. It’s extremely dangerous for a separatist movement to coalesce around any individual leader.
A case in point… in 2017, after a request made by the Spanish government, Spain’s Constitutional Court declared an impending referendum on Catalonia’s self-determination to be in breach of the Spanish Constitution. The fed-up Catalonian leaders went ahead with the referendum anyway in spite of a police crackdown. The National Police Corps and the Guardia Civil intervened to prevent voting even as local Catalonian police allowed voting to continue. Turnout was thus abysmally low, at only 43%, due to so many polling stations being closed and the violence that erupted on that fateful day between civilians and police. Yet of the votes that were cast, 92% voted in favor of Catalonia becoming its own republic.
The Supreme Court intervened once again. Local police were investigated for disobedience and one Catalan mayor even investigated for sedition. After the Catalan government declared its intention to act upon the results of the referendum anyway and unilaterally declare independence from Spain, the Spanish government responded by summarily dismissing the entire Catalan government and imposing direct rule by the Spanish federal government.
The President of the government of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, fled to Belgium to avoid arrest, but in 2018 German police arrested him nonetheless and he faced extradition back to Spain. Long story short, after lots of back and forth and plenty of legal drama, the European Court of Justice finally intervened in 2022 to restore his parliamentary immunity. In 2024, he briefly returned to Spain from his exile in Belgium, gave a speech advocating for Catalonia’s right to self-determination, and then was forced to free into the crowd as a large-scale police operation began in order to try to arrest him. One local police officer was arrested on suspicion of helping Puigdemont escape, and Puigdemont is now back to living in exile in Belgium to escape the wrath of the Spanish government.
Although I have no idea what her true beliefs are, Premier Danielle Smith’s stance is wise at this stage of the game — by distancing herself from the separatist movement and by making it clear that if it happens it must happen as a citizen-led initiative, via petitions and a direct-democracy referendum, it helps insulate Premier Smith and her government from legal shenanigans if/when Ottawa starts playing nasty. It also avoids the mistake of allowing individual political personalities to define the movement. This reduces the risk that individual personalities become the target for a government- and media-led smear campaign that could tarnish the whole movement — instead the onus is put on Ottawa to do what it takes to convince the Albertan people that Canada is still a nation worth being part of.
Furthermore, it also establishes a clear precedent for what happens AFTER a successful referendum — it sets the precedent that an independent Alberta would emerge as a bottom-up republic, with government “by the people, for the people” rather than repeating the mistake of becoming a smaller top-down elite-led dictatorship with Edmonton rather than Ottawa holding the whip.
If separatism makes it onto the referendum ballot, it’s because Ottawa failed to earn back the support of the Albertan people, and the people themselves pushed for independence. Meanwhile, Premier Smith remains neutral, tasked with carrying out the people’s will whichever way the cards fall, establishing herself as the servant not the master of her people.
However, she also went out of her way to emphasize that those who are considering a national divorce are loyal Albertans too, NOT traitors, and that if a citizen-led separatist referendum is successful, she will accept the judgement of her fellow Albertans even if they choose to vote for a national divorce. Thus, those working on the petitions have nothing to fear from Premier Smith’s government.
Her demands are clear. And she now has a citizen-led ace in her back pocket if Ottawa doesn’t dance to her tune. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
But this is where things begin to get difficult. Even if Ottawa wanted to give Premier Smith everything she asked for, saying yes to her demands is virtually impossible and risks tearing the country apart from the other end.
Before I dive into the second half of this essay — into Ottawa’s impossible choices as it faces up to Alberta’s demands, the challenges and dangers that lie ahead if a separatist referendum is successful, and the devious tools at Ottawa’s disposal to block Alberta’s exit — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!
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Ottawa, Trapped Between a Rock and a Hard Place
At first glance, Premier Smith’s demands seem quite reasonable, perfectly in line with our Constitution, with our constitutional concept of provincial sovereignty, and with the ethos of Western liberal democracy itself. And yet, her demands are virtually impossible for Ottawa to fulfill, even if Ottawa wanted to.
What Premier Smith has laid out is, functionally, the end of the federally-led climate crusade in Canada. The federal government can respect provincial autonomy. Or it can impose its climate crusade onto dissenting provinces by authoritarian diktat. But not both.
This presents a major problem for a Liberal government whose entire support base across the rest of the nation has been built on that fictitious climate narrative — after all, Mark Carney was the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action. Turning his back on that narrative now would spark a revolt among his support base.
Furthermore, the climate narrative is one of the main load-bearing myths of our era to justify the global socialist movement and the accelerating centralization of power in the hands of federal and international institutions as they continue to eat away at local and regional autonomy. Without the climate crusade, power begins to flow the other way.
If Alberta gets its way, its provincial sovereignty would overrule these climate-justified power grabs and the concentration of power at the federal and international level would begin to unravel. Respecting provincial sovereignty effectively renders Canada’s international climate agreements and internationally-agreed climate targets null and void. And no federal leader could ever sign another one without Alberta’s approval.
If Carney backs off in order to respect Alberta’s provincial sovereignty, he betrays the expectations of a very large number of people. But if Carney rides roughshod over Alberta’s demands to cater to his base and sustain the power-hungry globalist climate crusade, he triggers a separatist referendum in Alberta. Check mate.
Alberta’s four demands strike at the very heart of the climate belief system. It transfers power back to local jurisdictions. It restores provincial and national sovereignty. It kills the ESG initiatives and carbon taxes that are central to the WEF-led vision that is being imposed upon the world. And once granted to Alberta, her demands would ripple outward through the rest of the Canadian provinces, and beyond — why would any corporation remain headquartered in Toronto if it can exempt itself from all that baloney simply by relocating to Alberta? Whatever Alberta gets will immediately be demanded by the other provinces too. And so, provincial sovereignty is the grenade that unravels the entire climate crusade in Canada.
Ideology aside, there are a lot of people, corporations, institutions, and governments at all levels in Canada that are financially and politically dependent upon keeping that Green narrative alive. It’s their gravy train. They’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on Ottawa not to give an inch. That leaves Mark Carney to choose between putting the authoritarian squeeze on Alberta to satisfy his base or risk the wrath of the support base that put him in power.
Even his own newly acquired power as Prime Minister is at risk — he still relies on the eco-radical and radically socialist NDP party to maintain his grip on Parliament because he failed to win an outright majority in the recent election. That leaves him with very little room to manoeuver without triggering an election that could strip him of power. Yet if he begins to squeeze Alberta, separation looms. So, he’s in a bit of pickle.
Equalization is equally problematic for Ottawa. Quebec is a major net beneficiary of equalization payments. Take that away and the case for Quebec separation becomes much easier to sell to Quebec’s electorate. And so, without equalization to grease the wheels, Ottawa would simply appease one separatist movement while fueling the other.
Even before Premier Smith’s announcement, Quebec was already gearing up for another separatist referendum in October 2026 as it too chafes under Ottawa’s ham-fisted rule. Ending equalization would just help tip the scales in favor of the separatist movement in Quebec. So, again, Mark Carney thus finds himself trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Unlike America, Canada isn’t held together by a union of sovereign states whose main glue is to remain united as a means of defending their liberty. Canada is held together by a vast patronage network that buys loyalty to the throne in Ottawa using a combination of federal money, federal legislation, and federal regulatory privileges. Equalization, like the “green agenda”, is part of the system of financial “incentives” that buys the loyalty of the patronage network. Canada and America may be the closest of siblings, descended from the same parentage, yet philosophically we truly live worlds apart.
As has been proven time and time again, patronage networks very quickly become disloyal when the financial incentives dry up. Can Canada survive without a corrupt patronage network to glue it all together and provide the lubrication that smooths over all the cultural and economic friction points between all the distinct provinces and cultures that make up our diverse nation?
Then there’s that inconvenient matter of an energy corridor and port access to all three of Canada’s coasts. A corridor to the Atlantic means pipelines to or through Quebec. And that has been a long-standing hard red line in Quebec for decades. Perhaps climate ideology is part of the equation to cater to Quebec’s left-leaning electorate, but more than anything I suspect that beneath all that is the cold, hard, pragmatic calculation that any future separatist bid by Quebec would be complicated if Quebec allows too much economic and energy integration with the rest of Canada, which would inevitably follow on the heels of pipelines and ports being built in the province.
Once your people become financially dependent upon a system, it’s pretty hard to get them to vote against that financial lifeline. An energy firewall around the province helps keep the door open for Quebec’s own simmering desire for a national divorce. Either way, the point is that Premier Smith’s demand for an energy corridor and port access are going to cause Quebec to scream bloody murder. Once again, appeasing one potential separatist leads to a surge in separatist sentiment in the other. Premier Smith couldn’t have put Mark Carney in a tighter box. 😈
Just on those three points — the collapse of the climate crusade, equalization payments, and energy corridors and port access — Premier Smith’s demands are likely bitter pills that Ottawa simply cannot swallow without crossing a red line among their own Liberal electoral base and without triggering a revolution in Quebec and possibly in some of the other provinces as well (like in left-leaning, eco-obsessed, anti-pipeline, NDP-controlled BC (my province)).
But it gets worse for Ottawa…
~ ~ ~
Premier Smith’s Decentralization by Stealth
Until now, with no hard consequences for ignoring citizen complaints, Ottawa’s top-down political system has proven extraordinarily resistant to bottom-up reform. And it’s been that way since long before Confederation itself.
For example, in 1837, with representative government far beyond the reach of the average Canadian, famed Canadian reformer and pre-Confederation politician William Lyon Mackenzie led an armed rebellion in Upper Canada to try to turn Canada into a republic. Known as the Upper Canada Rebellion, it was fueled by a desire to replace the existing system of colonial government with responsible government (accountable to the people) and to end the power of the “Family Compact” — the nickname given to an elite group of officials and businessman who dominated the colony.
In the latter days of the rebellion, Mackenzie and his rebel co-conspirators forcibly established the tiny break-away Republic of Canada on little Navy Island in the Niagara River (near Niagara Falls). It lasted 28 days before it was ultimately overthrown by government troops.
Several of the rebels were executed for their part in the rebellion, but Mackenzie managed to flee to the United States from where he tried unsuccessfully to rally American support for an invasion of Canada (instead they threw him in jail for a bit for violating their Neutrality Act, which prohibited invading a foreign country with which the U.S. was not at war).
However, back in Canada, fear of another rebellion did finally motivate the British government to look deeper into the matter. Lord Durham, the Governor General at the time, published his findings in 1839 in the famous Report on the Affairs of British North America, colloquially known at the time as the Durham Report. In time, the recommendations in that infamous report led to the first reluctant blossoms of responsible government in Canada.
Mackenzie and his surviving peers were eventually granted amnesty by the Canadian government and allowed to return to Canada — Mackenzie even served in the Legislature of the newly created Province of Canada, which was created in 1841 based on the recommendations of the Durham Report. But don’t mistake this new Legislature as benevolent — it too was weaponized from the start to put a lid on discontented citizens.
The express purpose of uniting the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada under a single legislature was to neutralize the growing political influence of the rapidly expanding francophone population in Lower Canada — the hope was that by amalgamating these two colonies into one, it would allow the English-speaking population to maintain its political dominance and thus would enable the legislature to forcibly assimilate the French-speaking minority into the English-speaking majority. Canada’s flexible political boundaries have always been weaponized as a tool for top-down nation-building. This was repeated in 1867 as the growing political influence of the francophone population served as one of several significant motivators for Canadian Confederation — to neutralize the French vote. In short, in Canada the system was designed from Day One to serve the interests of the elite and circumvent the political demands of the people.
I won’t go through every twist and tortured turn of Canada’s political history. However, to understand how Premier Smith’s political demands are a direct challenge to that unreformable, decentralized, top-down political structure and could, at long last, bring it crumbling down, I do need to jump to one other important historical chapter in our history.
In 1980, Pierre Elliott Trudeau de-facto nationalized the entire oil and gas industry via his National Energy Program. Like many previous waves of government overreach, this triggered a massive exodus of Canadians to the USA (the U.S. effectively serves as our pressure release valve for disgruntled Canadians fed up with the lack of liberty on offer in Canada). Once again, thanks to the distorted nature of Canada’s parliamentary system that allows the Laurentian East to completely dominate the Canadian political system, Western Canada was left politically powerless to prevent Trudeau Sr.’s parasitic move.
It didn’t last — like all socialist programs, Trudeau Sr.’s grand energy scheme collapsed under its own suffocating weight. By 1991 even the national oil company, Petro-Canada, created under his watch, was sold into private hands.
This blatant overreach of federal authority over provincial sovereignty fueled the rise of modern-day sentiments of western alienation and led to the creation of Preston Manning’s Reform Party in 1987. This was Canada’s version of America’s Ron Paul and the Tea Party movement.
The Reform Party demanded that Canada be turned into a decentralized Canadian federation with significantly increased provincial autonomy and much reduced federal powers, including demands for strengthening provincial rights, lower taxes, balanced budgets, ensuring equal political representation for ALL provinces, and the creation of a “Triple-E Senate” with an equal number of Senators for each province that would henceforth be directly elected by each province, much like the American system today (currently, our Senate is still appointed on the whim of the Prime Minister, for life (until age 75), and the number of senators is deliberately stacked to give Ontario and Quebec de-facto control over the entire Canadian political system — the map below shows how senators are apportioned across the provinces).
In 1993, the Progressive Conservative Party collapsed under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s inept leadership (he was once nicknamed the most hated PM in Canadian history, though he has a lot of competition, not least of which from both Trudeau the father and Trudeau the son). His party lost so many seats in the 1993 election that it lost its official party status in Canada — quite an accomplishment considering it was the ruling party on the eve of that election.
The Reform Party emerged as the largest conservative party in Canada. By 1997 it was the Official Opposition in Parliament! But lack of support from the East motivated it to incorporate more ideas from Eastern Canada (thus prompting a name change to the Canadian Alliance in 2000), and then to merge with the rejuvenated Eastern-dominated Progressive Conservative Party in 2003 to form the modern Conservative Party of Canada. And ever since, all the guiding objectives of Manning’s original Reform Party have increasingly faded from view despite the fact that its newly-created offspring, the present Conservative Party of Canada, went on to win the 2006 election.
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried but largely failed to devolve federal powers down to the provinces during his tenure and spent almost 10 years as Prime Minister unsuccessfully trying to reform the Senate. He even only managed to balance the budget during three of his nine years in power. Constitutional reform in Canada seems to be nut that just can’t be cracked — the founders of our Constitution did their job well to insulate our system from the kind of direct republican-style democracy that their Loyalist ancestors had fled from when America’s rebellious colonies kicked out the British and created their decentralized Republic.
Even efforts to reform the system by opening the Constitution itself, as was attempted by Brian Mulroney during the Meech Lake Accords in 1987 and the Charlottetown Accords in 1992, both failed … and directly contributed to his unpopularity and the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party. It was simply impossible to reconcile all the conflicting interests of everyone who has a say in the process, which includes not just all the provinces and territories, but all the indigenous nations as well. And there are simply too many people who benefit from the status quo.
Both of those efforts at constitutional reform were attempts to devolve federal powers to the provinces to give the provinces more control over their natural resources, immigration, Supreme Court appointments, federal spending, and to give provinces more tools to opt out of federal programs.
And yet, here comes Danielle Smith and plants a giant grenade in the middle of that unreformable system, effectively asserting “Provincial Sovereignty or Bust.” No more games — fix it or lose it.
If asking nicely doesn’t ever produce results, perhaps the nuclear option is the only threat that can achieve results. And if that fails too, what has Alberta got to lose by following through by leaving?
If Alberta leaves, Saskatchewan probably does too. Manitoba might join them — they are a natural fit. BC, isolated on the West Coast, might also become amenable to the idea too once it realizes that if it doesn’t play nice with Alberta, oil, gas, and other commodities could just as easily flow south through America’s infrastructure to reach world markets — the Port of Vancouver and all the related supply chains are a MAJOR driver of BC’s economy, revealing just how dependent BC is on the trickle-down effects of remaining integrated with Alberta’s economy. If asked to choose between loyalty to Ottawa for ideological reasons versus loyalty to Alberta for economic reasons, I don’t think it will be a hard choice, regardless of how much shade BC’s NDP leader is throwing at Alberta today.
Meanwhile, if Alberta leaves, the calculations for equalization payments would necessarily change, leaving Quebec as a “have” rather than a “have-not” province, which would force it to start sending money out to other provinces rather than being a net recipient. That might tip the scale for a hasty Quebec exit too — even now, before Premier Smith threw that wrench into the mix, Quebec is already cueing up for their next separatist referendum in October 2026.
If Quebec leaves, it would leave the Maritimes isolated and looking towards America as an alternate parent nation instead of continuing to rely on financial support from a distant country that’s reduced to Ontario plus a bunch of financially dependant northern territories.
It would seem that, despite all the lofty rhetoric, Canadian Confederation is not actually a very happy marriage if it only takes the richest province leaving to splinter the rest apart. The patronage network quickly falls apart without a generous cow to plunder.
In other words, regardless of who is in power in Ottawa, now that separatism is on the table, the pressure to either yield to Alberta will be huge. Despite how little political respect Alberta gets in Ottawa, it is the lynchpin holding Canada together.
However, if Ottawa yields to Alberta, what will other provinces demand as they wake up to the opportunities that come from asserting greater provincial sovereignty for themselves?
Quebec might demand a stop to federally controlled immigration targets as it seeks to take full control over immigration to its province — Ottawa’s immigration policies are already one of the big drivers fueling Quebec’s revived separatist movement. BC has long demanded greater control over its shipping waters, resource development, and protectionist economic measures. Newfoundland has also long been advocating for greater control over its provincial resources. Even the Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories might want to roll back federal authority in order to more aggressively develop their arctic mineral resources according to their own vision and for their own benefit. Especially if the equalization payments dry up…
And so, Ottawa’s ham-fisted and elitist centralized grip over Confederation is weakening.
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Complicating the issues still further, how do you satisfy Alberta’s demands for an energy corridor across British Columbia when that requires stepping over BC’s provincial autonomy and overriding the wishes of BC’s eco-obsessed electorate? It’s Quebec’s anti-pipeline stance all over again, only this time it’s motivated by climate hysteria. So, to satisfy Alberta’s demands for greater provincial sovereignty, you have to curtail BC’s provincial sovereignty and begin negotiating with BC’s more than 202 First Nations band governments and 23 tribal councils. Cue the howling. Talk about poking an angry hornet’s nest!!!
All of a sudden, the entire structure of our constitution is in play as the current legal system proves itself to be unworkable to achieve the necessary reforms to make Alberta happy.
There are only two solutions to resolve this paradoxical dilemma:
resort to dictatorial authoritarian control by subjugating some provinces for the benefit of others, which would require Carney to turn himself into a Caesar to override the entire system to give himself the unchecked power required to “get-it-done”). That could get very ugly very fast as the federal government would quickly find itself facing down a revolt from countless provincial legislatures and First Nations all the way down to the people themselves.
or Ottawa could go to the other extreme of radically decentralizing the entire political system by transforming Canada into a decentralized republic, essentially following in the footsteps of America’s Founding Fathers who limited the reach of the federal government to national security and interstate commerce (and not much else), while leaving everything else up to its constituent sovereign states — it was the only way to keep America’s radically different 13 founding colonies happy under a single umbrella. But that could get ugly very fast too as Canada’s federal government would quickly find itself facing down a revolt from everyone who currently benefits from the patronage network that’s enabled by top-down federal control, including many of the provincial legislatures and First Nations all the way down to many of the people themselves. Once you make the mistake of building a patronage network, the incentives it creates makes it almost impossible to tear it down.
And yet, virtually everything in between these two extremes is equally unworkable.
In effect, trying to solve this tangled and paradoxical problem would necessarily lead to the end of the Westminster parliamentary system in Canada, either by turning us into a full-blown oppressive authoritarian dictatorship or, finally, at long last, completing the long-overdue transition to a decentralized republic, with plenty of noise and shouting to overcome along the way.
As the chart and critique from @Martyupnorth_2 on X (Twitter) demonstrates below, Canada in its present form is a kind of failed marriage. His arguments sound eerily similar to those made by Jefferson Davis in 1864.
And so, the gravy train has reached the final station, and the rest of Canada must decide whether it is willing to make the sacrifices required to keep Alberta on board.
As economist Milton Friedman once observed:
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
Perhaps, if we’re lucky, the sum of all these intense pressures will compel Ottawa to do the right thing even with all the wrong people in charge. The referendum is in 2026 — the clock is ticking.
But of course, that’s not Ottawa’s way. When doing the right thing is hard and when there are so many who benefit from maintaining the top-down, centrally-controlled, Laurentian-dominated system, the temptation for Ottawa to try to squash, frustrate, and delay will be irresistible. That, unfortunately, is the time-tested secret recipe that Canada has always used to resist reforms — a strategy inherited from the British who successfully used ‘divide and rule’ to build the largest empire in history.
Unfortunately, even the idea that Canada has a legal path to separatism is little more than an illusion — like a door painted on a solid brick wall.
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A Door Painted on a Brick Wall — the Illusion of a Path to Separatism
Quebec tried twice to achieve a national divorce by referendum, first in 1980, and again in 1995. Both failed, with grim lessons for any province thinking of trying to go down that route.
In the 1980 referendum, the separatists got 40.44% of the vote, but the question posed on the ballot was long and difficult to understand, and the federal government under Pierre Elliott Trudeau blatantly meddled in the process instead of allowing Quebecers to debate their future on their own. No-one was happy. The bitter feelings left over from that failed referendum played a significant role in Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s decision to patriate the Canadian Constitution from Britain to Canada in 1982. Quebec refused to sign on to that new Constitution, but, as usual, the Supreme Court ruled that Quebec is bound by it anyway.
This in turn led directly to two failed attempts to reform our Constitution to decentralize more power to the provinces via the afforementioned Meech Lake Accord in 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, both of which we meant to try to bring Quebec into the “family.” Ironically, the Charlottetown Accord ultimately unravelled thanks to the antics of a single First Nations member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly who said “No”. With Manitoba unable to ratify, it all fell apart from there.
After those two attempts at constitutional reform failed, Quebec returned to the polls with a second separatist referendum in 1995 to try leaving again. This time the separatist vote reached 49.42%, just shy of their objective.
However, it was later revealed that 86,000 ballots (out of a total of 5 million ballots) were “rejected” by the Ballot Returning Officers, many for no valid reason. Charges were laid against several of those officers, but the courts predictably found them not guilty, and the results of the referendum remained intact (the pattern of the courts providing cover for government antics is well-established in our country — whenever the Canadian government investigates itself, it tends to find itself not guilty). And a court challenge by Alliance Quebec (which advocates for English-speakers in the province) to be able to examine all 5 million ballots was also denied by the courts.
It was also later revealed that Canada flooded Quebec with over 43,000 last-minute new immigrants who all happened to live in Quebec and who all gained citizenship in the final weeks and months before the referendum. It was later exposed as having been a deliberate strategy by the federal government to speed up immigration applications as Canada expected the majority of these new immigrants to vote against separatism (Canada even sent extra judges to the province, plucked from the other provinces, to speed up processing in the weeks and months before the referendum date).
Furthermore, it was also later revealed that federally-funded anti-separatist activist groups flooded the province with campaigns just ahead of the vote, breaking legal limits on spending established by election rules, and hired buses to transport people to anti-separatist rallies, which was also in violation of electoral law. The courts dismissed all charges. The Bloc Québécois demanded that Parliament launch a federal inquiry to look into these and other suspicious issues, but the inquiry never happened.
But just in case Quebec tries again, Ottawa passed a new law in 2000, deceptively called The Clarity Act. In theory, it’s meant to provide clarity on how a separatist referendum needs to be conducted and how the aftermath of a successful referendum would proceed. In theory, this provides a legal path out of Confederation. In reality, it’s that door painted on a brick wall.
The easy part is the referendum itself. To avoid confusion like there was during those two previous referendums, future referendums would need to ask a single simple question, which must be approved by Parliament.
It’s what comes next that’s devious.
A successful separatist referendum does not automatically trigger a unilateral exit. It triggers the start of negotiations not only with Ottawa, but with all the other provinces AND with all the indigenous peoples. They all need to be happy with the terms before the province can leave.
And the House of Commons, at its sole discretion, can override any referendum decision if it feels that some condition of the Clarity Act has not been met.
And, when it comes time to leave, the secession of a province would require an amendment to the Constitution, which requires all the other provinces and indigenous peoples to sign off on that Constitutional amendment. The failures of the Meech Lake Accord in 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 reveal how impossible this task would be as everyone who has a say uses the opportunity to extract concessions for themselves. Good luck with that.
In my opinion, with no realistic and concise path to a national divorce, and with all those who benefit from maintaining the status quo being given the authority to say NO (or to use that opportunity to thoroughly fleece the province seeking to leave the national marriage), the process seems designed for failure — a deliberate strategy crafted to frustrate the process to such a degree that the finish line is never reached.
With so many parties involved, negotiations would be guaranteed to end in gridlock and be drawn out over so much time that the separatist movement would lose momentum or give up in frustration. And, by extending it over so much time, Ottawa would be able to demand a do-over of the referendum itself, thus trapping the province in a perpetual loop. It’s a recipe expressly designed for failure.
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Predictions
So, how would things play out for Alberta?
The first psyops along the path to a referendum have already begun, with various First Nations chiefs already speaking out to claim that they will never support a separatist bid and, thanks to their treaty rights, which they claim gives them a veto over the matter, the whole idea is dead in the water. They even took a copy of Premier Smith’s new bill (which lowered the signature requirement for triggering citizen-led referendums to 177,000 signatures) and tossed it onto the floor and called it garbage, thus rejecting the entire concept of a democratic plebiscite. Apparently, they feel they have a veto that can overturn the majority vote of the entire province — not exactly democratic, is it?
First Nations are approximately 6.8% of Alberta’s population. And it’s not like anyone has asked the First Nations peoples themselves what they think. Those speaking out are a handful of chiefs. But the issue has not been put to a vote among the indigenous people either — do these chiefs truly represent their people’s wishes? Indeed, as we saw with BC’s Wet’suwet’en tribe during the anti-pipeline protests of 2020, the unelected hereditary chiefs were largely opposed to the pipelines, while virtually all of the elected band councils of the Wet’suwet’en people were overwhelmingly in favor of those same pipelines and of the economic opportunities that they bring to their community — it caused quite a heated debate between the two groups on Twitter at the time. And when it came time to negotiate, Justin Trudeau sent his representatives to negotiate with the hereditary chiefs, but completely ignored the band councils that supported the development.
Furthermore, investigative journalist Vivian Krause’s 2019 documentary, Over A Barrel, exposed that many indigenous activists actually receive significant funding from environmental activist groups from both inside and outside of Canada. In 2014, the Toronto Sun even featured a story about a chief from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, who earned $55,000 from the Tides Foundation to participate in an anti-oilsands celebrity event in Toronto. And yes, he’s one of the chiefs who is condemning Danielle Smith today and threatening to obstruct natural resource development in the province if the option of a separation referendum is not removed from the table.
In short, the divisive politics designed to derail a separatist referendum are already swinging into gear and threatening to split many communities apart. And Ottawa can leverage these divisions to full effect in its courts to undermine the legality of any separatist referendum, even if it is successful. It would also be worth watching whether any federal money finds its way into these activist campaigns, as they did in Quebec ahead of the 1995 referendum.
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The path to a referendum has equally divided the broader population. Many want reforms, but far fewer are ready to ditch Canada. In that regard, Premier Smith’s decision to lay out her four demands is wise because if, over the coming months, Ottawa fails to deliver, it will be much easier to unite Alberta’s population around a separatist vote, whereas leaping straight in today would likely fail. The onus is on Ottawa to deliver. If it doesn’t by 2026, the case for separation will be ironclad. Patience until 2026 is a virtue.
But allowing the referendum to be delayed beyond that date (i.e. if Premier Smith blinks or doesn’t play fair with her electorate) would be a betrayal of the Albertan people that could trigger ugly consequences among an increasingly angry population that is rapidly losing its patience.
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The other advantage of the 2026 referendum deadline is that it gives America time to clean up its act to show what kind of deal it can put on the table for Alberta. What comes after a successful separatist referendum — do you set up an independent Republic of Western Canada, or apply for U.S. statehood? Again, the population is deeply divided, on emotional grounds, for economic reasons, and out of fear of jumping from the frying pan into another increasingly centralized fire.
But by 2026, Trump will have had ample time to prove if his new reforms really will succeed in cleaning up the American Republic. If by then, America has entered a new era of lower taxes, devolution of powers to the states, reduced regulation, a manufacturing revival, reformed institutions, etc., the case for U.S. statehood and tariff-free access to the huge U.S. markets would be overwhelming. On the other hand, if the constant bluffs and changes of direction continue on into 2026 and none of these promises materialize by then, the case for an independent Republic of Western Canada would be overwhelming.
In other words, this pause until 2026 gives America a chance to either deliver or fail on its promises. Either way, this will lead to a much more united Albertan population as it gains clarity over what path to take following separation.
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Now, on to the referendum itself. Let’s assume that there is a successful referendum in 2026. What happens next?
If, as I suspect, Canada choses the path of delay, frustration, and sneaky games to try to frustrate Alberta’s exit, this could easily drag out over decades. It would take a very skilled set of hands in Alberta to prevent that frustration from boiling over and someone doing something stupid that would give Ottawa an excuse to declare some kind of emergency warranting the invocation of the Emergencies Act. We all saw during the Freedom Convoy in 2022 how eager Ottawa is to use this hammer. This kind of stunt to crack down and extinguish the separatist movement would be in keeping with what the aforementioned Spanish government did to the Catalan referendum on independence in 2017. Ottawa will be itching for any excuse that can be twisted into a reason to squash the whole thing.
I encourage you to read Ian Smith’s book: Bitter Harvest: Zimbabwe and the Aftermath of its Independence (Amazon Affiliate Link) in which he describes his 15-year ordeal to break Rhodesia free from Britain. He served as Rhodesia’s last Prime Minister before it became Zimbabwe (he served from 1964 until 1979) but he was only continuing a process that had already been underway for some time under his predecessor. His efforts to negotiate a reasonable exit was thwarted at every turn as both London and Washington relentlessly undermined him as the Rhodesia Question became a political hot potato in their own domestic political calculations, even as it became clear that their delays and impossible demands would result in Rhodesia falling into the hands of Robert Mugabe’s genocidal communist regime and that their political games were propelling Rhodesia towards civil war.
In 1965, Ian Smith’s government got so fed up with the constant double-speak, betrayals, and endless moving targets that his government knowingly broke Britain’s laws by unilaterally declaring independence from Britain via their infamous Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). They now regarded themselves as an independent sovereign state. Britain and the rest of the world did not and declared their act to be illegal. They soon found themselves under crippling UN-led economic sanctions, with international friends quickly abandoning them even as the Bush War against Mugabe’s communist and Soviet-funded guerillas raged on.
By 1979, completely isolated on the international stage and their economy blockaded by the international community, they finally capitulated, and Rhodesia fell to Mugabe’s communists. Zimbabwe (as the country was renamed) immediately unravelled into factional war over the spoils as Mugabe launched a genocide against other rival tribes, which had been Mugabe’s allies during the Bush War.
Once again, there’s a lesson in this for Alberta. There are good reasons for delaying the referendum until 2026, as I’ve already outlined. But with much of the Western world fully in the grips of the global socialist movement, the Trump administration is likely Alberta’s only reliable international friend in this process — the Europeans, the globalist United Nations, and so on are all likely to side with whatever case Ottawa makes against separatism.
The same is true of the US Democratic Party (with its close ties to Canada’s Liberal Party), which would also likely support Ottawa if the Democrats were to regain power in the United States. So, a successful separatist referendum in Alberta in 2026 would need to move very quickly to resolve the terms of the national divorce in order to have Washington’s support to keep things fair.
If negotiations with Ottawa turn hostile and drag out over a longer period and the US Democrats come back into power (i.e. in 2028), Alberta could see itself completely isolated on the world stage and get crushed. Ottawa knows it and will be playing for time.
Will Danielle Smith stay true to her word to honor a separatist referendum, and act on it if it succeeds?
Will the impatient members of the Alberta separatist movement divide the movement by fracturing into a thousand smaller parties?
Will the separatists be infiltrated by bad actors with the intention of sowing division, derailing the objectives, or provoking someone into doing something stupid that destroys the movement?
Will Quebec support or hinder Alberta’s bid as it too contemplates national divorce? This, perhaps more than anything, will be a key point to watch for as it would determine how much leverage Ottawa can gain over Alberta without triggering an equal but opposite reaction in Quebec. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Despite the decades of bitterness that have grown up between Alberta and Quebec, if ever there was a time for cooperation, this would be it, either to force Ottawa to completely reform the Constitution to give the provinces the provincial sovereignty they desire, or to help each other to both exit Confederation at the same time.
What happens if Ottawa declares the referendum null and void, like happened to the Catalan government, but Alberta thinks it was just and fair?
And what happens after a successful referendum if Ottawa continues to play games, like Britain did to Rhodesia, year after year after year?
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Only time will tell how this all plays out, but one thing is for sure — Canada has entered a very dangerous new era in its politics.
There are dragons ahead —whatever lies ahead is not for the faint of heart. Pray that Ottawa chooses reason and fairness and puts the past behind it, irrespective of which way this plays out.
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See you in the next one!
