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Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Canadian Province Mulling Independence Vote 

CANADA 

After Mark Carney won Canada’s elections in April, the prime minister-elect warned in his victory speech that “US President (Donald) Trump is trying to break us so America can own us.” 

But Canada doesn’t necessarily need the US for that to happen.  

Still in his honeymoon period, the prime minister now faces an emboldened secessionist movement within his own borders. 

Observers of Canada might assume this movement originates in Quebec, the French-speaking province in eastern Canada that has long flirted with exiting a largely English-speaking country that evolved out of the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries.  

But they would be incorrect. 

Instead, the movement to split from the mothership is growing in Alberta – and to a lesser extent in its eastern neighbor, Saskatchewan – a western province dominated by the Rocky Mountains where conservative leaders want to export more fossil fuels, commodities, and conduct other trade to grow their economy. These voices for breaking away decry how tax authorities in the faraway capital of Ottawa are happy to collect their share of the province’s treasure in return for services most voters don’t notice. 

Alberta, for example, contributed 17 percent to Canada’s gross domestic product in 2022 and $14.2 billion more to federal revenues than it received in federal spending. Only 10 percent of Canada’s lawmakers, meanwhile, are Albertans. 

Now, populist Albertan Premier Danielle Smith, who says she doesn’t support secession, is likely going to allow a vote on independence in a move to show how sick and tired her constituents are with federal red tape and other rules they view as intrusive and counterproductive. 

For example, as Canada’s CTV showed, Smith and other conservative province officials are currently battling progressive British Columbian officials who have rejected gas pipelines running from Alberta to the Pacific coast. British Columbian Premier David Eby says he has a right to oppose polluting infrastructure that his constituents don’t want. That angers some Albertans. 

As a result of these and other grievances, Smith has initiated a process that would schedule a referendum if more than 177,000 Albertans signed a petition to do so within 120 days. Estimates said such a petition would collect 200,000 signatures easily. 

“There will be a vote by Albertans on Alberta independence,” wrote Calgary Herald columnist Rick Bell in a recent opinion piece. “Everyone who has their ear to the ground agrees. They say you can bet the farm on it.”  

That doesn’t mean that even if a vote were held, the ‘leave’ movement would win. According to recent polling by Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, support in Alberta to leave the confederation is still a minority, 36 percent. But those minorities shrink when assessing how serious the support is – few in Alberta (19 percent) say they would “definitely” vote to leave were a referendum to be held. 

Still, the push goes on. 

Opponents of independence say that Alberta is stronger within Canada and that Albertans, who define themselves as rooted in traditional conservative values, are not as culturally distinct from those in Ontario or other provinces as the secession camp claims. Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta who studies the province’s political culture, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation says the ideals expressed by separatist groups don’t represent the average Albertan in 2025.  

“They’re absolutely dead wrong, and they’re projecting their own values on the rest of Alberta society,” he said.  

But supporters say that isn’t true.  

“We are ceaselessly told, with the smug assurance of Central Canadian punditry, that Alberta is ‘stronger within Canada’… This is the lullaby Ottawa sings to keep the West docile while siphoning its wealth and ridiculing its lifeblood industries,” wrote James Albers, a Calgary, Alberta-based management consultant in the Western Standard newspaper.  

“The real question echoing across the Prairies is not ‘Why would Alberta leave?’” he added, “but ‘Why on earth would it stay?’” 

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