Donna Kennedy-Glans: A pipeline deal won’t be enough to tame Alberta’s separatists

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Official polls attempt to gauge support for Alberta’s sovereignty or independence, but it’s squishy. Support for separation remains a minority view among Albertans; typically 25-30 per cent in polls. “The majority of Albertans are not prepared to give independence a green light…yet,” one independence proponent reports. Others suggest official polls aren’t to be believed, and report the existence of internal UCP polls indicating over 60 per cent support for Alberta’s independence among party members. If true, these feel like wildly optimistic numbers, in my opinion, and very much subject to whether you frame the question as one of sovereignty, independence or separation.

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A referendum on independence has not so far been approved, and there are competing proposals. A court hearing is underway in Edmonton to determine whether Mitch Sylvestre, executive director of the Alberta Prosperity Project, can take steps toward putting a citizen initiative question in front of Albertans, asking voters: “Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province in Canada?” A “Forever Canadian” petition, launched earlier this year by former Alberta deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, to counter separatists, collected nearly half a million signatures.

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Figuring out who, exactly, is behind this push for Alberta to separate from Canada can be a bit opaque. It’s a grassroots-to-political mashup, with the more obvious players being the Republican Party of Alberta (a provincial political party supporting a binding referendum on Alberta independence and a subsequent non-binding referendum on joining the United States) and the Alberta Prosperity Project (a movement pushing for a referendum on an independent Alberta, that some claim to be the largest political organization in Alberta, bigger than the UCP or any single union).

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There’s a strong populist flavour to this push for Alberta’s independence. One leader within the Alberta Prosperity Project described the movement as the “spiritual successor” to Take Back Alberta, an earlier socially conservative grassroots movement that takes credit for removing former premier Jason Kenney from office and getting Danielle Smith elected premier. At the UCP’s November 2023 AGM, Take Back Alberta elected their so-called “freedom fighters” into all eighteen UCP board seats.

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Unlike the U.S., where the religious right plays an obvious role in politics, there are lots of religious people affiliated with the independence movement in Alberta but it’s not a religious organization. “All of these western populist movements had a spiritual dimension to them,” Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party, shared in a conversation earlier this year, pointing to Louis Riel, Tommy Douglas, and “Bible Bill” Aberhart.

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People in Alberta are mad — health care unions, the Alberta Teachers’ Association, gender identity activists — and the opposition NDP has as many as nine recall petitions being fired up to mow down the UCP majority. Some people inside the governing party are mad too; angry with Ottawa and itching for that referendum on independence.

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Alberta’s premier is bringing a positive attitude to the negotiating table with Prime Minister Carney, and is expected to do the same at the UCP AGM. As governor of the Bank of England, Carney couldn’t put the brakes on the U.K.’s Brexit from the European Union; as Canada’s prime minister, he should understand what’s in play, for Premier Smith and Ottawa.

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For those of us aiming for Alberta to remain in an economically competitive Canada, it would be encouraging to hear Carney’s sincere assurance he’ll exercise all the powers he holds to ensure pipeline construction is accelerated — even in the face of dissent — because, after all, it’s 2025.

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Donna Kennedy-Glans is a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister.

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