Donna Kennedy-Glans: Alberta’s grievances have nothing to do with MAGA

The flags of Canada and Alberta fly at the Syncrude Giants of Mining exhibit north of Fort McMurray on May 17, 2025. Photo by File Photo /Postmedia

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On Sept. 3, the New York Times published a guest essay by Edmonton writer Curtis Gillespie under two stacked headlines: “Trump Isn’t Just Trolling Canada. He’s Helping Push It Apart,” and “MAGA Is Feeding a Separatist Surge in Canada.” It is part of a Times series called “The New World Disorder,” about countries adjusting as America steps aside. Alberta is the exhibit.

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Gillespie opens his column describing a United Conservative pancake breakfast during the Calgary Stampede. Premier Danielle Smith arrives in Lone Star boots, a Stetson and a Texas bolo. He reads the outfit as a nod south. He hears her contrast Albertan grit with Ottawa’s mandarins and tie “newcomers” to soaring government costs. Then he finds what he came for: groups such as Albertans4Freedom and United Alberta flags, the “bald-faced” separatist, talk of an independent Judeo-Christian nation, and a push to vote yes on Oct. 19 to a question that would start Alberta down the path to leaving Canada.

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Smith, he writes, has given that impulse a new life without quite endorsing it. Donald Trump and MAGA, he claims, are “unmistakable strands” of the conversation. The president’s greatest gift to the cause, Gillespie concludes, is not a cheer for independence. It is the habit of talking about Canada as weak, broken and beholden.

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This is the image of Albertans many American readers now have: a MAGA annex in cowboy clothes, already pulling away.

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I live in Calgary. I have been writing about this file for the National Post all year. The separatists are real. They are organized, they raise money, they use targeting tools and they are not going home if they lose on Oct. 19. I have sat with Keith Wilson; I have stood on my own porch with a Stay Free Alberta canvasser; I intend to vote Option 1 — that Alberta remain a province of Canada — and I am not complacent. None of that makes Gillespie’s portrait true.

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What Gillespie gets wrong is the engine.

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The Times piece treats MAGA as the cause and Alberta as the symptom. That flatters Washington and insults the people who actually live here. Western alienation is older than Trump’s first campaign, older than Smith’s premiership and older than the separatist groups Gillespie noticed waiting for pancakes at the Stampede breakfast.

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Albertans have been arguing with Ottawa about energy, equalization, and respect for decades. The grievance is that this country still treats a “have province” like an ATM and then lectures it for producing the deposits. You do not need a MAGA cap to feel that. You need pipelines that don’t get built, and a federal government that talks about nation-building while its rules remain hostile to what Alberta sells.

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Smith has given the independence question a new life. That is fair to say. She pushed a vote onto the October ballot. She has been careful not to campaign for leaving, and she has said she will campaign for Alberta to stay. That is a more complicated premier than “Trump-friendly in a bolo tie.” It is also why the real contest is not the hard separatists Gillespie came to photograph. It is the soft ones.