Trace it back a bit, and you'll find that there's nothing to this that isn't driven by the Department of State.
Whether Palestinians have a national identity or not, driving them out of their homes at gunpoint and settling in is a war crime.
Albertans, while obviously the most disadvantaged and persecuted Canadians in recorded history, have not yet had anyone commiting genocide or war crimes against them.
Um what?
>now Canadians will get a taste of their own medicine courtesy of the Trump admin.
Ah so no, you're just in the higher end of the sinking canoe laughing at the people who are drowning.
Whether it's a good idea is a different question. I doubt most Albertans want to be independent. I also think being a landlocked country with a resource economy means that you will always be subject to outside control, whether that be parliament in Ottawa or corporate offices in Dallas. It remains unclear if being independent will solve the issue of Alberta being land-locked.
It's not a thing.
Hatred or criticism of Toronto and Ontario at large is a thing. But that's a thing everywhere. It's a fundamental part of the Canadian identity.
No, it's not a thing.
I think the dismissive attitude here is proving my point.
And noticeably, the opinions of the Albertans are generally different from the rest of the country! How curious for a place without an identity of its own, as you claim.
The referendum? Or calling for imprisoning people for wrongthink?
Wrongthink (well, technically, crimethink) is canonically treason. Nutters on Reddit calling everything treason isn’t new.
In this case, I’m failing to see how someone—who, granted, appears to be a nutter—following a lawful process is treason.
The really galling thing here is that as an American you would absolutely never tolerate a country like, say, China, supporting, both monetarily and otherwise, a group agitating for California to leave the union. You'd all call that treason loudly and proudly, but now that your country is doing it to someone else suddenly we have to slow-roll this.
No. But I don’t think we’d put people in jail for it unless they were ready to overthrow the government. (Hell, we didn’t even charge the actual people trying to violently overthrow the government with treason.)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/analysis-alberta-sepa...
The U.S., as you very well know, has a long history of influencing foreign separatist movements for its own benefit. It even has overt organizations like the NED, which had a DOGE defunding theater but is still funded and deleted its detailed activities from its website. There are many other ways of funneling influencer money.
When the Soviet Union did similar things to the U.S., that activity was called "treason", as you also very well know.
This makes sense. If she took money from Americans agitating for separatism in Canada to promote separatism in Canada, and that violates Canadian law, I can see a legitimate path for investigating and imprisoning.
Anyone can claim refugee status. That doesn’t make them refugees.
Being a refugee requires showing persecution that one can’t find relief for within the country’s own system [1]. Given Canada has a functioning court system, the second part of the definition is failed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...
Fair enough, I should have said credible.
I googled the Clarity Act and it appears to be recently-passed US (not Canadian) legislation about regulating cryptocurrencies or something. What's its relevance here?
I am not Canadian and know nothing about Canadian politics. Someone please enlighten me.
Exactly. Albertans are scratching their heads, wondering what on earth Premier Smith is trying to accomplish. Utterly ridiculous ''solution'' to some internal problems within her party, I'm guessing.
A second petition by "Stay Free Alberta" asked the government to hold a referendum on separating. However, it was blocked by a judge because a previously ruling basically said that separating would violate treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in Alberta. It's also fraught with controversy as the individuals running the petition were able to (likely illegally) obtain the voter rolls for every Albertan. They used it to build an online tool to track their progress. There is speculation (without evidence since the signatures on the petition is not public) that they simply used it to fill out the petition for people they knew. There are pieces of evidence that point to this being a possibility, for example, a Stay Free Alberta leader claimed that in some communities, nearly 98% of residents signed the petition. These are generally right leaning communities, however, getting 98% of people in a community to do a single thing would be incredibly hard.
EDIT: oh, there is a process. thats the Clarity Act. This seems extremely surprising - I've never heard of this sort of thing before with any other country.
Does there need to be a legal process? If Albertans are willing to fight a war over it then all they need to do is declare that they don't recognize Ottawa's authority anymore and then go about trying to get other countries to recognize their independence.
So it can be argued that the Clarity Act is a way to legislate friction to defederation.
Of course Quebec (and like Albertan) separatists hold that all this is moot and that they can self-govern as they wish following a referendum. Others look at the "no-deal" Brexit as a template.
If it really came down to it, i think it would be the supreme court that decides.
It's a little surprising - even as a Canadian - if you're unfamiliar with Canadian politics/history/civics, but Canada is more loosely held together than most other countries, including the US. And a comparison with the US is instructive, because Canada's founders were unifying the country the wake of the US Civil War and were working very much in response to it: there was a fear that the US would turn empirical in an exercise of national unity and begin trying to snatch up the rest of the continent from the British and a belief that the British wouldn't care to defend them, which was arguably the primary motivation for Confederation: to form a unified front against American expansionism. And the Fathers of Confederation had seen how horrible the Civil War was and wanted to prevent that sort of thing from occurring, so the provinces - like in the US, formerly independent colonies - were given more power than the States, with the separation of powers clearly and rigidly defined.
The Clarity Act itself wasn't part of Confederation, but that's the cultural legacy that informs it: a civilized process allowing provinces to separate without bloodshed is just about as fundamentally Canadian as anything.
Legally, leaving required an Act of Parliament. To hold a binding referendum, they would have had to pass an Act that says "here are the exact details of how we'll leave the EU, coming into force if the referendum passes".
But that would have required them to figure out all the exact details of what it means to leave the EU, and they didn't bother - they just held the referendum and assumed they could figure out the details later if Leave won, which they didn't expect would happen.
We all saw how well that worked out.
> there was sufficient political capital to push it through without a follow up vote.
This seriously overstates how smoothly things went between 23/6/2016 and 31/1/2020
She was openly going around all standard democratic and diplomatic protocols and holding private meetings with the American executive in Florida.
That is not part of democracy, unless you are simply calling it the corrupted part.
It doesn’t need to be. 10% of the population being able to put major policies to a referendum is a bit silly.
I vote in Zurich :). Our system has cooling-off features that Alberta does not.
I think it's fantastic, actually. If the US had such a mechanism in place, we'd get term limits passed in a jiffy! In the absence of such a mechanism, the political class can simply refuse to act on popular measures. And while 10% might seem like a small number, the time, effort, and organization required to get 1/10th of the entire population to sign on for such a measure is actually a huge undertaking.
Nobody thought there was any realistic chance of the UK leaving the EU either...
Likewise, you could say that NYC and LA should singularly secede from America by that same logic.
It doesn't track. There is no legal precedent. Alberta as an entity did not exist beyond Canada.
Legal precedent doesn't really matter here. If Alberta wants to leave and they're willing to fight a war over it, then that's up to them. USA already went through this once.
U.S.A. ''life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness''
Canada ''peace, order, and good government''
Those are fundamental to the identity of each nation's people. Are they core beliefs of the majority of their citizens? Probably. Are Canadians ready to fight a civil war over Alberta separatism? Not at this point, even slightly.
TLDW: There are some Dutch guys hiring Americans to pretend to be Canadians to put out YouTube slop videos to make money via AdSense on the political-idiot-doomer niche on YouTube (and at least 1 is selling a "make quick money" guide to the scheme). Whether they're just a grifting pyramid or if there are other sources of income driving it is not made clear. Though they insist its entertainment and not paid-for political motivated content (note had they admitted that they'd be in breach of various laws and ToS')
The real issue is that these platforms have commoditized rumor in a way that gets around our cultural taboos about the practice.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/05/20/investigations/a...
This is clear foriegn political interfierence. It's like mini-brexit. We have a weak, incompitent leader in Alberta who is giving in to her right-wing base so she can stay in power. It's David Cameron all over again.
Genuinely debatable. The total economic destruction of Brexit has been far higher than anything Alberta would suffer. And geopolitically, Alberta wouldn’t take itself off the table the way the English have basically rendered the UK irrelevant.
Russia and its proxies ran an active measures campaign in the UK. If the US government isn’t doing something similar, the toxic soup of the maga-sphere definitely is.
> The addresses of around 2,000 Albertans
> Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta: “The data is worth probably millions of dollars. It's probably worth at least $3 million.” “It’s the largest data breach in Canada. I haven’t heard of anything that surpasses that scale,” he added.
Not gonna lie, the Commissioner’s remarks and the general tone wouldn’t be out of place in a South Park episode about Canada, hah.
This is not a concern in Quebec, because the overwhelming majority of it is ceded land.
If ducks had two wheels, they'd be bicycles, and if there was anything in common between the two provinces, you might have a point.
The treaties were made in perpetuity, and if you are going to not hold up the crown's end of the promises, the FN's side - giving the crown and Alberta governance over the land - needs to be reverted as well.
Contracts require both sides to adhere to them.
That is wrong. You were probably thinking of British Columbia, where no such grand Treaties were ever enacted.
It did come up. It's referenced in the Supreme Court of Canada case on secession. https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1643/in...
"Consistent with this long tradition of respect for minorities, which is at least as old as Canada itself, the framers of the Constitution Act, 1982 included in s. 35 explicit protection for existing aboriginal and treaty rights, and in s. 25, a non-derogation clause in favour of the rights of aboriginal peoples. The "promise" of s. 35, as it was termed in R. v. Sparrow, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1075, at p. 1083, recognized not only the ancient occupation of land by aboriginal peoples, but their contribution to the building of Canada, and the special commitments made to them by successive governments. The protection of these rights, so recently and arduously achieved, whether looked at in their own right or as part of the larger concern with minorities, reflects an important underlying constitutional value."
East:
ON: 92,392M
QC: 43,549M
NS: 4,464M
NB: 5,167M
NL: 2,467M
PE: 680M
West:
BC: 33,037M
AB: 29,900M
SK: 5,579M
MB: 5,745M
North:
NT: 273M
NU: 162M
YT: 254M
The requirement to do so is in our constitution, the Charter. It's not optional and not absurd to anyone with proper historical understanding of Canadian history.
> Smith acknowledged some of those concerns on Thursday, arguing that the federal government has tried to "move towards a more centralised American-style system" and is infringing on provincial jurisdiction.
Ah interesting. I always thought US is rather decentralized with each state with its own government and laws and such. But I guess that's when compared with individual European countries, not Canada.
Then, I wonder if they would like to still have a king https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada as a new country, or would they drop that as well? If they want to drop that, that faction could lean into the current US current protest movement and put up "No Kings" signs and hold rallies and such. It would be good enough for a chuckle at least.
~465,000 legally verified signatories to the federalist petition to declare Alberta permanently part of Canada
~360,000 status First Nations persons within Alberta
~330,000 legally unverified signatories to the separatist petition to hold a referendum to separate from Canada
First Nations have successfully argued in court that as consultations with them are required by the Canadian Constitution, no such consultations had even been suggested by separatists.
Apart from the fact that the Alberta population is ~4 million, it is difficult to see how separatists can figure they'd win a referendum to separate.
We've unfortunately been putting up with these leaders doing this sort of thing too long and let the rural part of this province dictate far too much.
FWIW, I even bought myself a membership to try and do at least a small part to prevent this a decade ago, but that was impossible. People have truely lost their minds here and it's bizarre to talk to people that were once rational.
Yes, they are part of Canada.
Treaties 6, 7, and 8 clearly ceded indigenous lands to the Crown, and the Indian Act spells out the relationship between First Nations and Canada. Further, the Constitution Act, 1982, contains Section 25 of the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms articulating ''Aboriginal And Treaty Rights''
> First Nations have successfully argued in court that as consultations with them are required by the Canadian Constitution, no such consultations had even been suggested by separatists.
IMHO as an outside observer, if the current question is 'should we commence the legal process to have a binding referrendum', having consultations now is inappropriate. They would be part of the process to have a binding referrendum and so they must either be done or not after the results of this referrendum.
To be fair, the failure is on the UK governance itself, not on Brexit. Other major EU economies like France and Germany have seen similar economic trajectories since 2020 as the post-Brexit UK, despite them still being in the EU. The post-2020 Covid and Ukraine crisis are difficult to isolate from Brexit to know if it's just Brexit alone or the world economic situation fucking everyone regardless since then.
Sure, Brexit probably didn't help, but looking at where Germany is now, I feel like UK handled the cold-turkey exit from the union far better than anyone expected.
/sarcasm
This is complicated by the fact that First Nations themselves are highly stratified. They receive billions in dollars from the federal government with zero oversight so corruption is rampant.
So what happens if a majority of First Nations people want to separate but the chiefs in charge of a particular band don't?
It's like the pipeline issue in British Columbia... Bands and their elected officials voted to allow pipelines, then some "hereditary chiefs" associated with environmentalist groups convinced courts that their opinion carries the same weight as elected chiefs and the court blocked pipeline projects.
In Canada there's layers of un-elected government officials and activist judges who seem more concerned with getting federal funding (aka. kickbacks aka. bribes) than any sort of democratic notions.
You say there is no oversight, yet you claim that something is true. Your comment is nothing more than a broad ethnic slur.
> In Canada there's layers of un-elected government officials and activist judges
None of the leaders of the Alberta separatist parties or organizations have been popularly elected. There are elected members of the Alberta legislature who are involved or at least sympathetic, but the activists pushing for Alberta separation clearly fail your test.
Citation needed. Good luck
One of the "separatist" leaders is hiding from the law in Texas. He can stay there.
If there was any legitimacy in this process, the petition that got 150% of the votes in less time would have been addressed first rather than this sham, likely fake one, run by bad actors provably funded by foreign entities.
We've seen some interesting cases of this, in Spain and in the Donbas of the last years.
I think the outcome of people voting against it is a great outcome. You have the freedom. You paid for the vote (its expensive) and "they" did not win. Hurray for unity at the highest level.
Democracy hasn't been hardened against social media and I'd prefer not to be another failed experiment like Brexit where we allow for foreign money to intentionally damage society.
Yes it feels wrong for the US to be giving money to influencers to influence the vote, but it's not like those voters are being coerced. In their opinion, Alberta would be better as a separate country.
Whether that opinion is enlightened or not has no bearing on it being democratic or not.
"Voting with your feet" is an option available to almost everyone except North Koreans.
Which one is that?
One of the separatist leaders was found guilty of misappropriating more than 1.3 million CAD from his elderly aunt and uncle’s bank accounts:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/dennis-modry-misappropriated-...
Most Canadians who are upset with the status quo are leaving or have already left. Last year saw a record amount of Canadians move to the US.
I guess this makes sense, since the traitor/seditionist and freedom-fighter/revolutionary labels are entirely dependant on your affiliation with the associated country. But a lot of Americans have strong negative reactions to this idea, or the idea of Brexit, but almost certainly support their own founding fathers who were likewise traitors to the British Empire.