Polls indicate the pro-independence camp remains a minority among Alberta’s five million people but that it has hit a historic high of roughly 30 percent.
Alberta separatists are also closer than ever to forcing a referendum, riding momentum fuelled by intensifying grievances over Ottawa’s control of the provincial oil industry and getting a boost from the return to power of US President Donald Trump.
After launching a petition in January, Stay Free Alberta, the group co-ordinating the independence push, had until the beginning of May to collect 178,000 signatures to force a referendum.
The group’s leader, Mitch Sylvestre, expressed confidence the group would succeed and that they would submit their list to provincial officials in the capital Edmonton on Monday.
Alberta’s First Nations have filed a court challenge, arguing independence would violate their treaty rights, a case that could render a referendum illegal.
But even if the vote never happens, or the separatists ultimately lose, many believe the process has left Canada permanently changed.
Jason Kenney, a conservative federalist former Alberta premier, has said if the independence camp gets 20-35 percent support in a referendum, “it will turn the separatist movement from a marginal fringe into a real factor in our politics that will be disruptive for a long time to come”.
Alberta joined the Canadian confederation in 1905 and resentments towards eastern political leaders in Ontario and Quebec fuelled marginal separatist movements at various points over the last century.
But Michael Wagner, an independent historian and long-standing supporter of Albertan independence, said separatism gathered real pace in protest against former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Program, which broadened Ottawa’s hold over the oil industry with price controls for domestic oil sales and new taxes giving Ottawa more revenue from Alberta’s oil.
Mark Carney’s 2025 election was “a tipping point”, Wagner said, adding that
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a huge polling lead early last year.
“It was fully expected he would be our hero. He would rescue us from the Liberal government. When the polls started turning for Carney, and then Carney actually won, the disappointment here was so dramatic,” he said.
Some secessionists insist Alberta’s future lies in union with Washington, but Sylvestre’s legal adviser Jeffrey Rath, who says he has met several times with top State Department officials on future Alberta-US ties, rejects statehood.
“The people in our movement are not interested in freeing themselves from the clutches of the federal government… just to put ourselves under yet another government 3,500 miles away,” he told the right-wing True North media outlet. (AFP)
