The US State Department held a meeting last week with a curious group from Canada. Known as the Alberta Prosperity Project, the group is advocating an independence referendum in the province of Alberta. In any normal time, a US administration might be wary about such a group, but the Trump administration has shown no respect for Canadian sovereignty and instead sees Canada’s domestic issues as a fracture it can exploit.
Separatism in Canada is usually associated with the French speaking province of Quebec. The separatist Parti Québécois held referendums on independence in 1980 and 1995, with both being defeated – the latter only barely. However, now Alberta has become Canada’s problem child.
Disgruntlement with Ottawa has fermented in the oil-rich province since the late 1970s, when then prime minister Pierre Trudeau developed the National Energy Program (NEP). The NEP sought to use Alberta’s oil to keep petrol prices low for the whole of Canada, as well as to redistribute some of the oil wealth generated to ensure all provinces had reasonably comparable public services. With Canada’s weak sense of national identity, this was something Albertans felt was unfair.
This resentment led to the formation of the western provinces protest party Reform – which would rise to become Canada’s official opposition in the late-1990s. However, with just over 60% of Canada’s population living in Ontario and Quebec, a party centred on the grievances of the less populous western provinces offered no path to power. Eventually the party would consume the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party to form the nationally viable Conservative Party of Canada.
Yet it was the return of the Trudeau name to the prime minister’s office that intensified Alberta’s discontent. In 2018, the government of Justin Trudeau legislated the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act – a progressively increasing carbon tax to be paid for by fossil fuel producers. The tax was seen as an attack on Alberta’s oil industry and, with the province’s odd form of petro-nationalism, Albertans themselves.
This sense of victimhood converged with the frustration of Alberta’s geographic reality. The province has pipelines running south into the United States, but to feed energy hungry Asian markets it needs to increase the volume of oil it can get to ports on the Pacific coast. However, the New Democratic Party (NDP) government in British Columbia (BC) is opposed to the construction of new pipelines, and has banned tankers from the northern BC coastline. While the federal government has jurisdiction over inter-provincial infrastructure, the NDP can muster public opinion, which Ottawa takes seriously.
Somehow, there is a belief, at least for some, that this geographic reality can be overcome through disconnecting Alberta from the cooperative mechanisms of the Canadian federation.
For the Alberta Prosperity Project, the path towards independence starts with a citizen-initiative petition to trigger a referendum. Early last year, Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, from the independence-curious wing of the United Conservative Party, lowered the threshold for such a petition to trigger a referendum. Previously, the bar was 20% of all eligible voters, with a geographic distribution of these signatures so Calgary and Edmonton couldn’t dominate.
There are a number of Canadians whose emotional allegiance is to the US president over Canada.
The new threshold is now simply 10% of voters who cast ballots at the last election. This equals 177,732 signatures. Smith also extended the timeframe to collect signatures from 90 to 120 days.
The petition began collecting signatures on 3 January and has until 2 May to submit them to the legislature.
With a nose for sniffing out friction, the Trump administration has inserted themselves into this process by meeting with the Alberta Prosperity Project. The publicity and sense of legitimacy may boost the petition drive, but those around the president have understood that for ostensibly a nationalist, Trump has a unique transnational appeal. He can harness frustration and resentment outside of the US as easily as he can within.
There are a number of Canadians whose emotional allegiance is to the US president over Canada. These people can be useful tools for Trump in his attempts to subvert Canadian sovereignty. The Trump administration instinctively sees opportunity in discord and isn’t shy from encouraging it. The White House would be keenly aware that Alberta has the world’s fourth largest oil reserves, and that any cracks in the Canadian federation presents a chance to harness these reserves for greater US – and personal – advantage.
While Trump himself may see laws as mere irritants to be worked around, in Canada the rule of law is still paramount. After the narrow defeat of the Quebec separatism referendum in 1995, the federal Canadian government devised the Clarity Act – a set of conditions that would dictate when, whether and how the federal government would agree to negotiate separation with a provincial government. The Clarity Act’s final stage would involve a constitutional amendment, something that requires the federal parliament and all other provincial legislatures to agree on.
This seems unlikely. In response to the Alberta Prosperity Project’s meeting with the State Department, BC premier, David Eby, bluntly made his views clear: “To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason.”
