Alberta’s Fantasy Separatist Movement Promises a Trumpian Future

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?”

That’s the question the Alberta Prosperity Project wants to see on a referendum about Alberta’s possible departure from Canada. The group, which does not list the names of its leaders on its website and describes itself as an educational initiative, maintains a post office box in Calgary and is calling for the “need to explore avenues for greater sovereignty within or outside the Canadian federation.”

But I suspect the real goal is not to leave Confederation, but to pull the Conservative Party of Canada much further to the right.

After visiting the project’s website, I feel oddly collegial toward its authors and supporters. They’re doing what I used to do as a writer of speculative fiction: portraying a dysfunctional society, some of whose members are determined to turn it into something much better.

For them, “better” means “sovereign” — Albertans alone deciding how they shall live.

The technical term for a story about a just and happy society is a utopia, like the book of the same name that Sir Thomas More published in 1516, describing the people of a faraway island.

The happy society utopia has fallen out of favour in recent years, displaced by dystopias like The Hunger Games, The Road and Station Eleven. But like the original utopia, such stories show us our own society from a different perspective, and they encourage us to ask how we might improve.

A dramatic reading of policy documents

If we’re reading the work of the project as a series of contemporary dystopian texts, one key document is “The Rationale for Restructuring Alberta’s Relationship with Canada,” a 20-page manifesto asserting that the province has been effectively a colony of Eastern Canada since its creation in 1905.

The opening lines closely follow those of the U.S. Declaration Of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal in the eyes of their creator, that they are endowed by natural law with certain inalienable individual rights, among which are life, liberty, property (starting with one’s own body), and the pursuit of happiness.

But the wording changes dramatically on the next page:

Inexorably, Alberta is on a downhill spiral into the vortex of the WEF-UN Marxist agenda that will be exacerbated by the proposed digital ID, programmable digital currency and the ESG social credit score to control every aspect of your life, along with food shortages due to fertilizer restrictions, and the shuttering of our oil and gas industry which may result in a one-third reduction in the average income of Albertans, as determined by Jack Mintz, the Chair of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.

That’s a single sentence packed with threat and paranoia. Now we are dealing with a dystopian Alberta from a far-right perspective in which the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the Bank of Canada and corporations in general are somehow Marxist.

Another document on the project website, “Proposed Policies and Governance for a Sovereign Alberta Within or Without Canada,” goes into minute detail about what a utopian Alberta would be like. And here it gets into more trouble.

For example, the project describes Alberta’s high GDP per capita, about 28 per cent greater than the national average. Then it adds: “Sovereignty would allow the province to leverage its economic autonomy to further enhance its residents’ prosperity.”

But if Albertans are already so well off, the desire for more looks like greed.

Utopias are generally arranged so everyone gets enough and no one gets deprived. This doesn’t support the idea of Alberta as exploited colony.

Democracy or republic?

The project’s “Frequently Asked Questions” raise more problems. Here are just a few:

“The APP is convinced Albertans are ready for a switch from a democracy to a republic.”

That’s straight from the John Birch Society, a U.S. far-right group founded in 1958 and referred to colloquially as the Birchers. They define democracy as the rule of the many, and republic as the rule of law. Like the Birchers, the project argues that democracies pass unjust laws to enrich the poor majority at the expense of the wealthy minority. In republics, however, laws are mysteriously “discovered.”

The Birchers might claim some credit for steering the United States into its present situation under Donald Trump, but few Albertans would want to repeat Trump’s achievement, whether in an independent country or in a 51st U.S. state.

On the question of getting Alberta gas and oil to markets, the project sounds like Trump in an aggressive mood: “If Alberta was denied access to tidewater, Alberta could impose massive and crippling tariffs on goods and services passing east and west across our borders. If necessary, Alberta could even block passage altogether, including overflights. Therefore, it would not be in the best interests of the rest of Canada to embargo Alberta.”

The project assumes new pipelines could be built into the United States and out to the West Coast. That would mean the rest of Canada couldn’t charge extra pipeline fees to move Alberta’s oil.

But the project also says an independent Alberta would be “the least taxed and regulated country in the world,” so other countries might be slow to import beef and grain that hadn’t been inspected for safe consumption.

Citizens of a sovereign Alberta, we learn, would need “an Alberta passport to qualify for the benefits of living in Alberta, such as low taxation and increased pensions and international travel.”

Then we learn that this will be a two-tier society:

“Canadians living and working in Alberta, and Alberta based Canadian corporations, would be required to pay Canadian taxes, as well as Alberta taxes. Alberta citizens would only be required to pay low Alberta taxes.”

The project policy documents note that they would welcome dual citizenship. But it’s unclear why Canadians would want to stay in Alberta, even as dual citizens, if they must pay higher taxes for the privilege.

Don’t count on low taxes

The project doesn’t say how low taxes will be, but since a sovereign Alberta will need its own military, police and court system, taxes are more likely to be a lot higher.

The project doesn’t think so, saying: “This would be a lot less costly than the $70 billion that we give to Ottawa every year.... Therefore, not only can Alberta afford those costs, the outcome in each of those areas would be vastly superior to what Canada produces now.”

And it would fund all these systems with an eight per cent to 10 per cent flat tax — maybe even no corporate taxes at all.

Seventy billion Alberta dollars might not even get the new country in the game. Consider military spending alone.

Norway, with just half a million more people than Alberta, spent over US$10 billion in 2024 to strengthen its armed forces, and plans to double that spending level by 2036.

Alberta would have to start from scratch, and could not assume that it could simply take over Canadian Armed Forces property in Alberta.

Albertans wanting both low taxes and a functioning military are doomed to disappointment.

A flight of expertise and wealth

It is more likely that a sovereign Alberta would find itself with neither a military nor the tax base to support one. If the Alberta Prosperity Project’s policies somehow took effect, we could expect a flight of expertise and wealth as people and corporations sought new homes in the rest of Canada. The newborn republic could find itself barely capable of keeping the lights on while it tried to recruit foreign experts to do the jobs left by federal employees.

While the project is banking on the great prosperity that would supposedly be triggered by the lack of government regulation, that would also mean no cleanup of abandoned oil wells, dubious water quality, little or no food inspection and unreliable health care. We are seeing what deregulation is doing to the United States, and it is alarming to think an independent Alberta government would preside over a similar disaster.

In envisaging how Alberta would run its own affairs, the project brings up a striking number of far-right U.S. policies. In education, for example, we learn that critical race theory would not be tolerated in the classroom. Tax funding would go to public, private, Catholic and charter schools as well as home schooling, ensuring not enough money for any of them.

Bias? What bias?

According to the project’s “Proposed Policies and Governance for a Sovereign Alberta Within or Without Canada” document, teachers will do their work without “political and or ideological bias, with emphasis on critical thinking and debate.”

But the schools will also include “a new curriculum that also responsibly educates students on the merits of the hydrocarbon industry in the context of renewable energy, environmental protection and preservation, as well as the over 6,000 products that derive from a barrel of oil.” Presumably this too will be energetically debated in classrooms, along with climate change.

As for health care, the same governance document proposes a two-tier system; Albertans will have the “choice of purchasing complementary private health care insurance and services to shorten wait times, as well as to improve quality and access for all Albertans.”

The project will also permit non-profits and private corporations to own and manage hospitals and outsource “appropriate elements of the health care system.”

And vaccination will be a personal choice. According to the project’s governance document, no “recrimination” will affect those who choose to decline it for themselves or their children.

It’s pretty clear that whether Alberta operated inside Canada by these rules or is fully independent, it would be no utopia — just a northern version of a solid-Trump state like Mississippi or Louisiana.

The project naively supposes that the rest of Canada would obediently accede to its demands. More likely Ottawa and the other provinces would impose sanctions on the would-be breakaway, showing Albertans what real colonialism feels like.

Stepping lightly to the far right

It might be different if the project manages to pull the Conservative Party of Canada even further to the right. As Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre prepares to run in the Albertan riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, he will have to step very lightly.

He won’t be able to endorse separatism, but he’s already sympathized with project supporters. His next step might be to promise plenty of special treatment for Alberta as a distinct society. If he fails to do so, Poilievre could be facing a second defeat and a hostile takeover of the Conservatives by people on the far right.

It’s disappointing that some Albertans, dreaming of utopia, are willing to break up their country just to create a hand-me-down fascist regime like Trump’s.

Still, they’ve called attention to themselves. The rest of us should prepare to engage in critical thinking and debate with them to see if they really want the changes proposed by the Alberta Prosperity Project, and if the project and the current government of Alberta are actually up to the task of secession.

As we watch Trump impose his own new order of things on the United States, we can believe that it can indeed happen here. Preventing that will require us to confront Alberta secessionists with the same determination we show Trump.