Is the Alberta Separatist Side Imploding?

According to social media posts Thursday night by two prominent figures in the Alberta separation movement, the board of the Alberta Prosperity Project terminated Mitch Sylvestre as CEO and Jeffrey Rath as the group’s legal counsel last month.

However, Sylvestre, speaking last night at an online video meeting of project supporters to discuss the next steps for their separation movement and how to get supporters to attend the United Conservative Party annual general meeting next month dismissed the claims as completely false. Rath was not at the meeting.

The social media comments have been posted in public.

Alberta Politics has been sent a transcript and recording of the meeting Sylvestre attended, first reported on social media by journalist and researcher Trevor Scott Howell.

A note on X published at 5:27 p.m. by Chris Scott, owner of the Whistlestop Café in Mirror which became a centre of opposition to COVID vaccinations during the pandemic, showed an image stating: “Notice of board decisions” beneath labels reading “Alberta Prosperity Project,” “formal public notice” and “from the board of directors.” The image was produced in the same style as the APP website.

The image states that Sylvestre, who is still president of the UCP’s Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul constituency association, and Rath, a well-known lawyer who served as APP counsel, were “terminated, for cause” on Sept. 14, and removed as directors at a separate meeting on Sept. 24.

“Neither Jeffrey Rath nor Mitch Sylvestre has authority to act for or represent the Alberta Prosperity Project (Alberta Prosperity Society),” it says.

“I had sincerely hoped this matter could be resolved privately,” Scott said in a post accompanying the image. “In the interest of protecting the integrity and unity of Alberta’s independence and sovereignty movements, every effort was made to reach a resolution behind closed doors. It is therefore with profound disappointment and reluctance that I find it necessary to issue this public notice to the members of the Alberta Prosperity Project.”

A post with the same image published about 20 minutes earlier by Tanya Clemens at her FarmGeek account on X said “I am an APP board member and wanted folks to know that these changes had been made by our board. Please read the notice.”

“We made the decision to wait until after the referendum to share this,” she said in part in another post on X. “We had all worked so hard to get to that point, and the last thing we wanted was to create a distraction when everyone needed to be focused on winning the vote.”

In 2023, Clemens was an unsuccessful nomination candidate for the United Conservative Party in the Livingstone-Macleod riding. In the past year, she has become well known as a proponent of the Alberta Prosperity Project.

At the APP’s way-forward meeting, according to the transcript, Sylvestre rejected the firing. “Chris and Tanya have never ever been members of the APS board. OK? So just understand this: the fact that they’re saying that they dismissed anybody from the APS board, they had no authority to do it. They cannot do it, and I’m really concerned with the timing of that.”

“This is all internal stuff,” he continued. “I said I would never, you know, have a fight in public about any of our internal stuff, and I’m going to hold that line. I’m not going to disparage anybody, and not going to do that because that I believe is the whole point here.”

“It’s going to literally make us all look like we’re freaking crazy,” Sylvestre adds in the recording. “You know, we’re having a fight right after a big success. What I thought is a big success. So as a consequence to that, you know what? I’m just going to move forward.”

The United Conservative Party AGM is scheduled to take place at the BMO Centre in Calgary from Nov. 27 to 29.

Meanwhile, last night Elections Alberta was still counting the final one per cent of the ballots cast in Monday’s separation referendum.