It\u2019s a Monday night in June and hundreds have braved the haze of Canadian wildfires to gather in a cavernous sports facility in the city of Red Deer, Alberta. <\/p>\n
An Alberta team, the Edmonton Oilers, are taking on the Florida Panthers in a National Hockey League finals game tonight. The atmosphere is heavy with anticipation. <\/p>\n
But these people aren\u2019t here for hockey. This is a rally for Alberta independence. <\/p>\n
It might be hard to believe, given Canadian sports fans\u2019 recent booing of \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner,\u201d but not all Canadians took offense to US President Donald Trump\u2019s questioning of their country\u2019s sovereignty. <\/p>\n
In oil-rich Alberta, where a movement for independence from Canada appears to be gathering steam, many see in Trump a powerful and important ally whose haranguing of their former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was as welcome as his calls to \u201cdrill baby, drill.\u201d <\/p>\n
Though some see US statehood as a step too far, many in the Red Deer crowd believe the US president \u2013 as a fellow pro-oil conservative \u2013 would recognize a breakaway Alberta should a vote on independence go their way. <\/p>\n
\u201c<\/em>Donald Trump is not the savior of the world,\u201d says Albert Talsma, a welding contractor from Bentley. \u201cBut right now he\u2019s North America\u2019s best asset.\u201d <\/p>\n With their \u201cMake Alberta Great Again\u201d hats, \u201cAlberta Republic\u201d T-shirts and posters declaring \u201cAlbertans for Alberta!\u201d it\u2019s not hard to see parallels to the US president\u2019s MAGA movement and the forces that inspired it. <\/p>\n Separatists here have long argued that Canada\u2019s federal system fails to represent their interests; that the federal government\u2019s efforts to stymie climate change are holding back Alberta\u2019s lucrative oil industry (the largest in Canada); that they pay more than they get back through federal taxation; that their conservative values are drowned out by the more liberal eastern provinces. <\/p>\n \u201cAlberta hasn\u2019t been treated fairly since 1905, when we joined Confederation. They basically used the west as a colony, to take wealth from the west to support the east,\u201d says Kate Graham, a singing grandmother from Calgary. <\/p>\n She opens the rally with a rendition of Janis Joplin\u2019s \u201cMercedez Benz,\u201d the lyrics modified to promote independence. Like Janis, she sings it a cappella, <\/em>before spending much of the rest of the event at a booth by the door, selling merch emblazoned with the slogan \u201cI AM ALBERTAN.\u201d <\/p>\n Similar disenchantment is voiced by a steady stream of Albertans, each venting against their mother country on a stage flanked by a large provincial flag strung across a soccer goal. <\/p>\n \u201cThey want to stifle our (oil) industry,\u201d says Mitch Sylvestre, a businessman from Bonnyville and one of the rally\u2019s chief organizers, his hoarse voice echoing over the PA system. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have cancer. We have a problem,\u201d says Sylvestre. \u201cWe have it large.\u201d <\/p>\n In a strange twist, the push to get Alberta out of Canada has gained momentum just as much of the country has united in <\/strong>patriotism in the face of Trump\u2019s tariffs and threats of annexation. <\/p>\n Soon after Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s Liberals rode a wave of anti-Trump sentiment to win the 2025 federal election in April, the Alberta Legislature passed a law making it easier to organize a referendum on independence. <\/p>\n Under the new law, petitions for a province-wide vote now require just 177,000 signatures \u2013 down from 600,000 previously \u2013 and those signatures can be gathered over a period of four months rather than three. The province is home to nearly 5 million people, according to Statistics Canada, representing more than a tenth of the population of the entire country. <\/p>\n One of the most vocal advocates for a referendum is Jeffrey Rath, a lawyer and co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), which organized the Red Deer rally. <\/p>\n Rath, well over six feet tall in a cowboy hat and boots, has a ranch just outside of Calgary. He raises race horses there and follows the sport closely, especially the Kentucky Derby \u2013 where this year, he notes with a grin, \u201c\u2019Sovereignty\u2019 beat \u2018Journalism.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIf you wanna know what\u2019s special about Alberta, just look around, right?\u201d Rath says with a sweep of his hand. <\/p>\n The view from the rise above Rath\u2019s horse pasture is superb: quaking aspen, white pine and green rolling hills. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of God\u2019s treasures on earth. And the people here are very distinct people that have a very distinct culture and that are interested in maintaining that culture.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n In Rath\u2019s eyes, Trump\u2019s attitude toward Canada is an opportunity. His group is counting on US government support in the event of success at the ballot box. <\/p>\n \u201cTrump\u2019s election has given us a lot of hope,\u201d Rath says. \u201cIf anybody is going to have the guts to recognize an independent Alberta, (it) would be the Trump administration.\u201d <\/p>\n Separatism is not new in Canada, but it\u2019s only had real political power in the predominantly Francophone province of Quebec, which has numerous pro-independence parties and voted in two referendums on independence in the past 50 years, rejecting it by a 60\/40 margin in 1980 and by around one percentage point in 1995. <\/p>\n In Alberta, enthusiasm for separation has waxed and waned for decades, fueled initially by \u201cWestern alienation\u201d \u2013 resentment felt in western Canada against a federal system dominated by the more populous eastern provinces. More recently, the movement has attracted Albertans who were angered by federally mandated lockdowns during the Covid pandemic. Among them was Rath, who has in the past faced controversy for suggesting government officials should face murder and negligent homicide charges over what he claims are the ill-effects of the Covid vaccine. <\/p>\n A recent poll by the Angus Reid Institute found about a third of Albertans currently support independence, though that support does not break down equally throughout the population. <\/p>\n Some of the loudest critics of the idea come from Alberta\u2019s indigenous communities, whose treaties with the Canadian crown are older than the province itself. Under pressure from that community, the government added a provision to the referendum bill that guarantees their treaty rights whatever the result. <\/p>\n While Smith\u2019s party proposed the referendum bill, she says she is against separation herself, preferring to \u201cget Alberta to exert its sovereignty within a united Canada.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWe have had, from time to time, these kinds of initiatives flare up,\u201d says Smith. \u201cAnd they\u2019re almost always in response to a federal government that\u2019s out of control. But they have all subsided when the federal government got back in its own lane.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI think that it\u2019s a notice to Ottawa that they\u2019ve got to take this seriously,\u201d Smith adds. \u201cThe question is, what can we do to address it?\u201d <\/p>\n One of the more explosive questions surrounding secession is whether an independent Alberta might join the United States. <\/p>\n In February, a billboard appeared along the highway between Calgary and Edmonton, with text urging onlookers to tell Premier Smith that Alberta ought to \u201cJoin the USA!\u201d superimposed over a picture of her shaking hands with Trump. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think Albertans are very keen to trade a bad relationship with Ottawa with a bad relationship with Washington,\u201d Smith says when asked about the possibility. <\/p>\n But others, like construction worker Stephen Large of Czar, Alberta, feel it would be good to have the might of the US on their side \u2013 particularly if negotiations fail in the event of a \u201cyes\u201d vote for independence. <\/p>\n \u201cThe minute something happens here toward independence, our federal government is going to be furious,\u201d says Large, who wears a red \u201cMake Alberta Great Again\u201d cap. <\/p>\n \u201cThey will pull out all the stops, military and police and whatever they can find to lock us down, lock us in.\u201d <\/p>\n Large points to how former Prime Minister Trudeau briefly invoked the Emergencies Act when Canadian truckers blockaded downtown Ottawa to protest cross-border vaccine mandates in 2022. <\/p>\n The statute, which had never been used before, allowed Canadian law enforcement to take extraordinary measures to restore public order \u2013 including freezing the bank accounts of certain protesters and banning public assembly in parts of Ottawa. The law also allows the government to deploy troops within Canada to enforce the law, though Trudeau did not invoke that part of the provision in 2022. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re gonna need some support from somewhere, and the only place on Earth that is worthy of their support is the United States military,\u201d Large says. <\/p>\n A woman sitting in front of Large overhears him and turns around, nodding in agreement. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m with him,\u201d she says, introducing herself as Evelyn Ranger of Red Deer. \u201cI\u2019m not sure that Alberta or the western provinces, even together, can make it on their own. So, the States is still the better way to go, because you\u2019ve got the military, you\u2019ve got the trade and everything already set there.\u201d <\/p>\n For his part, Rath refuses to consider whether the federal government might invoke the Emergencies Act or use other measures to put down his movement if it were to unilaterally declare Alberta independent in the event of a \u201cyes\u201d vote. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but we don\u2019t see that happening,\u201d Rath says. <\/p>\n Asked if he would be up for an interview at that point, he grins. <\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d Rath replies, before letting out a laugh. \u201cIt might be from a jail cell.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s a Monday night in June and hundreds have braved the haze of Canadian wildfires…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1532,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profitalarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Hopes for a vote in \u2018one of God\u2019s treasures\u2019<\/h2>\n
Western alienation<\/h2>\n
The 51st state?<\/h2>\n