A foreign trade threat that has prompted a rally-’round-the-flag moment for Canadians may also have provided a boost for a pro-unity group whose emblem is a modified Canadian flag.
Thomas Lukaszuk said he pulled in more than 11,000 viewers for an online town hall Sunday to update his Forever Canadian group’s fight to counter Alberta separatism. That’s far more than he garnered at virtual gatherings this spring, or at the height of Forever Canadian’s massive petition drive last year, and he credits the higher traffic to the concerns around the newly escalated U.S. tariff war against Canada.
It was perhaps inevitable that interest would rise in his group’s patriotic lawn signs as the calendar ticked toward the Oct. 19 referendum on Alberta’s future in Canada. But this weekend’s acrimonious collapse in bilateral trade talks could heighten the movement’s urgency, Lukaszuk said.
“I’m finding that the outpour of support for Forever Canadian is rising every time we see these existential threats to our sovereignty, particularly from [the] United States,” he told CBC News.
“We have to be particularly united at this point in time.”
The rising friction has prompted Quebec’s separatist Parti Québécois to pledge that if elected this fall, it won’t hold a secession referendum until after U.S. President Donald Trump leaves office. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said this weekend she won’t follow suit, not with this referendum process well under way.
According to an Angus Reid Institute poll taken this weekend, more than three-quarters of respondents support Canada refusing the Trump administration’s trade deal terms, and responding with dollar-for-dollar tariffs. Support for those positions among Albertans is not as strong, but is still well into majority territory.
That much solidarity risks not leaving much rhetorical room for separatists to make their own case to break away the province from Canada amid Trump’s punitive measures and continued threats.
But the independence advocates are determined and they see an opportunity.
They are leaning into their side’s existing distrust of the federal Liberal government, and paint the latest developments as a national disaster that Albertans should walk away from.
To deride the crowd that favours an “elbows up” response to the tariff threat, some separatists on social media like to call them “elbozos.” That includes Alberta Prosperity Project’s Jeffrey Rath, who conveys this all as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s crass play to gin up patriotism.
Another user of the “elbozo” swipe is Derek Smith, host of the popular pro-independence Unacceptable Fringe show on YouTube.
He has said the failure in trade talks is an economic disaster for Canada against a more powerful neighbour, and a sign of Carney’s “Trump derangement syndrome.”
In one of his videos Monday, he said any Canadian leader like Carney will focus their policies and attention on the more populous parts of Quebec and Ontario, which he highlighted in a graphic.
“This is why Alberta wants to leave,” Derek Smith said. “This red portion of the map decides who’s in charge of the country.”
In a livestreamed Unacceptable Fringe episode later Monday — with more than 31,000 views — Derek Smith and his guests claimed Carney is an inadvertently great salesman for Alberta secession.
“I for one tend to be optimistic about this because at the end of the day, what’s bad for Canada is good for Alberta independence, baby,” one of Derek Smith’s guests told the show.
In this broad, decentralized independence movement, not all voices take part in the “elbozo” name-calling or overtly root for the country to suffer. Jason Lavigne, a fellow daily YouTuber who touts independence, said he hadn’t heard that term until CBC News asked about it.
But like the others, he puts a positive spin on the deterioration of the Canada-U.S. trade relationship and argues this could sway undecided Albertans to vote for a binding referendum to leave the country.
“What they’re paying close attention to is whether or not Canada can work, and this will be a strong indication that quite possibly it can’t work,” Lavigne told CBC News.
To this point, Alberta has largely escaped the damaging effects of tariffs, with oil, gas and agricultural products exempted by Trump. But Lavigne now sees high downside risk for his province from this trade war escalation, either in higher costs from retaliatory tariffs to the lingering prospect that oil and gas export taxes are imposed as leverage tactics.
“There’s a lot of people here in Alberta that really strongly believe that if there was a negotiation where Alberta could have the [lead], it would have come out much differently,” he said of an independent Alberta. “It likely would have led to no tariffs, possibly some free trade.”
Thus far, separatists appear to have struggled to win broad support for their movement, repeated polls suggest.
And opposing them is an ever-growing movement that spans much of Alberta’s political spectrum, including former NDP and UCP premiers Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney on a newly launched joint campaign with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
“Most Albertans are proud Canadians at heart, and we’re reminded of that with the attacks that our country is facing from abroad,” Kenney told CBC Radio’s Calgary Eyeopener on Tuesday.
But it’s hard not to notice some envy of the American system among Alberta separatists. Alberta Prosperity Project’s recent discussion paper on an independent Alberta floats elected judges and senators, open-carry gun laws, and a president with veto power — all the trappings of U.S. constitutional framework.
While supporters of Carney and his government’s position may express frustration with Trump, some separatists are more likely to side with the U.S. president.
Derek Smith, the Unacceptable Fringe host, said this week that if Trump offered citizenship to Albertans, “I’d happily pack up and go to the United States at this point. At least they have real leadership there.”
Part of that may be strategic, Lavigne suggests, because the U.S. president’s support and recognition of an independent Alberta would be pivotal to a would-be country.
The host of The Lavigne Show said Trump’s more overheated “51st state” rhetoric doesn’t help the independence cause, but he also echoed the president’s new threat to rebrand Lake Ontario.
“To the people of Ontario, you deserve better leaders,” Lavigne wrote Tuesday on social media. “Carney and [Ontario Premier Doug] Ford are sinking you. Soon, you’ll find yourself at the bottom of Lake America.”
As Trump’s attention stays on Canada during this trade sniping, it may well turn to the Canadian disunity that Alberta independence has helped stoke.
If his higher tariffs are altering the campaign now, it’s hard to know what a more direct Trump foray into the debate would do to those who want to safeguard Canadian unity and those who’d rather abandon it.
