The Alberta question: How separatists took hold of the province’s governing party

The Edmonton stage should have been a safe space for Danielle Smith. A place where an Alberta premier could revel in partisan applause. 

Instead, it was the scene of a political mugging.

Smith sat on the stage, dressed in a crisp white suit, alongside her cabinet at the United Conservative Party’s 2025 annual general meeting to take questions from the party faithful. 

One man, dressed in a blue blazer and baseball cap, stepped up to the microphone and launched into a familiar refrain of western grievance with the federal government. 

But he wasn’t there to ask Smith a question. He was there to send a message. 

“My question for the room is how many of all of us favour a free and independent Alberta?” shouted Jeff Rath, constitutional lawyer, UCP member and the bulldog of the Alberta independence movement.  

The crowd rose in an ovation. Smith, appearing unfazed, shot back with a political maxim Albertans would soon hear repeatedly. 

“Well, I support an independent Alberta within a united Canada.”

At past AGMs, Smith’s proclamations were received by cheers. But on this day, the audience booed her.

Smith offered her united Canada pitch twice more during the AGM, touting her successes in addressing Alberta’s concerns with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney. Why give up now, she said, when victory was at hand?

As before, she was booed. Both times.

Jeff Rath, seen on the big screen, whips up the crowd at the UCP annual general meeting in Edmonton in November 2025 with a call to action for independence. Premier Danielle Smith, seated in white, was booed when she pushed back. (CBC)

The jeering of a premier at an AGM wasn’t normal. Something had changed within the UCP. It was now home to a movement, activated during the COVID-19 pandemic, bent on breaking up Canada. 

“There was a cohort of the population who were living in alternative reality in COVID and they just got active,” said former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, whose 2022 resignation came, in part, at the hands of that movement.

Separatism cheered, premier booed at UCP convention

A fifth estate investigation found that Smith leaned on this movement during her rise to the premiership. While polling consistently shows independence is out of step with the vast majority of Albertans, the premier nonetheless called a separation referendum for Oct. 19.

Albertans are divided. So is the UCP. And some of the separatists Smith once welcomed into her “big tent” party are now trying to remove her from office.

Through interviews, reviews of government documents and separatist video archives, the fifth estate has identified four critical steps the independence movement took to push Alberta into a referendum that could change the fate of a nation.

In the spring of 2021, a slender man with slicked-back hair and a thin voice travelled from one Alberta town to another like an itinerant preacher, speaking to whoever would listen. But old- time religion wasn’t Dennis Modry’s mission.

He was an evangelist for an independent republic of Alberta.

In the 1980s, Modry was a surgeon hailed for performing the first heart-lung transplant in Western Canada. 

But his medical career crashed in 2013, after Alberta Health Services suspended his surgical privileges over performance issues. He unsuccessfully fought the suspension in court and in 2017, he failed to renew his licence. By the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Modry’s medical career was over.

By 2021, he had embraced Alberta independence as his new calling. In speeches, Modry laid out a path to create a new country through a referendum.

Modry wasn’t calling for the formation of a separatist political party. Past attempts in Alberta were electoral failures.

His path to a referendum was through the UCP itself, by transforming it into a government with an “independence focus.”

Dennis Modry speaks at a separatist rally in Edmonton in October 2025, urging Albertans to vote to leave Canada. It was one of his last public events after a judge found in March 2025 that he misappropriated $1.3 million from his aunt and uncle. (CBC)

“When Jason Kenney and the UCP were elected, they had 120,000 members,” Modry told an audience in Medicine Hat in 2021. “We want to grow that membership to four or five or six or seven hundred thousand people.” A group that large, even in a province of nearly three million voters, could shape an election, he said. 

If they were successful, Modry was fond of saying, 2023 could be the last provincial election in Alberta’s history.

Modry joined lawyer Jeff Rath and sporting goods store owner Mitch Sylvestre in creating the Alberta Prosperity Project, an organization dedicated to promoting separation. The trio also joined the UCP.

Even with separatists joining the UCP, there was little chance the party would call a referendum so long as Kenney, the premier and party’s founding leader, remained in office.

Kenney would have to go. 

From the start, Jason Kenney wanted to keep separatists out of the UCP. He thought they were more of a nuisance than a clear and present threat, he told the fifth estate, but nonetheless tried to erect a firewall to keep them out. 

“I wanted to send a message to them that this is not your party. You want to play in politics? Good for you. It’s a democracy. You get to do that in your separatist parties. This is not one of them,” Kenney said.

So when the 2017 merger of the Progressive Conservative Party and its rival, the Wildrose Party, created the UCP,  Kenney wrote a loyalty-to-Canada clause into the unification agreement, expecting it to be part of the UCP’s foundational principles. 

But when the party held its first AGM in 2018, the committee deciding on what principles members would vote on didn’t include the loyalty clause on the ballot.

The door that Kenney wanted to slam shut was left open.

Three years later, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Kenney’s leadership into a crisis. Some Albertans, including those who would join the 2022 Ottawa convoy and border blockade at Coutts, Alta., were enraged by Kenney’s pandemic restrictions. Even some of his own MLAs rebelled, and Kenney was forced into a leadership review.

Modry saw something else in Kenney’s political woes.

Opportunity. 

“The options are, Kenney is replaced or he’s not replaced,” Modry said in a November 2021 speech in Brooks, Alta. “Could that party move with a new leader or with Jason to an independence-focused future?”

The sequel to the convoy movement

Kenney told the fifth estate that in the fight for his political life, he didn’t recognize where the threat was coming from.

“I will admit, I and my team were late to notice what was going on,” he said.

In May 2022, Kenney received only 51 per cent support from UCP members. He resigned immediately. After the dust settled, Kenney saw what happened. 

“Two-thirds of the people voting in that review vote … were brand new,” Kenney said. “They came in on COVID anger, anti-vax sentiment. A lot of them were separatists. 

“Separatism is the sequel to the convoy movement.”

With Kenney gone, and the UCP ranks filling with separatists, a referendum seemed more realistic than ever. What the separatists needed was a new and sympathetic UCP leader.

That person turned out to be a political exile hosting a talk radio show in Calgary.

Danielle Smith had been the leader of the opposition Wildrose Party until 2014, when she crossed the floor to join the governing Progressive Conservatives. But when the 2015 election came, Smith failed to secure the PC nomination in her own riding.

So Smith made her living on the radio.

Eight years later, Kenney’s demise offered the chance for a political resurrection. When she set her eyes on the UCP leadership, Smith extended an olive branch the former premier never would have.

“I knew how important it was to address the issues of autonomy, and I talked to Dr. Modry as one of my first steps,” Smith said during a UCP leadership debate hosted by the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project. “I take your movement very, very seriously … because you have the power to be the ‘or else.'”

Danielle Smith won the UCP leadership in 2022 in part because she courted the support of the party’s newest membership base: Alberta separatists. (CBC)

During the leadership campaign, the UCP membership rolls exploded. At the time of Kenney’s resignation there were about 60,000 voting party members. On the night of the leadership vote, there were nearly 124,000.

Smith, who declined an interview request from the fifth estate, was the only one out of seven leadership candidates who did not serve in the Kenney government. 

The outsider won after six rounds of voting, returning to political prominence with only 54 per cent support. But she led the UCP to a majority government in the 2023 election.

She did not campaign on separation. But after the election, Smith continued to accept separatists in the party. In the spring of 2025, for example, she attended the annual UCP fundraiser held by the Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul constituency association. Seated on either side of her at the head table were two prominent separatists: the association’s president Mitch Sylvestre and Dennis Modry. 

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith sits with two of Alberta’s key separatist leaders at UCP fundraising event dinner in 2025. On the right is Dennis Modry and on the left Mitch Sylvestre, who is also a UCP constituency association president. (Bonnyville Cold Lake St Paul UCP Association/Facebook)

The referendum was only one step away.

In 2025, Modry, Sylvestre and Rath were busy marshalling their forces for a petition campaign to force a referendum.

But there were hurdles. Separatism was unpopular among Alberta voters. And the law required at least 294,000 signatures on a petition for it to qualify for a referendum. 

In July 2025, Danielle Smith’s government changed the rules, slashing the number of required signatures to 177,000, and boosting the number of days to get them from 90 to 120. On the same day the law changed, Sylvestre filed a separatist petition with Elections Alberta, asking a direct remain-in-Canada-or-leave question.

Then Elections Alberta got in the way. An independence question came with constitutional implications, so the petition was sent to the courts for review.

This turned out to be a temporary setback. Smith’s government changed the law again in December 2025, stripping Elections Alberta of its powers to refer a petition to the courts. As before, Sylvestre filed papers the day the law was changed. This time his petition, labelled StayFree Alberta, was approved. 

The petition ultimately cleared the reduced threshold with 222,600 verified signatures.

Mitch Sylvestre, separatist leader and a UCP constituency association president, delivers the StayFree Alberta petitions to Election Alberta in May 2026 alongside Jeff Rath, standing to his right. A First Nations court challenge tossed the petitions into legal limbo. (Alice Burgat/Radio-Canada)

The fight wasn’t over. A group of First Nations chiefs went to court, arguing the Alberta government failed its constitutional duty to consult them on an issue that could impact their treaty rights. 

On May 13, 2026, the courts agreed, and stopped the StayFree Alberta question from becoming a referendum.

Smith could have used the ruling as an off-ramp, said Orlagh O’Kelly, a lawyer representing the chief of the Sturgeon Lake Cree. Instead, on May 21, Smith announced her own question, designed to evade a court challenge. 

On Oct. 19, Albertans would be given two choices: remain in Canada or start the process of having a binding referendum to stay or leave.

“When Danielle Smith was actually elected in 2023, she didn’t run on any of this,” said O’Kelly. “Jason Kenney got taken out by that arm of the party and she knows that.”

Smith said she was “fiercely loyal” to Canada and would vote for Option 1 — to remain in Canada. She also reassured separatists she empathized with their feelings.

But some UCP separatists reacted to a question about a referendum with outrage. For Rath, Smith was a turncoat. To get the referendum they wanted, they needed an extra step.

“We just need to get rid of her sooner rather than later and proceed to have a special general meeting of the party to vote on her leadership the same way we did with Jason Kenney,” Rath told the fifth estate.

As referendum day got closer, Smith repeatedly said her position, and that of her government, is a vote to stay.

Her party is a different story. A spring poll by Angus Reid found some 64 per cent of party members were separatists. Meanwhile, more than 70 per cent of Albertans reject the idea. 

Two weeks after Smith’s referendum announcement, UCP party president Rob Smith — no relation to the premier — said the quiet part out loud on CBC’s The Calgary Eyeopener radio show.

Many of the UCP members are pro-independence, Rob Smith said, including “a large number of the leaders across Alberta that pushed” to make the referendum happen. If the premier had not called the referendum, he said party unity would be in jeopardy. 

Separatists turn on Smith

For Rath, Smith is the cause of the party’s ills and “a complete impediment to independence.”

“As long as Premier Smith is premier of Alberta, Alberta will never be free,” Rath said at a separatist rally on the steps of the provincial legislature in August. 

Rath believes separatists already have the influence to take Smith out, claiming they sold upward of 8,000 memberships in 2025 to put separatists on the UCP board of directors.

He has been pushing UCP constituency associations to call for a special leadership review, which can only happen if at least 22 of 87 associations call for it. As of this writing, only two have done so.

But as he plots to overthrow Smith, Rath is grappling with his own legal troubles. He is being sued by two First Nations groups that allege he misappropriated millions of dollars from trust funds his law firm oversaw. Rath has said allegations he misappropriated funds from the trust are false.

Jeff Rath speaks at a pro-separation rally outside the Alberta legislature in Edmonton on Aug. 29, and urged the crowd to push out Danielle Smith as UCP leader and premier. (Bob Grieve/CBC)

Divisions are showing within Smith’s caucus. On Sept. 29, Red Deer MLA Jason Stephan publicly split with the premier’s position and announced he voted for Option 2 — that Alberta should hold a binding referendum on whether to leave Canada — via a mail-in ballot.

At the same time, Smith’s popularity with Albertans has reached its lowest point since the 2023 election. But she has held her course. 

During an online conference on Sept. 19, a month out from referendum day, Smith fought back tears while running through a list of grievances often heard at separatist rallies.

“Some begin to ask the painful question: Does this country actually want us?” she asked before returning to the same united Canada mantra that earned her boos in 2025.

A week later, the premier was beaming beside Prime Minister Carney at a press conference in the oil hub of Fort McMurray to announce that the federal government was fast-tracking a West Coast oil pipeline. This was proof, Smith said, that Canada was working for Alberta.

Then on Oct. 7, at a press conference at CFB Edmonton, Smith struck a defiant tone when a CBC reporter asked if she had encouraged the behaviour of separatist leaders, her one-time political allies, by calling the Oct. 19 referendum.

“Well, there is no greater critic of me than the same separatist leaders that you are talking about, because I have been making it very clear that my position is to vote to remain.”

Graphics: Tim Kindrachuk | Editing: Andre Mayer