Alberta separatists getting organized — a unity challenge for Canada and Danielle Smith’s party

You don’t need to be a Preston-Manning-like soothsayer to imagine western separatist sentiment ticks upward if the Liberals win re-election.

You just need to remember 2019 and the Wexit movement.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals narrowly won a second term that fall, and disgruntled Albertans and Saskatchewanians self-branded a separatist movement after the United Kingdom’s Brexit. 

But what did it amount to? Not much.

Though a Wexit Facebook group drew a large following, a few rallies drew a few hundred people. Within months, COVID hit and the dream dissipated.

The 2025 murmurings about Alberta wanting out of a Liberal-led country come during another attention-grabbing crisis, this one in U.S.-Canada relations.

But there’s an apparent difference between the Wexit movement of 2019 and the separatism of 2025, and it’s not just the accumulated weight of a potential fourth Liberal term this time.

This year, there’s a much more robust organization — some of it outside Danielle Smith’s UCP base, and some of it squarely within her party’s tent. She’d talked about a “national unity crisis” emerging in the wake of the election, but another unity crisis may wind up emerging within her own United Conservatives.

Last month, days after the federal campaign began, a group of pro-sovereignty Albertans held a news conference in Calgary. Jeff Rath, an Alberta lawyer who’s been on Fox News backing the 51st-state plan, led the event, and announced a petition drive to get a provincial separation referendum as soon as this fall.

Mitch Sylvestre spoke there, too. He’s the president of a UCP riding association in northeast Alberta, and also leads the Alberta Prosperity Project, a pro-independence organization.

“I really believe it’s Alberta’s turn to take care of itself,” he told the audience last month.

He touted the financial benefits he foresaw in prosperous Alberta leaving Canada, but did suggest the province could use it as a leverage play. 

“If we threaten the government like that with separation, the government is more likely to come to the table and give us what Quebec has,” he said.

Sylvestre is an influential figure within the grassroots of the UCP. He was a top figure within the Black Hat Gang last year that prompted the United Conservative membership to embrace major expansions to the Alberta Bill of Rights — ones that went much further than what the Smith government legislated last fall.

He’s also been a captain with Take Back Alberta, the conservative activist organization that helped oust Jason Kenney as premier and UCP leader in 2022, and has since helped get like-minded figures elected to the party’s board of directors.

Sylvestre didn’t respond to requests for comment, but CBC News spoke with Take Back founder David Parker, who has also recently begun arguing that Alberta must secede.

“We must move now, while the Alberta spirit still burns hot,” he wrote online this month. “While we still have the numbers, the courage, and the will to act.”

In an interview, Parker echoed ex-Reform leader Manning’s point that the separatist movement rises if the Mark Carney Liberals win on April 28.

“Admittedly, I have my own bubble that I exist in, but everybody I talk to that was a federalist is becoming a separatist if Carney wins,” Parker said.

Polling by Angus Reid has shown 25 per cent would vote “yes” in an Alberta independence referendum, with potential for more support depending on the outcome of the federal election.

At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff and “51st state” threats have stirred Canadian nationalism, the idea of a breakaway Alberta strikes even some conservatives as offensive.

“Threatening to leave the country because you don’t get your desired electoral outcome is counterproductive, and unpatriotic,” Kenney told CBC News last week. “And I don’t think it’s something that should be thrown around.”

The Alberta separatist sentiment is actually lower than it was in 2019, the Angus Reid firm notes, but Parker expects organizers to do a better job of harnessing the post-election mood this time.

“There wasn’t a lot of people with a pedigree of success in the former separatist movement, but I think there’s a number of people who know what they’re doing and are pushing now,” he said.

“It will be a very credible movement with a lot of people who know how to organize.”

In addition to Sylvestre, and potentially himself, Parker touts veteran conservative campaigner Cam Davies, who is now with the low-profile separatist party that was called the Buffalo Party but has recently rebranded as the Republican Party of Alberta.

It’s staying fairly quiet now, but the party’s website claims without evidence that some UCP MLAs support provincial independence. Republican Party president Brittany Marsh also said it will consider running candidates in two upcoming provincial byelections in Edmonton — which could split the conservative vote in two NDP stronghold seats.

Meanwhile, the maverick Calgary UCP constituency that held a vaccine-skeptic event last year is now promoting a June event about “building a framework for a sovereign Alberta.” (No speakers are listed yet.)

Sovereignty of a kind has, of course, been at the core of Premier Smith’s offering. But she always took pains to distinguish it from secessionism, calling her flagship anti-Ottawa bill the Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act.

At a conservative conference in Ottawa, Smith flashed her patriotism by stating “Canada is worth fighting for” — and even showed off red toenail polish to convey that she’s “Team Canada right down to my toes.”

But back at home in Alberta, she’s stressed how federalism is broken and the federal election’s winner needs to fix it. Smith has laid out her demands that nine oil-and-gas-related Liberal policies be repealed, and warned of a “national unity crisis” if her wishes aren’t fulfilled.

“There’s a bit of a reckoning that is coming,” she told her call-in radio show this past weekend. “I tend to take the diplomatic approach. I’ve been pretty direct about what I think needs to change. But let’s see what happens on April 28 so that we know what we’re dealing with.”

Should Carney remain prime minister, she’ll apply pressure for him to respond to renewed frustrations in western provinces.

But the unrest within Smith’s conservative base could also demand a response from her. 

In an echo of Kenney’s response to the 2019 Liberal win, Smith said she’ll create a second “Fair Deal” panel to tour Alberta after the election to assess the mood of Albertans toward the province’s place in Canada. 

Parker said Smith will be “trying to walk a tightrope” after a Carney election victory. But grassroots UCPers could try to push separatism, potentially demanding action at the party’s annual convention in November, the Take Back leader said.

“I think the party will try its hardest to quell any sort of movement,” Parker said. But the activist who helped vault Smith into the leader’s seat said this issue could threaten the job security she won last year in a 91.5 per cent leadership review vote.

“If she doesn’t handle that well, I think it could very well be her undoing,” he said.

One other difference between 2019 and 2025 could prove influential as well. Six years ago, zero Liberals won seats in Alberta.

But Carney has the party leading in the polls with less than two weeks to go before voting day. CBC’s Poll Tracker forecasts that between four and 11 Alberta seats could go red.

It also has Liberal support in the province averaging 30 per cent — higher than it’s been in decades. This also might mean that more people want the Liberals to win than see their victory as a cue to leave Canada — to say nothing of all the pro-Canadian people voting for the Conservatives or other parties.

Danielle Smith serves as premier of all those Albertans. She’ll have to figure out how to satisfy their disparate wishes on April 29 and beyond.