Canada’s Oil Province Wants Out
Alberta’s sovereigntists are flirting with the Trump administration while promising freedom from Ottawa. But independence would expose the province's narrow oil economy to capital flight, brain drain, and serious fiscal strain.
Alberta’s sovereigntists promise liberation from Ottawa while courting allies in Washington. Their rhetoric is heavy on grievance but light on vital practicalities such as trade access, market shock, and the legal force of indigenous land and treaty rights. (Walaa Alshaer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
National self-determination is no bad thing. After World War I, during which imperial powers such as Britain, France, and Germany squandered millions of lives for nothing, President Woodrow Wilson called for an end to the old order. In his speech of January 8, 1918, to a joint session of Congress, he said: “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by.” His famous “Fourteen Points” articulated a vision of a world in which old empires respected the sovereignty of nations, secret deals were banished to the past, diplomacy was conducted in the open, and the interests of national populations were afforded just as much consideration as the territorial claims of their leaders. Although the United States ultimately failed to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s intellectual framework helped lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of the United Nations and the era of liberal internationalism that followed.
Among today’s sovereign nations — many of them, in various respects, beneficiaries of Wilson’s vision — where does Canada stand? And, more pointedly, what is the place of the prairie province of Alberta within it? Roughly the size of France but home to only five million people, and landlocked to boot, Alberta is considered by some to be a victim of the bad old colonial ways. The province, along with neighboring Saskatchewan, was carved out of the North West Territories by an act of the Canadian Parliament in 1905. Prior to that, for much of the colonial period, its vast land mass had been controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, exploited through the fur trade — beaver pelts, pemmican, and the wider provisioning economy that sustained it.
That same year, Sir Clifford Sifton, Liberal minister of the interior and superintendent general of Indian affairs, said publicly: “We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire, that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work, and in every legitimate way to our prosperity.” More than a century later, these words are far from forgotten. Those who nurture Western grievances see the province as having been established rather like the provinces of the old Roman empire. In a provocative article published in the wake of the anti-vaccine, anti-Trudeau “Freedom Convoy,” David Solway wrote for C2C magazine that “the Prairie provinces were regions dominated by the ruling, administrative center to whom they owed fealty and paid tribute.” On this view, Ottawa is Rome, in the grip of the patrician “Laurentian elite,” and Alberta is a mere tributary.
Gas, Grass, or Petrodollars — Nobody Rides for Free
However it narrates its colonial beginnings and vassal status, Alberta has done very well for itself. During the twenty-first century, Alberta outpaced most of Canada for growth in GDP. As the corporate friendly Business Council of Alberta reports:
Albertans generate more economic value per person than anywhere else in the country. Alberta’s per-capita GDP is around $72,000 — about $7,000 more than the second highest in Saskatchewan, and a whopping $18,000 and $23,000 more than Ontario and Quebec, respectively.
The main driver of this wealth is the oil and gas industry. As of 2023, the industry contributed 22 percent to Alberta’s GDP.
At the same time, Canada’s overall economic performance in the twenty-first century has been pretty lackluster, especially during the decade Justin Trudeau was in charge. As a report from TD Economics shows, Canada has lagged behind most of its G7 peers for real GDP growth per capita. This is due to low investment (outside real estate), a paucity of spending on research and development, and an underinvestment in workers.
An old joke, which no longer seems funny, holds that Canada is nothing more than “three corporations in a trench coat.” In almost every economic sector — telecommunications, mining, banking, retail — you will find a handful of large, monopolistic corporations dictating the rules of the game, driving up prices for consumers, and stifling the ability of workers to create more favorable prospects for themselves.
In this light, Alberta could be seen as the unwilling captive of a larger state that stifles growth, entrepreneurship, and, worst of all, siphons off wealth through taxation and onerous regulatory burden. This is the picture that emerges in a foundational separatist document, The Value of Freedom: A Draft Fully Costed Fiscal Plan for an Independent Alberta, authored by a group that has generated a lot of noise in the province recently, the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP).
The fiscal arithmetic of the plan is not without its detractors. Trevor Tombe, professor of economics at the University of Calgary, has given The Value of Freedom a read and concluded that “a separate Alberta would be a poorer Alberta.” The revealing feature of the APP document is its strong ideological orientation. Unlike in Quebec, Canada’s other sovereigntist stronghold, Alberta sovereignty has no footing in linguistic and cultural self-determination. The entire argument boils down to the notion that Alberta would be materially better off going its own way.
In broad terms, the APP envisions an independent Alberta that would aggressively slash taxes — eliminating the federal goods and services taxes and reducing personal and corporate taxes — while dismantling what it calls “restrictive regulations.” These changes would, the authors argue, foster foreign and domestic investment. Central to the project is also the reversal of Trudeau-era climate change policies. In the introduction, the authors declare their intention to “completely eliminate all externally imposed limits on C02 provision to Alberta forests, prairies, grasslands and farmlands.”
Alberta sovereigntists make claims similar to those on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom. But the comparison is far from perfect. The European Union was a supranational union, whereas Ottawa is the elected government of a federation in which Alberta is a full constitutional partner. The issue is not a matter of taking umbrage at unelected foreign rulers; rather, it’s grousing about federal compromise.
Nevertheless, the sense of grievance is undeniably similar. From the view of sovereigntists, halting transfers to distant, incompetent, corrupt and wasteful bureaucracies (Brussels, Ottawa), will enable the “free” nation to retain more revenue to spend on its own people, bolstering core programs such as health care and education. Indeed, one of the document’s authors confirmed to Jacobin that the Alberta Prosperity Project vision will maintain funding for the heavily subsidized national childcare program launched under Trudeau, though the program is not mentioned explicitly in The Value of Freedom. Canada Post, meanwhile, would get the ax. The authors write that the “‘small government’ approach that Alberta favors” means that public mail delivery would be entirely replaced by private couriers such as FedEx and UPS.
We’ll Take Treason for $500 Billion
Last month, a journalist from the Financial Times confirmed a rumor that Alberta separatist leaders had met three times with US State Department officials in Washington since April 2025. Jeffrey Rath, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s legal counsel, let the cat out of the bag. Rath — who typically sports a cowboy hat and has been unaffectionately nicknamed “Boss Hogg” due to his uncanny resemblance to the Dukes of Hazzard character — revealed that the separatists would be looking for a $500 billion credit facility to help float a newly independent Alberta. “The US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Rath told the FT.
Senior officials in the Trump administration appear to agree. Scott Bessent, secretary of the Treasury, told a right-wing podcast that Alberta is “a natural partner for the US” and spoke of a “rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not.” The Financial Times article prompted no less than David Eby, premier of the neighboring province of British Columbia, to denounce the actions of the separatists as “treason.”
Strong words — and yet Alberta remains on a path toward a possible separation referendum. The route ahead is far from clear, but Alberta’s ruling United Conservative Party (UCP) has actively helped the separatist cause by passing legislation favorable to citizen-initiated referendums. On July 4 last year — American Independence Day, a date hard to accept as accidental — the UCP government updated its own Citizen Initiative legislation, dramatically reducing the number of signatures required to trigger a referendum, including any petition on the question of separation. The new law also extended the timeline for collecting signatures, from ninety days to 120.
And so it is that Albertans currently find themselves in a bizarre situation. A pro-federalist petition, Forever Canada, filed under the previous rules, collected an impressive 456,000 signatures — easily surpassing the required threshold of 294,000. Yet the province still faces the prospect of a separation vote, as Jeff Rath and the Stay Free Alberta campaign circulate a second petition under the new, more lenient rules, requiring just over 177,000 signatures.
“This is not a well-trod path with a clear blueprint that folks can follow and anticipate what comes next,” Jared Wesley told Jacobin in an interview. A professor of political science at the University of Alberta and lead researcher for Common Ground, which studies political culture in Western Canada, Wesley notes that, “in Canada, direct democracy tools like plebiscites and referendums are not binding.” Given that the UCP does not have to call a provincial election until the fall of 2027, this effectively puts the current premier, Danielle Smith, and her government in the driver’s seat.
Flirting With the Separatists
So is Danielle Smith a separatist, leading a separatist party?
Veteran political observer, David Climenhaga, says yes. In his view, Smith’s oft-repeated call for a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada” amounts to doublespeak. After all, a truly sovereign Alberta would recognize no lawmaking body above its own legislature. As Climenhaga argues, judged by actions and words, “it can no longer be denied that Ms. Smith is a separatist, and her UCP Cabinet and Caucuses are secessionists as well.”
In May 2025, following the comeback election victory of the federal Liberals under Mark Carney — an outcome that infuriated a lot of Alberta conservatives — Premier Smith issued a sweeping list of demands to Ottawa. These included decades-old grievances, including Canada’s system of equalization, in which “have” provinces contribute more to federal revenues than they receive in return, enabling “have-not” provinces to provide reasonably comparable public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.
Since then, Smith’s UCP government has been holding a knife to the throat of the federal government. Most recently it told Mark Carney’s government that Alberta will withhold funding for the judiciary unless the province gets to help pick judges for Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench, the Alberta Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Because the UCP did not campaign on separatism when it won the last election in 2023, it has taken voters a while to realize what direction their government would take. It is a lot clearer now. Whether it’s defying the Canadian constitution to order 51,000 striking teachers back to work, ignoring the treaty rights of indigenous people who have well-founded legal claims against separatism, or intentionally destroying the province’s beloved single-payer health care system to bring it closer to the United States’ pro-profit model, Alberta’s current leaders are steering the province away from the federal government’s regulatory and welfare-state framework. They are going full speed ahead toward a MAGA-infused, polarized style of governance.
The Alberta Disadvantage
It is a great shame that Albertans will spend most of the next year mired in the divisive politics that a separation referendum will doubtlessly supercharge. The province, despite its recent history of wealth, has serious social and economic problems that require real leadership to solve. Since 2019, when the UCP came to power, Alberta has suffered the worst wage stagnation of any province in Canada. Meanwhile, Albertans grapple with serious quality-of-life woes: the highest rate of food insecurity in the country, among the highest auto insurance premiums, and a staggering surge in electricity prices as a result of a disastrous experiment in utility deregulation. The province has even seen a resurgence of measles exacerbated by a government that is intentionally lax about vaccination.
It is not enough to say Alberta sovereignty is a distraction from the province’s numerous problems. It is the confrontational style of politics surrounding the sovereignty movement that is causing those problems. Alberta sovereigntists, authoritarian to the core, respect no voices but their own. “The people who aren’t our friends, make sure people know who they are,” said Jeff Rath publicly to supporters late last year, an obvious ploy to name and shame federalists.
Opinion polling continues to show that a massive majority of Albertans oppose separation. Jared Wesley argues that heightened attention to the issue of sovereignty may be undermining the cause. “The more Albertans seem to be tuning in and more interested in separatism, the less they are likely to support it,” he tells Jacobin. “I think a lot of this has to do with the leadership of the sovereignty movement, which does not really appeal to mainstream Alberta, but also the threat of becoming the fifty-first state.”
The sovereigntist spiel assumes that Alberta can rid itself of the straitjacket of the federation but somehow retain all its benefits. Sadly, for the hopeful sovereigntist, modern states are not sets of modular furniture to be detached and reassembled at will. They are complex institutional ecosystems. Currency, customs, defense, pensions, courts, banking regulations — these are not add-ons; they are foundations. Going it alone is not a matter of simply subtracting Ottawa. It would mean building from the ground up. And in the interim, markets would not wait. Investment would stall, and real estate values, the backbone of household wealth for yes and no voters alike, would fall long before the fledgling nation’s new institutions were in place.
As the Alberta Federation of Labour has argued, an independent Alberta would enter global markets not as an equal of Canada and the United States, but as a junior partner negotiating from a much weaker position. Trade relationships would have to be rebuilt, and the new country would no longer sit within institutions like the G7. It would have to develop entirely new labor laws — and, if the politics of a would-be sovereign Alberta’s architects are anything to go by, the right to unionize seem like a dubious prospect. Moreover, during the separation process, there would inevitably be a large exodus of workers and businesses from the province, reducing the tax base, which would in turn erode vital public services.
Ultimately, an independent Alberta would be bad for workers. It would erode the standard of living and social safeguards that Canada’s union movement fought long and hard for. Moreover, the so-called national freedom the separatists want is almost definitely an impossibility. “Freed” from Ottawa, the province would still be deeply integrated, and economically dependent upon, the United States. The danger the sovereigntists would impose on their friends, critics, and neighbors is not simply departure from Canada, but plunging headfirst into a profoundly asymmetrical relationship with its southern neighbor.