#alberta secession

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Canada separatists accused of ‘treason’ after secret talks with US state department

Alberta activists’ covert meetings with US officials revealed, outlining group’s increasingly emboldened efforts

Leyland Cecco at The Guardian:

Covert meetings between separatist activists in the Canadian province of Alberta and members of Donald Trump’s administration amount to “treason”, the premier of British Columbia said on Thursday. “To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there’s an old-fashioned word for that – and that word is treason,” David Eby told reporters. “It is completely inappropriate to seek to weaken Canada, to go and ask for assistance, to break up this country from a foreign power and – with respect – a president who has not been particularly respectful of Canada’s sovereignty.”

The revelations that far-right activists met US state department officials first emerged in a Financial Times report outlining the efforts a group of increasingly emboldened separatists are taking in their attempt to secede from Canada. A minority of residents of the oil-rich province have long argued that the province’s woes are due to the structure of payments to the federal government and a perceived inability to get their vast fossil fuel reserves to market. Organizers of the Alberta independence movement, which still boasts only minority support, are now collecting signatures to trigger a referendum there. The pro-independence campaign has been travelling across the province as organizers try to collect nearly 178,000 signatures over the next few months. The group has publicly said it wants a $500bn credit facility from the US treasury to help fund the creation of a new country if their referendum is successful.

“I think that while we can respect the right of any Canadian to express themselves to vote in a referendum, I think we need to draw the line at people seeking the assistance of foreign countries to break up this beautiful land of ours,” Eby told reporters, adding he would raise this at a meeting of provincial leaders later in the day. Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, who has rejected the idea of separation and said she “supports a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada”, is facing mounting criticism that her government recently made it easier for residents to petition for a referendum. The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, said Smith needed “to stand up [to the separatists] and say enough is enough”. Last week, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, appeared to support the efforts by the separatists in an interview with the conservative website Real America’s Voice.

Far-right separatists from Alberta held secret talks with the US State Department to seek the breaking up of Canada, possibly by Alberta joining the USA or becoming its own nation.

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The MAGA Plot to Take Down Canada

A growing movement of MAGA-pilled Albertan separatists would happily break up the country to be closer to Trump.

John Last for The New Republic:

When the fascist general Emilio Mola closed on Madrid in 1936, he made a haunting claim aimed at the city’s republican resistance. He would arrive with four columns of soldiers to besiege the city, and they would soon find help from a fifth column of sympathizers within. Well, if President Donald Trump were ever to march on Canada—a possibility roughly half of Canadians now fear—it is becoming abundantly clear that a fifth column would await him here too. Recent months have seen the escalation of a brazen campaign by separatists in the oil-rich province of Alberta to dismember the country and lease its resources to an expansionist American regime, with direct support from officials in the U.S. government. “There’s a real national security threat there,” Patrick Lennox, a former intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and security expert in the Albertan capital of Edmonton, told me. “This is the perfect scenario for foreign interference.”

Alberta, often erroneously dubbed the “Texas of Canada” by U.S. media on account of its pro-oil, anti-government politics, has long been home to grievance movements lamenting perceived federal overreach. “Since the moment Alberta became a province [in 1905], there’s been a movement to separate,” said Duane Bratt, an expert in separatism at Alberta’s Mount Royal University. But a recent push for a referendum on independence has achieved unprecedented success, in no small part due to tacit support from the Trump-aligned provincial government.

The province’s current premier, Danielle Smith, was one of the first Canadian officials to kiss the ring of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has long tested the limits of her powers to pursue his crusades and causes at home. “There is an ideological alignment with Trump,” Bratt said. “On gun rights, climate change, trans rights, renewable energy, wokeness … it’s all consistent with American right-wing movements.” On Thursday, she went as far as announcing a series of referenda, timed to coincide with a likely fall vote on independence, that would pack the ballot with proposals to seize control of the courts, withdraw from federal programs, and withhold public services from some immigrants, which she accused the federal government of deploying to “flood [Alberta’s] borders.” Though Smith has been ambiguous about her support for Albertan independence itself, she has worked for a referendum on the issue in virtually every other way. Her government massively lowered the threshold of signatures required to put the question to a vote, and overrode a court decision deeming a referendum unconstitutional. She has repeatedly refused to denounce those who would break up the country and reportedly said she’d stay on as prime minister of an independent Alberta.

In the past, she’s been explicit that she views independence as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the federal government, under rival Liberal leadership since 2015. And she’s had some success—Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, struck a “grand bargain” this year to put environmental progress on hold for the sake of the Albertan oil patch.

Secession crisis in Alberta? Far-right MAGA influencers from the USA, aided by Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith (UCP), seek to cause strife over the province’s status within Canada.