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.

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]........

© New Republic