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Alberta Separatism Is Built on a Big Lie

Danielle Smith has turned western grievance into a national unity crisis

We must now acknowledge that a contagion is infecting the Canadian polity. This pandemic of disinformation and dishonesty, through the conduit of the Alberta separatist movement, is testing not our hospitals but our political institutions and our belief that Canada is worth fighting for. To defend ourselves we must understand where to draw the line of tolerance. Because on the other side is treason. Recognizing this must inspire a countermovement in defence of Canadian democracy.

The Alberta separatist movement and its enablers wear the obscuring masks of grievance, but behind those masks are the faces of traitors. They are dangerous, illiberal actors whose complete disregard for the standards and regulations of their chosen professions and our electoral and criminal laws has been demonstrated. They have wrested control of the democratic levers of Alberta and are using the seemingly innocuous vehicle of a provincial plebiscite in a way that invites the foreign interference operations of their global far-right brethren.

Direct democracy carries tremendous risk, especially when a nation’s future is on the ballot. The risk only increases if that nation fails to recognize and brace against the threat posed by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and military-grade psychological warfare. Our misguided belief that Canada is somehow immune from the dangers that confront the rest of the world renders us inert at a time when we must be most engaged.

This referendum on whether to hold a referendum on Alberta’s future in Confederation is a big lie. This lie is foisted upon the nation and intended to reshape perceptions of Confederation. Canada is a representative, constitutional democracy. Not more than a single percentage of the Alberta electorate voted for one of the fringe, separatist candidates in the general election in 2023. And twice, over the last year, the courts have ruled that a secession referendum would be unconstitutional and a violation of the treaties.

To nonetheless move forward with the referendum is a form of psychological warfare conducted against us in alliance with the Donald Trump administration’s continual and escalating efforts to have us question our right to exist as a sovereign nation. It needs to be understood as being of a pair with these attacks on our country.

The big lie is a far-right, fascist political technique. Deploying the tactic is actually fairly simple, although it requires a great deal of nerve and perseverance. Once you tell a colossal untruth, you have to really commit, and they have committed. It will take an equal commitment to turn them aside.

Trump continues to claim—erroneously, baselessly, and ludicrously—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. He used it as a pretext for an insurrection on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, that killed seven people and sought to hang former vice president Mike Pence for fulfilling his role in the peaceful transfer of executive power to the incoming president. Vladimir Putin’s big lie is just as colossal. It, too, has led to catastrophe. He has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine is not a real country, that it is naturally part of Mother Russia, and that it requires liberating from neo-Nazis committing genocide against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas. Nonsense, of course, but a pretext for war nonetheless. Ukrainians failed to believe that their neighbour could turn on them so suddenly and so violently. Big lies come at a tremendous cost if we cannot defend against them early enough and vigorously enough.

On its face, Premier Danielle Smith’s big lie that Albertans are aggrieved enough with Ottawa to justify a vote on whether to start down the road to becoming an independent nation may seem relatively innocuous. What’s wrong with a little exercise in direct democracy, goes the thinking. Let’s just test the temperature and let the separatists blow off a bit of steam.

But Smith’s big lie is equally malign, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional. Her experiment with direct democracy by executive order is designed to subvert representative democracy. The referendum questions are detached entirely from the United Conservative Party’s constitution and from the campaign platform on which it was elected. Smith’s big lie is an opening to her colleagues within the global far right: her friends at PragerU and Breitbart and the American tech billionaires to whom she’s selling the province’s agricultural land to build their hyperscale data centres. Her referendum is a trojan horse built and placed within our country via an executive order signed by her alone. She’s simply following through on the vision she outlined before becoming premier. “People keep asking me about Alberta sovereignty,” she wrote. “My view is we need to stop complaining and start doing. There’s no turning back. The fight lies ahead.”

Her big lie follows a similar dark reasoning as she duplicitously takes the fight for Alberta sovereignty forward while wearing a federalist mask. The reality is that the majority of Albertans are far more likely to be frustrated and angry with Smith’s own far-right government and........

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