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The Blueprint Behind Danielle Smith’s Plan to Break Up with Canada

A little-read separatist manifesto is shaping her government’s most controversial moves

During the last United States presidential campaign, an ominous 920-page policy document emerged into the public eye. Known as Project 2025 and released by the Heritage Foundation, it laid out a blueprint for a maximalist version of executive power, a sidelining of Congressional power, and a radical overhaul of government, the bureaucracy, and American society writ large.

It was a playbook for the far right and unreservedly so. It raised such a spectre during the campaign that candidate Donald Trump denied any knowledge of the document. But within his first year back in the Oval Office, Trump had managed to implement much of the Project 2025 agenda in his quest to “Make America Great Again.” We’ve all seen how that has been going for the United States and, frankly, for the rest of the world. The only word that captures it is “revolutionary.”

There are probably only a few dozen people or so who have actually read Project 2025 cover to cover. I don’t count myself as one of them. But I did read Alberta’s own little version of the document, and it was illuminating to say the least.

Like many Albertans, I’ve been struggling to keep pace with the rate at which the United Conservative Party has legislated since Danielle Smith took the helm in 2022, often in unconstitutional ways that target minorities and override treaty rights. They have passed legislation, often in the middle of the night, that will leave extraordinary impacts on citizens of the province, alter the nature of our democratic society, and could ultimately see Alberta remove itself from Confederation. On four occasions, they have invoked the notwithstanding clause to override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Some people, such as federal justice minister Sean Fraser, have described this approach as a form of “democratic backsliding” designed “to cater to a unique political opportunity that may be a good fundraising email but will potentially violate constitutionally protected rights of vulnerability.”

Similar to our neighbours in the US, Albertans are in our own anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex, in which we’re being pulled into the unknown by a MAGA-adjacent far-right UCP government.

It might have helped to see some of this coming. Turns out we could have, if only we’d read the Free Alberta Strategy sooner.

The Free Alberta Strategy was written in 2021 by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper, and Derek From at the height of anti–Justin Trudeau sentiment in the province and in the altered-reality state of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when so many radical ideas were incubated in a stew of isolation and myopia-inducing screen time. Anderson is a lawyer with a history in provincial politics who is now Premier Smith’s chief of staff. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary. From is also a lawyer.

The document is a shade under fifty pages and contains a smattering of footnotes from Ted Morton, Jack Mintz, Lorne Gunter, Preston Manning, Pierre Poilievre, and the Fraser Institute. Not exactly a non-partisan affair.

It certainly isn’t written with any attempt at neutrality or objectivity either. On the contrary, it is laced with incendiary rhetoric that seeks to demonize Eastern Canada in simplistic and snide ways. It sets Alberta up as an oppressed victim of Confederation that has been “pillaged” by a federal government that has become an “existential threat to our province’s economic viability and the core freedoms of our people.”

The strategy asserts that “Ottawa has fundamentally breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta.” Accordingly, it has become incumbent upon the provincial government to “repudiate this arrangement on behalf of its people, to renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation.”

The authors then call on the government of Alberta, at the time led by Premier Jason Kenney, to pass a Sovereignty Act that would allow the province to disregard all federal laws at its discretion; turf the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and replace it with a provincial force; create independent provincial legislation for financial institutions, presumably to end federal regulatory oversight over banks working in the province; end equalization transfers; opt out of federal health, education, resource development, environmental regulation, and property rights; replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version; do the same with employment insurance; replace the federal government in international diplomacy and negotiation; and give the provincial legislature the power to make all future judicial appointments.

These are the strategic moves the authors believe will “offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.”

According to the authors, “a vast majority of Albertans” agree that the province, in recent years, has been “economically terrorized by the Government of Canada.” “Eco-extremists,” they say, have looted the province of “well over $600 billion” through transfer programs.

Anderson, Cooper, and From blame the federal government for increases in suicides, bankruptcies, and overdoses. And they suggest the feds have “commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry.” Policies such as the carbon tax, clean fuel regulations, and........

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