Canada: Alberta paves the way for a possible independence referendum

A week after Liberal and former Justin Trudeau adviser Mark Carney won the federal election in Canada, Alberta provincial premier Danielle Smith, stated that she would "hold a referendum next year on the separation of the province if the petition gathered the necessary support."

Smith said the province of Alberta, which makes its living primarily from the oil industry, natural gas and agriculture, "has no choice but to take action to combat a decade of federal hostile liberal policies that have not only taken an unfair share of Alberta's wealth, but in doing so have also undermined the oil and gas industry that drives its economy."

Mark Carney, a concern for Albertans

With Carney as prime minister, Albertans have reason to worry. The banker and now leader of the Liberal Party is considered 'the embodiment of Davos'.

In 2021, Carney published Value(s): Building a Better World for All. In this book, Canada's new prime minister states that all Canadian financial institutions are going to have to be reequipped in line with "the catastrophe of climate change," and that 80% of the fossil fuels, which drive the Canadian economy, will have to stay in the ground.

According to Jordan Peterson, "there is no one in the world who has bet more, intellectually, spiritually and politically, on the Net Zero hoax than Mark J. Carney."

This is how the province of Alberta views the recent election of this bureaucrat with particular concern. However, this is not the first time that this province has been threatened by the liberal policies of the Canadian federal government.

Alberta prepares to leave Canada

A day after the federal election, Smith's Conservative government introduced a bill that, if passed, would drastically lower the bar that voters must meet to trigger a provincial referendum.

The bill would amend the citizen-initiated referendum rules to require a petition signed by 10% of voters eligible to vote in a previous general election, as opposed to 20% of the total number of registered voters.

Likewise, petitioners would also have 120 days, instead of 90, to collect the required 177,000 signatures.

"To be clear from the outset, our government will not include on the referendum ballot a question about separation from Canada," Smith said on Monday.

"However, if there is a citizen-led referendum petition that succeeds in gathering the necessary number of signatures requesting that such a question be put to referendum, our government will respect the democratic process and will also include that question on the ballot in the 2026 provincial referendum," he added.

For Smith, "the vast majority of these people are not voices to be marginalized or vilified. They are loyal Albertans. They are, literally, our friends and neighbors who are fed up with a hostile federal government attacking their livelihoods and their prosperity."

Alberta: a province under attack by the federal government

After a decade of Liberal policies under Justin Trudeau, the province of Alberta has been left with a sense of political and economic marginalization.

Many Albertans saw the former prime minister's green policies as opposed to their province's economic interests, especially when it came to the energy sector.

On Monday Smith he stated: "over the past 10 years, the successive Liberal governments in Ottawa have unleashed a series of laws, measures and political attacks aimed at Alberta's free economy, against the future and well-being of our people."

For the premier, these measures have made "new energy and agricultural projects impossible to develop."

"For Albertans, these attacks on our province, by our own federal government have become unbearable."Danielle Smith

Smith also stated that "the anti-energy, anti-agriculture and anti-resource development of resources have intimidated foreign investments to the tune of $500 billion."

"For Albertans, these attacks on our province, by our own federal government have become unbearable," the premier added.

For Smith, the billions of dollars in investments that have been lost because of the federal government's control - over its natural resources - could have been "invested in health, education, infrastructure and social services."

For many years, Alberta has felt slighted by Ottawa. Its natural resources have made it a major contributor to the Canadian economy, but they feel that the environmental policies of the liberals drastically regulate their resources and constitute a threat to their way of life.

Alberta, a province that has been underappreciated

Alberta's independence movement has a long history. From the moment this province joined the federation in 1905, Alberta felt economically exploited and politically marginalized. Unlike the other provinces, Alberta did not have control over its natural resources until 1930.

In the 1980s, the policy of then-premier, Pierre Trudeau, was one of control. In October of that year, the National Energy Program (NEP) was implemented, which served him to intensify the struggle for natural resources between the east and west of the country. For Albertans, Trudeau's actions were nothing more than an attempt to redistribute the wealth generated in Alberta.

The western provinces saw this program as a strategy by the federal government to keep low energy prices down, to the benefit of the eastern provinces.

Another program that hit Albertans very hard was the Petroleum Incentive Program (PIP), which paid up to 80% of exploration expenditures to Canadian-owned companies, working in the north and overseas territories, thus diverting oil exploration away from Alberta.

In the 1980s, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals branded Albertans as un-Canadian, while much of this province's money circulated in the eastern provinces, most of which were engaged in production of goods and services.