Alberta’s separatists are showing the limits of Trump’s power over Canada

Later this month, voters in Canada’s oil-rich conservative heartland of Alberta will weigh in on whether to pursue secession. It’s the sort of thing that President Trump — with his imperial ambitions and penchant for pot-stirring, and given the MAGA-like fervor of the separatist movement — might be expected to chime in on.

The advocates of the Alberta vote have certainly tried to get his attention. The fringe tea party-style movement, seizing on decades of simmering regional alienation, has appealed to the Trump administration for help, including aspirations of a $500-billion credit line, and its advocates say they’ve traveled to Washington to try to meet U.S. officials. But Trump has so far conspicuously stayed silent, and the U.S. ambassador to Canada says he was ordered by the White House to steer clear.

The disconnect captures a paradox of Trump’s reach abroad: He remains a powerful reference point and tailwind for right-wing movements, but association with him can become a liability at home. In Canada, an array of tariffs and his threats to vassalize the country have made him deeply unpopular — even in conservative Alberta — and turned opposition to Trump into a force for unity. An intervention from Washington would almost certainly hurt the separatist cause more than help it.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is taking Alberta’s push seriously, viewing it as a silly but dangerous gamble with shades of Brexit. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney worries this is only the beginning. “The chances of this becoming deeply and permanently divisive, and Trump leaning into this to divide Canadians … is very high,” Kenney, a conservative and one of the most prominent anti-separatist voices, said earlier this year.

The same tension is playing out in Canada’s original separatist stronghold. In Quebec, separatists have said they won’t hold another independence referendum as long as Trump is in office, arguing that his presence would distort the debate. Trump can reshape the politics of an allied country without directly intervening. The catch is that the reaction he provokes can work against the people there most inclined to agree with him.

Alberta beef

Alberta, a province of 5 million nestled above Montana along the ridge of the Rocky Mountains, has long considered itself something of a black sheep — with reason. It is home to Canada’s oil sector, the country’s top export, and is among its richest provinces. Residents have long chafed at both the political clout of the more populous eastern hubs of Ontario and Quebec and the failure of pipeline projects that have throttled the province’s energy sector.

Separatism remains a minority position. Recent polls put support for leaving Canada at around 30%, though support varies depending on how the question is asked; because the vote itself is tentative, it may also give separatist-curious Albertans a chance to register a protest vote. Alberta has been home to backlash movements before, and its political alienation runs deep.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was born there, as was Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian conservative leader whose path to becoming prime minister was derailed in part by Trump’s return to office. (Poilievre has campaigned against secession.) Trump himself was in Alberta for last year’s Group of 7 summit, though he left early, citing developments in Iran.

Canada has held two separatist votes before, both in Quebec. The first, in 1980, failed decisively. The second, in 1995, failed by a hauntingly narrow margin, with one leading advocate chalking up the loss to “money and ethnic votes.” In each case, the effort was led by the separatist Parti Québécois, which appears poised to win power again in a vote Monday. And foreign involvement isn’t unprecedented: Charles De Gaulle’s “Vive le Quebec libre!” — delivered from a Montreal balcony in 1967 — helped inflame Quebec nationalism.

Alberta’s movement is different. No party, premier or lawmaker is leading it. It’s a grassroots aspiration of sorts, led by an amorphous, ad hoc group that — like Trump’s MAGA base — includes the far right and movements that peddle conspiracies online. Together, they have harnessed long-simmering and more widely held Alberta grievances and turned them into a full-blown secession effort. Those in favor of leaving prefer to call themselves an “independence” movement; their critics call them “separatists.”

No sector is a greater lightning rod for those grievances than oil and gas. Canada’s environmental policies once threatened to cap emissions from the vast oil sands — heavy crude that generally emits more carbon than other forms — while Alberta repeatedly saw its pipeline projects stalled by opposition from other provinces or shifting legal hurdles. The separatists are capitalizing on that frustration, though it exposes one of the contradictions in their pitch. If building a pipeline is hard now, it would only be even harder as an independent, landlocked nation. (Another is that Carney has rolled back many of those environmental policies.)

Alberta’s premier, conservative Danielle Smith, has walked a fine line — too close to appeasement, in the eyes of her critics — that underscores the political risk: While secession is unpopular overall, it plainly has sway within her party. She has called for “a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada,” an opaque phrase that nods to both camps.

“That’s like me saying I’m single within the confines of my marriage. You can’t have both,” says Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Alberta deputy premier and anti-separatist campaigner.

The backlash has hit Smith too: Her United Conservative Party suffered a surprise loss in a Calgary by-election — as special elections are known in Canada — in September, costing her a seat in the provincial legislature.

Carney is taking the movement seriously for another reason: The prime minister and Edmonton Oilers fan was raised in Alberta and was serving as governor of the Bank of England when British voters shocked elites by choosing to exit the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Carney has criticized Smith’s handling of the separatist movement, implying she is playing with fire, while also responding to some of Alberta’s grievances. Chief among those responses is the announcement of a new crude oil pipeline that would largely follow the route of another pipeline salvaged and completed by Justin Trudeau, who remains something of a cartoon villain in Alberta.

That is one reason political leaders are taking seriously a movement that remains well short of majority support: Circumstances can change, and another vote might go differently. Sources across Canadian politics say the separatist cause would be considerably stronger if Trudeau were still prime minister and Trump was not providing Carney such a potent foil.

Washington keeps its distance

All this has swirled for months with, uncharacteristically, little input from Trump, even amid the breakdown in U.S.-Canada trade talks in August. Other members of his administration, though, have sent mixed signals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner” for the U.S., while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raised eyebrows in Canada when he chalked up the recent collapse in trade talks to Carney wanting to prop up the “remain” side.

Some Alberta separatists say they have traveled to Washington to try to meet Trump administration officials and win their support, including a $500-billion credit line — an appeal that one provincial premier said amounted to “treason.” But they have offered little public evidence of any meetings, fueling competing theories about whether the Trump administration is engaging with them at all.

Peter Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada and a staunch Trumpist who’s repeatedly antagonized Canadians, has said he was directed by the White House to stay out of the matter. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, brushed aside a question about Trump’s views, saying his public silence is only because he is focused on other things.

“It would be beyond the pale for a foreign government to play directly into a secessionist movement in Canada,” Kenney says. “If it’s happening, it is totally offside.” But, he cautions, some of it may be exaggerated. “I would not overstate American involvement in this process,” he says, beyond the indirect impact of Trump’s politics. “The hard-core Alberta separatists are almost all alt-right populists whose view of politics has been informed by the MAGA movement.”

Smith has also downplayed any American carrot, saying that becoming a U.S. state is a “nonstarter” and that Alberta doesn’t “want to swap an overbearing Ottawa for an overbearing Washington.”

Still, the independence movement plainly sees closer American ties as part of its path forward. That creates an awkward dynamic: Carney swept to power with an “elbows up” pledge to stand up to Trump, and polls suggest he would make major gains in Alberta if an election were held today.

The Trump effect

Trump returned to office with threats to “take back” the Panama Canal, calls for Canada to become the “51st state,” aspirations of seizing Greenland and an eye on pressuring Venezuela’s since-deposed Nicolás Maduro and toppling Cuba’s government. His “Donroe Doctrine” foreign policy is one of the sharpest shifts of his second term. Meanwhile, Trump has shrugged off Russia’s ongoing barrage of Ukraine and distanced himself from the Asia-Pacific, Taiwan in particular, sending a loud signal that he welcomes a return to an era of regional powers.

This month, he signed a fig-leaf deal expanding U.S. military operations in Greenland but abandoning his push to acquire the island outright. And he has taken to posting memes characterizing Venezuela as the 51st state. Canada, however, was an early target of his. The collapse in trade talks led Trump to renew his calls for Canadian statehood, however unlikely, but his fight with Carney has also consolidated political support around the prime minister.

For separatists, though, the disruption itself can be useful. “Never has there been a president of the United States that in any way interfered so blatantly in our domestic politics,” Lukaszuk says. “If you’re a separatist, if you’ve always been unhappy, times have never been better.”

The Alberta vote, scheduled for Oct. 19, will ask voters — as part of a convoluted, 10-question survey — whether to remain in Canada or begin the legal process toward a future binding referendum on separation. Whether or not Trump ultimately weighs in, it offers another example of the paradox of his influence abroad: The more his administration tries to bolster potential allies around the world, the more it risks provoking backlash from residents who resent his involvement.

Carney, along with corporate Alberta, is trying to avoid repeating mistakes of Brexit by publicly preaching what virtually every influential figure says privately: Seceding is a harebrained idea, half-baked at best, that would add to the oil sector’s woes and open a Pandora’s box. There’s no clear plan for how Alberta would replace federal services, from the mail to the military, for example. And Quebec’s separatism scare led to a law that raised the bar for actually seceding; Carney has noted Alberta would need more than a simple majority vote, a view that has angered grassroots separatists.

Even a defeat this month may not put the issue to rest. A 30% showing would leave separatists well short of victory, but with a substantial base to build on: “30% actually is a very dangerous number,” Lukaszuk says. “It’s like a 2-1 hockey game.”

Kenney, too, worries about the lasting turmoil. Separatist parties have always been trapped in the low single-digits in elections. “Going from 2% to 25% will be taken by the separatists as a sign of huge momentum,” he says. “There’s a chance we get locked into the never-ending trip to the dentist that Quebeckers have been locked into for five decades” and “it becomes a permanently divisive movement, particularly for conservative parties.”

Quebec offers a cautionary tale. After its first referendum, the province was, in effect, promised a new deal; when it didn’t materialize, separatists nearly won the second. Alberta is, in essence, being promised a new deal by Carney, including a pipeline. Any delays or renewed headwinds could send things right back where they started. And if the vote beats expectations, it will only heighten the tensions — and the temptation for Trump to get involved after all.

Wingrove writes for Bloomberg.