America has - well, had - a tradition of breaking up with the ones that brought us, starting in 1776 and ending with the Treaty of Paris. We also have a tradition of treating the concept of secession harshly - see also 1865.
When people talk about "secession" in the US today, it's usually anger from some libertarian-right miasma, or tongue-in-cheek regionalism (I'm looking at you, Texas).
But recent events - including the replacement of really bad ultraprogressive Justin Trudeau with even-worse progressive Mark Carney, under a hail of rib-poking from the Trump administration, and following the government's very un-Canadian but quite Orwellian response to the social unrest of the pandemic, may have taken the subject out of the realm of the dorm-room bull session or pool-table soliloquy and brought it, if not to the Canadian mainstream, at least into the conversation.
Canada has always been an uneasy federation; even in the union's earliest days, the eastern provinces, the unruly Quebecois and the West got along more out of social tradition than any great kinship.
And those traditions are being tested today.
Discontent with Canada’s political elite has long festered in the western provinces, where residents complain of neglect from the establishment back east, but the oilmen, cowboys and cattle ranchers in Alberta’s secessionist movement have been invigorated by the recent general election.
The result — in which Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, was elected prime minister, handing the Liberal Party a fourth consecutive term in office — was met with dismay among many in Alberta.
Separatists argue that climate policies championed by the Liberals — led for the past decade by the despised Justin Trudeau — stymie their homeland, where vast reserves of oil and gas make the province one of the most resource-rich regions in the world.
And Ezra Levant - who came to attention in the US via his long-running battle with the Alberta Human Rights commission, a major skirmish in the war over "woke" politics long before the term really existed - is saying that Alberta needs to go big or go home - that it can't just be a mere negotiating tactic:
"Some in Alberta want to use it as leverage, I think that's a failing strategy. If we're going to play the independence game, we play to win because we want an independent country," he said.
The Western Standard publisher also discussed whether he sees Alberta's current independence movement as "revolutionary."
"I think if we do achieve independence, then retroactively we get to call this a revolutionary period. If we don't, then perhaps not," he said.
[Western Standard publisher Derek] Fildebrandt went on: "But Alberta and Saskatchewan — there is something very different happening right now. And no one's talking about a radically new form of government, it's in large measure keeping our form of government, keeping our institutions, but decentralizing them from a distant imperial government in Ottawa and repatriating the constitution to a local level."
Albertan Colby Cosh gets what the fuss is about...
I say this having near-total sympathy with most of Alberta’s grievances against Canada. The very constitution of the country is explicitly rigged to diminish our electoral and senatorial power. Our heavy funding of the rest of Confederation seems to earn us nothing but contempt from central Canada. I don’t have major complaints about explicit fiscal equalization between provinces per se, apart from the unceasing ad-hoc updates, but equalization is just the questionably necessary top layer of a cake.
...but remains unconvinced that it's going to happen:
Alberta separatist political parties are gnats, invisible to the naked eye. They haven’t come within an order of magnitude of passing any electoral test, despite lots of chances, since the National Energy Program crisis. Alberta separatists don’t have recognizable intellectual leadership — none that you’d use those words to describe, anyway. They haven’t either captured or formed any popular journals of opinion. They haven’t written catchy songs that Albertans bellow at each other in bars.
The Maple Leaf flag is as popular here as anywhere. Try applying Tebbit’s cricket test: we Albertans cheer for Canada at the Olympics, and sing “O Canada” with incomparable gusto at hockey games. We don’t have an entire cultural vanguard that plays footsie with separatism. The separatists don’t have a permanent literature going back decades: there’s no ready-made Alberta pantheon, no list of Alberta sovereigntist classics.
For its part, the Eastern Canadian mainstream is reacting almost like Babylon Bee-like parodies of leftists, whether they be from the brow-furrowing professional big-thought-thinker class, or Canada's entertainment industry - in this case, the calm, Socratic rationalism of singer Jann Arden (or, as she's known in the US, "Jann Who?" (language NSFW, even with the Canadian accent):
#BREAKING - Canadian singer Jann Arden posts an Alberta insult rant on her tiktok account, calling Alberta pricks and wackos. pic.twitter.com/4ShaNw3Jeb
— Beautifulcanada1 (@BeautifulCana1) May 15, 2025
To sum it up? It may be premature to re-design the Stars and Stripes with 51 stars (or 52 of Saskatchewan jumps the ship).
But it's intrigueing to think about.
