Populism, Sovereignty, and Democracy in Alberta

My Address to the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada

This talk was delivered in Montreal, January 19, 2026.

A video of the talk is available here.

Thank you very much for inviting me to the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

I bring greetings from Treaty 6 territory, in what is now northern Alberta. I want to start there because the topics we’re discussing today -- sovereignty, constitutional authority, and the boundaries of political community -- touch directly on treaty rights and responsibilities.

My research is conducted on Treaty 4, 6, 7, and 8 territory, and I’m very conscious of what it means to talk about sovereignty in a place where sovereignty has never been a settled matter.

The research I’m drawing on today comes from our broader Common Ground project based at the University of Alberta. My co-principal investigators are Drs. Feodor Snagovsky and Michelle Maroto, and the study is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

When Daniel Béland invited me, it was on the premise that I respond to the rather broad but vexing question: What on earth is going on in Alberta?

For those who haven’t been following Alberta closely, we’ve been…. having a moment -- one that’s lasted for the better part of the last decade and a half.

It’s difficult to remember a time when Alberta politics were boring. But they once were.

A Progressive Conservative dynasty governed the province for over 40 years. Alberta was known as the bastion of Canadian conservatism.

It was also the heartland of western alienation -- a kind of chronic condition that’s coloured its politics for over a century. Always present, but never really reaching a fever pitch -- at least not to the same degree as Quebec nationalism.

When I returned to Alberta in 2011, I joked with colleagues that it was nice to be back somewhere “stable,” where nothing much happened politically. That illusion didn’t last long.

Working in intergovernmental relations, I served under five premiers in six years. And the turbulence hasn’t subsided; in many ways, it has intensified.

Constant turnover among PC leaders soon gave way to a divided right, opening up space for Alberta’s first-ever New Democrat government in 2015.

This was followed by the reconsolidation of the political right in the form of the United Conservative Party, who returned to power in 2019.

As it turns out, populists were an important part of that new right coalition.

Subordinated to moderates in the PC party, folks motivated by “Making Alberta Great Again” have since assumed control of the UCP -- ousting the party’s founding leader, Jason Kenney, and taking over the Board of Directors.

Alberta separatists are at the head of this populist faction. Under various banners like “Take Back Alberta,” “Free Alberta,” and “the Alberta Prosperity Project”, separatists now wield considerable influence over Alberta government policy by virtue of capturing the party in power.

This includes pushing the province to the brink of a referendum on separation as early as this calendar year.

All of this activity is driving a surge of interest in Alberta separatism. On this slide, you can see the relative salience of the topic in Google Searches.

Peaking in the aftermath of the 2019 federal election -- won for a second time by Canada’s poster child for Laurentian elitism, Justin Trudeau -- interest in separatism waned during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be resurrected with Danielle Smith’s rise to the premiership in late-2022.

After a lull in 2023 and 2024, it has since surged again.

But interest doesn’t necessarily translate into popularity. For that, we need to examine public opinion polling.

Here, we see little concrete evidence of a surge in support for separatism since 2020. A few points to note:

• Question Wording Matters: Polls asking if Alberta should separate often yield higher numbers (e.g., Leger, Mainstreet) than polls asking strictly how one would vote in a referendum tomorrow (e.g., Abacus, Pollara).

• The “Federal Election” Effect: There are distinct spikes in separatist sentiment immediately following federal election victories by the Liberal Party (late 2019 and May 2025). In between these events, support tends to recede to a baseline of roughly 20-25%.

When you layer these graphs, you can see that, while interest seems to be surging once again, it is not necessarily correlated with a rise in support for the separatist cause.

When we put it in historical perspective -- zooming out to 1995 -- we gain a better perspective. Separatism is both more salient and more popular now than it has been in a generation.

Possibly even higher than it was during the National Energy Program in the early-1980s.

Clearly, something is going on in Alberta.

How do we explain these recent patterns? And what can federalists -- myself among them -- do to push back against the rising tide of separatism?

Here’s what I want you to take away from tonight’s talk.

First: the current separatist moment in Alberta doesn’t simply follow the old “western alienation” trajectory that scholars and journalists used to describe a generation ago. We need to examine public opinion and elite behaviour in a different way.

Namely, second: we need to treat separatism as part of the rise of right-wing populism in Alberta as elsewhere. This lens is crucial to understanding and addressing the grievances driving the separatist movement.

Third: rather than just admire the problem, I’m going to suggest a response: combat populist escalation by reinforcing pluralism — the norms, institutions, and habits that make disagreement workable in a diverse democracy and federation like Canada.

Let me begin with the first claim: this is not your grandparents’ western alienation.

And I want to make that intuitive with an analogy.

Many of you will remember Dallas: a glossy 1980s drama about a wealthy oil family from Texas. The plot is full of power struggles, betrayal, family legacy, and conflicts over money and influence. It’s melodramatic, but the world of Dallas is essentially stable: institutions exist, the system is the system, and the characters maneuver within it.

Now compare that to Yellowstone. It also centers on land, legacy, oil-and-gas adjacent power, and family conflict. But the tone is darker and more resentful. The threats are existential: outsiders are coming, “the way of life” is under siege, and compromise is portrayed less as strategy and more as surrender. There’s more suspicion of institutions -- courts, regulators, media, universities -- and more celebration of direct action and grievance. Those institutions need to be circumvented or infiltrated in order to preserve the prosperity of the Dutton family.

So: same thematic ingredients (land, resources, identity, outsiders) but a different narrative frame. Dallas is about power inside the system; Yellowstone is about defending identity against a system that feels hostile.

That’s a useful lens for Alberta today. Yes, there are continuities with older western alienation. But today’s separatist talk often carries a sharper edge: it’s less about getting a better deal within confederation and more about resisting an illegitimate order that’s portrayed as fundamentally out to get “real Albertans.”

Let’s return to the political science literature.

Traditionally, western alienation has been understood through a simple contrast: the West wants in versus the West wants out.

And historically, the dominant story was “the West wants in.”

In the Reform Party era of the 1980s and 1990s, “the West wants in” meant something quite specific: not withdrawal from Canada, but institutional reform to secure fair representation and influence: Senate reform, decentralization in specific areas, and a stronger western voice in national parties and national decision-making.

The underlying assumption was: Canada is worth fighting for, but it needs to be rebalanced.

By contrast, “the West wants out” -- separation -- was long treated as fringe: more of a protest posture than a governing project.

In her province-wide address to Albertans in May 2025, Danielle Smith alluded to similar divisions. Positioning Alberta as at a crossroads in its relationship with the rest of Canada, the premier divided Alberta into 3 main groups.

• The first were those who support Canada in her words “at any cost.” We might call these the Federalists

• The second camp that she discussed were those who want to leave Canada entirely. She said these separatists were, quote, “not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified, they are not traitors, they are our friends and neighbors. They are fed up with their livelihoods and prosperity being attacked by a hostile federal government. They are frustrated, and they have every reason to be”.

• Smith’s third camp consisted of what we might call autonomists, or in her words, those who want to forge “a path forward for a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada”. Those of us here in Quebec today may recognize some of the language. Premier Smith placed herself in this final grouping.

Today’s situation doesn’t fit neatly into the “West Wants In” / “West Wants Out” binary, though. Nor can we easily group Albertans neatly into federalists, separatists, and autonomists.

Public opinion in Alberta is much more complex than the literature or political rhetoric suggests.

Led by my colleague, Feo Snagovsky, our Summer 2025 Viewpoint Alberta survey asked Albertans to respond to a number of different statements about the province’s place in Confederation.

• A vast majority felt that Alberta should remain within Canada, with nearly everyone wanting it to be treated the same as other provinces. These federalist tendencies are strong across the political spectrum.

• There was majority support for what we might label an autonomist approach -- one in which Alberta exercises fuller control over things that the constitution currently permits.

• Fewer were in the mood for absorbing new powers from the federal government.

• Or separating from Canada entirely.

Note, however, that these positions don’t sum to 100. Most Albertans supported more than one -- or none -- of these positions. They don’t fit neatly into discrete categories or camps.

This is true of their provincial and national identities, too.

Asked whether they see themselves as Albertan or Canadian, the vast majority of Albertans answered “both”. Only a small fraction of people in the province see themselves as “Albertan only” or “Canadian only”, with the greatest number seeing themselves as Canadian first and Albertan second.

We see similar multiple identities when we ask Albertans whether they see themselves as progressive, conservative, or moderate. They like to check multiple boxes.

So what do Albertans want out of their relationship with the federal government?

When we ask Albertans what they expect from Ottawa, the answer is: make it work and make it fair. Going from the bottom of this figure to the top…

• Most Albertans express a preference for governments that cooperate -- provincial and federal.

• Many believe there is an important role for a strong federal government in Canadian society.

• More agree than disagree that the federal government has an interest in keeping Alberta prosperous.

• And a majority feel that flirting with separatism is not an effective intergovernmental strategy.

That can sound surprising if your only exposure to Alberta politics is elite rhetoric these days.

In the abstract, Albertans express support for “more provincial control,” especially when the comparison point is Quebec… because Quebec stands as a reference case for assertive autonomy within Canada.

But when you shift from abstraction to specific proposals -- like abandoning key federal institutions related to pensions, policing, or taxation --support gets lukewarm quickly.

According to our surveys, Albertans often like the idea of control… right up until they’re asked to accept the costs, risks, and uncertainty that control can entail.

The so-called “firewall” measures -- ideas associated with the early-2000s “Alberta Agenda” open letter to then-Premier Ralph Klein, signed by conservatives including Stephen Harper -- have generally been unpopular with the public over the last two decades.

What tends to be more popular are bridge-building and influence-seeking strategies: more Alberta influence in Ottawa, Senate reform, stronger western representation in federal institutions, and a stronger federal presence in Alberta -- things like federal jobs and decision-making capacity located in the West.

So if we’re trying to understand separatism today, we should not start from the assumption that the public has moved en masse toward independence or even autonomy.

At Common Ground, we don’t just run surveys; we also conduct focus groups across Alberta to unpack political culture -- what people think is acceptable to say, do, or believe in their environment.

One method we use asks participants to imagine a typical member of their community, draw them, and then “speak through” that character.

And across communities, participants very often draw someone like this: a middle-aged, white, male, blue collar worker -- a guy they often call Joe.

Joe is stereotypically conservative: not in the partisan sense alone, but in temperament. He’s practical. He’s skeptical of politics. He focuses on what affects his family and community. He tends not to think in abstractions -- he thinks in lived experience.

And in 2025, when we probed Joe’s relationship with separatism, we found something important: according to Albertans, Average Joe isn’t a hard core separatist -- but he’s often separatist-curious.

Samuel Goertz led our focus groups last summer and concluded the following from his conversations with hundreds of Albertans in small towns and cities across the province.

Joe wants Alberta to remain in Canada and make it work. But life has been getting harder. And he’s open to the idea that maybe something more drastic is needed to get a better deal… or at least to be taken seriously.

Joe may not attend a separatist rally on his own, but he might go if invited. He might not vote to separate, but he can be tempted by the leverage the threat seems to offer.

That’s important because one of the most predictive questions in the Brexit context wasn’t only “what will you do,” but “what do you think your neighbors will do.”

The sense that something is becoming socially normal or politically correct can help change minds and behaviours

So far, we do not find evidence that separatism has become broadly socially acceptable in Alberta. But we do see this “curiosity,” which creates a potential political opening.

Returning to our surveys, though, we find that most Albertans -- including many separatists -- doubt independence will ever be achieved.

Among the general population, most say it’s unlikely or will never happen.

Even among self-identified separatists, certainty is limited.

That combination -- low confidence but ongoing support -- can nonetheless produce tactical behavior: people may vote for a risky option not because they expect it to happen, but because they want to send a signal.

Some may even take solace in the fact that their so-called “protest” vote is a safe one -- because independence is unlikely, it’s okay to register displeasure.

This raises the questions: just who are today’s separatists and what do they want?

In work I did with Lisa Young, we found that Alberta separatists tend to be driven more by economic than cultural motivations. These included perceptions of economic unfairness, unequal treatment, and federal hostility to Alberta’s core industries.

We also found a strong partisan component: Most Alberta separatists vote Conservative at the federal and provincial levels, and about one-third of both parties’ bases in Alberta consist of separatists.

Demographically, separatists are more likely to be: Canadian-born, long-term Alberta residents, white, male, homeowners, married, private-sector, rural, more religious, and less formally educated.

But here’s the crucial finding: when you control statistically for multiple factors, demographics don’t do most of the explanatory work.

The stronger predictors of separatism are attitudinal and informational.

When you run a larger regression model, four things stand out as primary predicators of separatist sentiment in Alberta.

First: greater susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking.

Second: stronger populist beliefs -- anti-elite and anti-establishment orientations.

Third: heavier daily consumption of far right news.

Fourth: a sense of decline -- the feeling that Alberta’s and Canada’s best days are behind us—and responsiveness to “make us great again” cues.

This is reflected in my work for the Public Order Emergency Commission after the Freedom Convoy. In that report,I described three shared forces linking convoy-style politics and separatist sentiment in Alberta.

First: status loss -- a sense that people who once had respect, economic security, and cultural standing are losing it in the face of globalization. Not just livelihoods, but ways of life. The story they tell themselves goes something like this: we built this place; we powered this country; and now we’re treated as disposable… or worse, as a problem. That feeling can sharpen when energy workers, rural communities, and traditional ways of life are portrayed as backward or morally suspect in political discourse.

Second: factionalism -- what political scientists call affective polarization: intense in-group loyalty and out-group hostility. Opponents aren’t just wrong; they’re enemies.

Third: a death of deference -- deep suspicion of authority, experts, courts, media, universities, and even legislatures. A refusal to defer to these and other institutions -- including election authorities -- when their findings don’t jibe with what they feel is fair.

Those three forces help explain what separatists want.

According to our Common Ground research, which has involved surveys, elite interviews, a social media study, analysis of separatist speeches, and attendance at independence rallies, three corresponding themes have become clear….

Separatists want to reclaim status and identity: a place of honor, respect, and legitimacy for “real Albertans.”

They want to exacerbate factionalism through polarization: drawing a clearer moral boundary between “us” and “them,” Alberta and Canada.

And they want a particular kind of sovereignty: one that places “the people” (again, often narrowly defined) above institutions, constraints, and pluralist compromise.

These slides show the identity work happening in separatist imagery and meme culture online. Again, we’ve seen and heard similar things in other quarters.

We are in the process of tracing the origins of these memes -- most of which are AI-generated. A not insignificant proportion are originating from outside Canada, including the US and Russia.

The visual language is telling: it’s overwhelmingly masculine, frontier-coded, and built around an idealized “Joe Albertan”-- self-reliant, tough, competent, suspicious of outsiders, and morally certain.

Beyond subtle, there are also worrisome themes and exclusionary tropes found in many of the images -- including the sort of anti-semitism found in other far right propaganda.

If you want the distilled version, there’s an AI-generated video series titled “the most Albertan man in the world.” The humor isn’t incidental -- it is a persuasion tool. It makes an identity feel normal, shareable, and socially safe.

The second theme, polarization, extends beyond identity into strategy.

The separatist movement often frames Alberta and sometimes Saskatchewan as the home of common sense and authenticity, pitted against a globalist, socialist, or elitist cabal trying to remake society.

It’s not just “we disagree.” It’s “they’re trying to destroy our way of life.”

That’s a classic populist move: simplify the political world into two camps -- pure people versus corrupt elite -- and treat compromise as betrayal.

Discussions of sovereignty among separatists are more muddied.

Some activists drift toward a “51st state” fantasy. Others insist Alberta should be an independent country. That division matters because it reveals something: beneath the shared grievance, there’s no single coherent institutional endgame. At least not yet.

But regardless of the end-state, the ambiguous sovereignty frame is doing a lot of heavy lifting: it elevates will over rules, and identity over institutions.

In all of these ways, today’s separatism is not simply an extreme version of your grandparents’ alienation. It is something qualitatively different.

If yesterday’s western alienation was driven by a sense that Alberta was being held back, this new version is edgier -- projecting a sense that Alberta is falling behind and more drastic measures are needed to restore its previous status.

So why has it changed, and how has it become so salient?

My answer: populism has paved the way.

To understand populism in Alberta, we have to talk about party structure… especially the creation of the United Conservative Party through the merger of the old Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose party.

The old PCs were managerial, brokerage-oriented, and relatively insulated from grassroots insurgency. That impurviousness is one of the reasons we saw legions of small, fringe right-wing parties come and go during the PCs’ long tenure in office.

The strongest among them, the Wildrose Party carried stronger populist values and a more porous organizational structure.

Jason Kenney’s key decision after the merger was to empower the grassroots -- giving members more authority over policy and leadership than had been typical in Alberta’s PC era.

That proved fateful. It created a system where premiers can be continually pressured by the most mobilized factions at AGMs and leadership reviews -- on COVID response, on sovereignty, and, now, on separatism.

This creates incentives to play to the hardest core of the party’s base, and disincentives to govern on behalf of all Albertans.

Let me give you an abridged political history to show how fast this populist insurgency captured -- and displaced-- the conservative establishment in Alberta.

The story starts after the 2019 federal election, when separatist sentiment spikes and talk of “independence” surges in Alberta. In response, Jason Kenney launches the Fair Deal Panel in 2020 -- a structured outlet for grievances and a search for autonomy “fixes,” from pensions to other provincial levers.

In 2021, Kenney follows with an equalization referendum -- mostly symbolic, but intended to signal leverage and take the edge off the movement. Then, during the pandemic, Kenney loses control of his party to internal insurgency and resigns -- an early warning that Alberta’s new conservative coalition had become highly vulnerable to grassroots pressure.

In 2022, Danielle Smith becomes premier, pursuing a minimum winning coalition strategy that put her base front and centre. As her first bill, she introduces the Sovereignty Act, a sharper, more confrontational posture toward Ottawa.

2023 and 2024 were comparatively quiet on the legislative and intergovernmental fronts. But the Smith government became mired in a multi-billion dollar health scandal -- CorruptCare -- revelations over which continue to this day. Critics claim that Smith’s focus on picking fights with the rest of Canada is a distraction from the controversy.

In December 2024, Trump openly muses about Canada as a “51st State,” which adds a new and unsettling frame to sovereignty talk, including within Alberta’s separatist ecosystem.

In April 2025, Mark Carney becomes prime minister, and Smith responds by issuing nine conditions for avoiding a national unity crisis. In May 2025, her government relaxes referendum rules and advances an “Alberta Accord” -- a more explicit set of policy demands that insist Ottawa stay out of Alberta’s backyard and pave the way for a new pipeline to the West coast.

June becomes a pressure test: there’s the Olds–Didsbury by-election (in which the upstart separatist Republican Party of Alberta has a shaky showing), and the government launches the Alberta Next Panel. Chaired by the premier herself and orchestrated politically out of her office, AlbertaNext shifted from consultation about the province’s place in confederation toward mobilization and persuasion to pursue more radical approaches (including an Alberta police force and pension plan, and stricter controls on immigration).

By summer 2025, changes to the referendum rules resulted in dueling petitions -- federalists organizing a ‘remain’ petition alongside separatists seeking to spark a referendum on independence. More on that in a moment.

In fall 2025, Smith’s government uses the notwithstanding clause four times, reinforcing a governing style that prioritizes majoritarian will over institutional restraint. In October, the Forever Canadian (federalist) petition succeeds.

In November, Ottawa and Alberta sign a Canada–Alberta MOU to explore a new oil pipeline to the West Coast, and later that month the UCP AGM showcases intensified separatist influence inside the governing party. They now control a majority of Board positions.

By December, referendum rules are relaxed again, preventing the Chief Electoral Officer from referring potential referendum questions to the courts. This removed the final roadblock to a separatist petition.

And that’s where we are now: in 2026, the independence petition is circulating -- not as the culmination of a Quebec-style party-to-referendum path, but as the product of populist pressure campaigns working through and increasingly within the governing party itself.

This is where the comparison to Quebec is useful.

The classic Quebec sovereignty path is: build a separatist party, win elections, govern, and then hold a referendum.

Alberta separatists’ path looks different: it’s more populist than sovereigntist in the institutional sense. It uses pressure, petitions, internal party politics, and social movement techniques to drag a governing party toward escalation.

The pressure started with the development of the Free Alberta Strategy -- championed by Danielle Smith before she rose to the premiership and supported by her future chief of staff and executive director. This quasi-separatist manifesto eventually inspired the AlbertaNext town hall series.

But even Smith’s populist group was outflanked. Led by Jeffrey Rath and the Alberta Prosperity Project, the UCP faction took over the party from the inside and has succeeded in getting the premier to remove many barriers to an independence referendum in 2026.

In sum, avowed federalist Jason Kenney’s fateful decision to make the UCP populist party did more to advance the cause of separatism than his attempts at creating a safety valve could address.

And Danielle Smith’s lowering the barriers to referendum-style politics has further changed the incentive structure in favour of far-right populists like Jeffrey Rath.

This new institutional context rewards groups that can mobilize outrage quickly. It encourages performative constitutional brinkmanship. And it normalizes the idea that you can use referendums as negotiating tactics without stable rules about what follows.

Lessons from Kenney and Smith bring us to the last takeaway this evening: our response shouldn’t be “more populism.” It should be strengthening pluralism.

Pluralism is neither about loving nor eliminating conflict. It’s about making conflict governable.

Pluralism and populism are not necessarily opposites, but they do represent divergent approaches to managing difference in democracies and federations like Canada.

Pluralism assumes society is made up of competing groups with legitimate differences. Politics is the ongoing work of negotiating a contested common good. The main obstacle to achieving this is the concentration of power in the hands of a few -- or the breaking down of checks and balances that keep our leaders accountable.

By contrast, populism frames society as “the people” versus “the elite.” Politics is about achieving “the public interest,” which is treated as obvious and embodied in the leader who claims to represent the real people. The main obstacle is a corrupt establishment blocking commonsense solutions.

Those frames don’t just describe different modes of politics. They encourage and justify different kinds of behavior.

A crucial difference is how the two paradigms treat means and ends.

Pluralists place a great deal more emphasis on means than populists do. For a pluralist, a suboptimal outcome is nonetheless legitimate if the rules were followed. Viewing the common good as constructed not inherent, they abide by the maxim that we should aim for the greatest good of the greatest number. Even if that means compromising to achieve consensus.

On the other hand, populists tend to view processes as illegitimate if they do not serve what they define as the public interest. A good outcome is one that meets the needs and wants of “the people,” whose interests are embodied in the leader. In this way, populists tend to emphasize ends over means, breaking norms if not formal rules provided they can achieve their goals.

When it comes to improving Alberta’s position in (or out of) Confederation, pluralists and populists take different approaches.

In forthcoming work with Gala Palavicini, we describe four broad orientations: two pluralist and two populist. These correspond with the survey responses I discussed earlier.

1. The Federalist approach aims to ensure Alberta remains in Canada and is treated symmetrically—like any other province.
   

2. The Autonomist approach: holds that Alberta should remain in Canada but assert greater control over powers it already has.
   

3. Denialism: holds that Alberta should stay in Canada but take on powers Ottawa currently holds—often by rejecting federal legitimacy in practice.
   

4. While Separatists: believe Alberta should leave Canada.

The first two align more naturally with pluralism; the latter two align with populist logic.

Each carries its own risks that need to be mitigated through a balanced approach.

Given these divergent forces, what do we do?

First: strengthen federalism institutionally -- regularized First Ministers’ meetings, stronger intergovernmental machinery, and real western representation inside national parties and appointments.

Second: bolster legitimate autonomism -- including reforms like strengthening the Fiscal Stabilization Fund so have-more provinces don’t feel abandoned in economic downturns, and exploring asymmetrical arrangements where they make sense -- without pretending the Constitution is optional.

Third: deter denialism -- procedural clarity, judicial review when necessary, and clear red lines about what is and isn’t constitutionally acceptable.

Fourth: resist the temptation to quell separatism by opening up “safety valves.” Referendums and petition politics aren’t costless when the rules are vague and the stakes are existential. The logic of escalation is real: today’s maximum demands become the minimum demands of tomorrow. Given the state of public opinion in the province, a firm stance against separatism would not just help preserve the federation; it would be politically expedient, as well.

I will close this final policy section with two cautions.

First: it is important that we not further polarize Albertans into choosing their province over their country. Or vice versa. Our research shows most don’t want to choose. For many, it really does feel like choosing between parents.

Second: federalists should avoid defending the status quo. “Remain”-style politics is a trap if it sounds like you’re asking people to accept a situation they don’t like. Anti-separatism needs to offer a reform agenda -- a better federalism, not just “shut up and stay.”

So, returning to the three takeaways:

Modern Alberta separatism is more than simply your grandparents’ western alienation. The public opinion landscape is more complex, more mixed, and more identity-driven than the old “in/out” story implies.

Populism has paved the way to separatism -- through party structures, mobilization incentives, and elite signaling.

And pluralism offers an effective response -- because what’s at stake is not only unity, but the democratic norms that make unity and diversity compatible.

Thank you. I’ll stop there. And I look forward to your questions.