Formerly confident Alberta separatists pivot to lamely pleading with voters to ‘send Ottawa a message’ 

Have you noticed how Alberta separatists who a few months ago were boldly predicting a massive separation victory on Oct. 19 have turned to whinging about how we need to “send Ottawa a message”?

Even Keith Wilson, the St. Albert lawyer behind the Let Alberta Decide group, could recently be found pleading with voters who want to stay in Canada to vote for separation anyway, you know, to give Premier Danielle Smith “leverage” with the feds. And according to the pundits, Mr. Wilson is supposed to be the sensible person’s separatist. 

What’s going on? Have Alberta’s bold secessionists stopped marching confidently toward a petroleum-drenched future in their lederhosen and taken to plaintively wailing about how we all need to tell Ottawa how bad they feel? 

Well, there comes a day when we all have to put on our big boy pants. This is starting to sound like a traditional federal NDP campaign when there’s a popular Liberal prime minister in Ottawa – like, say, right now. 

If this keeps up, I fully expect that as soon as the dumb referendum-on-a-referendum votes have all been counted on Oct. 20, or whenever, Alberta separatists will declare that they have just won a “moral victory.”

Take it from an old New Democrat, boys, when that happens, your irrelevance looms. Hope you had fun! Don’t forget to remove your big blue signs from the boulevards before Bylaw carts them off to the dump.

Back on May 3, 2025, as his first year as leader of the Alberta NDP drew to a close, a still relaxed and confident Naheed Nenshi sharply challenged Premier Danielle Smith’s flirtation with separatism. 

“To Premier Smith, I’m talking to you directly now, stop playing games,” he told more than 1,000 cheering NDP supporters at the Edmonton Convention Centre. “You have two choices: denounce separatism once and for all, and do it today, or let Albertans decide.”

A few moments later, he continued: “You want a referendum? Give us the referendum now!”

Cooler heads prevailed, unfortunately. That kind of rhetoric went down the Memory Hole when it started to look as if Mitch Sylvestre and the Alberta Prosperity Project/Stay Free Alberta gang, aided and abetted by Ms. Smith and her separatist-dominated United Conservative Party Caucus, would get their way and have a binding separation question on a ballot right about now. 

Eventually, stuff happened – including a couple of rulings from a court about the wording of the APP/SFA question and the lack of consultation about the vote with First Nations – so we got stuck with Ms. Smith’s dumb as referendum on a referendum instead. 

I’m starting to think that Mr. Nenshi’s instinct was right, though.

If we had proceeded directly to a binding separation referendum, just like Mr. Sylvestre and company insisted they wanted and Mr. Nenshi challenged the premier to deliver, we’d be 18 days away from a crushing defeat for the separatists.

Leastways, despite a lot of protests to the contrary from the separation gang, and the nagging worry that complacent voters who want no part of separation will nevertheless fail to show up on voting day, the auguries suggest that things are not going particularly well for the seppies, as they have come to be unfondly known by Albertans.

“With time running out, new poll suggests Alberta separatism support is slipping,” said the headline on a CBC story about the Janet Brown Opinion Research poll that was in the field from Sept. 8 to Sept. 21.

Plus, the professional number crunchers keep reporting in, and the headlines they generate don’t exactly reinforce the seppie case. 

The day before yesterday, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce waded in with a report by University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe that painted yet another grim picture of life after separation. 

“An 8 per cent rise in both interprovincial and international trade costs, which is informed based on the Brexit experience for the United Kingdom, would lower real GDP per capita by about 6 per cent, reduce employment and population by nearly 7 per cent (about 175,000 workers), and shrink the province’s overall economy by $62 billion a year (in 2026 dollars),” wrote Dr. Tombe. 

It’s wordy, but if you’re inclined, you can read the whole thing for yourselves here. Plus, of course, it’s just one of several studies with similar messages, like the report of the Alberta Government’s own “independent advisory panel,” economist Jim Stanford’s False Promises, Big Dangers study, and former Alberta finance ministry official Lennie Kaplan’s analysis.

Newsies are trained to be fair, so some of the coverage of the Calgary Chamber’s contribution included bleating by separatists that Dr. Tombe was too gloomy. 

“It’s not an accurate report,” Mr. Wilson complained. “It’s a model.” Anyway, he added, “the vote on the 19th of October isn’t for separation.” Count on it, though, that’s exactly how a vote for Option 2 would be taken, by Alberta, Canada, and the world. And Albertans are smart enough to know that.

Still, the slide of support for separatism would have been much steeper and more dramatic if this were a binding vote coming up, and at the end of the day this whole ridiculous secession referendum would be one and done. The APP would have been left with SFA. 

Instead, I suppose, we’re going to have to put up with a lingering possibility that Premier Smith will find a way to ignore the likely result on Oct. 19 – or whenever Elections Alberta manages to get finished counting – and manipulate us into facing yet another referendum before she has to face the electorate in an election.

If it’s either lose her job to the restive separatists in her caucus or try to gin up a neverendum, she might very well roll the dice again.

It’s the polls – and no doubt the reception canvassers are getting on the doorstep – that explain the separatists’ lame pivot to sending Ottawa a message.