I didn’t immediately recognize the woman in a toque and red and black plaid coat, but she remembered me. It was Tania, my other daughter’s one-time preschool teacher, now a public elementary school teacher and volunteer with the campaign to recall local MLA—and Minister of Education—Demetrios Nicolaides. She introduced another volunteer, Trevor, a big-shouldered man in a red “When We Fight, We Win!” shirt. He turned out to be my older daughter’s former Grade 1 gym teacher. Small world.

We chatted about the new recall campaign, ballooning K–12 class sizes, the ongoing teachers strike, the connection among all of these. “We do have a bit more time on our hands these days,” Trevor joked. “But we’re not all teachers,” Tania said. Earlier that day I’d read in the news that “Recall Nicolaides” had been started by an oil and gas geophysicist.

I hadn’t realized, however, that the campaign was already out collecting signatures. Politics in Alberta these days moves fast.

A young couple with a baby was filling out the petition—name, address, contact info, confirmation of vote eligibility, date, signature. A pickup truck honked as it pulled up. A man in tan overalls hopped out and joined the line. Tania gestured to the table, with its pens and clipboards. “You live in the riding,” she said. “Are you going to sign?” My six-year-old was grabbing my arm. She was cold. She was hungry. One second is over! Maybe next time, I told Tania.

In fact, I had questions before I was willing to add my name. Try to remove our MLA, outside of an election What exactly would we be signing up for?

A frequent criticism in Alberta is that our political representatives face too little accountability. “When most of us stink at our jobs, we get sent packing,” wrote the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in 2020. “[But] that standard doesn’t apply to politicians.” Citizens’ main recourse is elections. Between elections, leaders are reluctant to sanction MLAs for fear of damaging their party “brand” or undermining caucus solidarity. MLAs are reluctant to criticize leaders, who could refuse to sign their nomination papers. But citizens can try to hold politicians accountable in another way. Recall votes—found in almost two dozen countries, most famously at the state level in California (which has had 182 recall campaigns!)—are a way for citizens to take charge. They decide whether or not their elected representatives should be removed before their term is up.

Recall reflects the idea that MLAs are delegates of electors, morally bound by constituents’ preferences. If enough constituents are dissatisfied with an MLA’s performance, they can remove that MLA from office. Recall requires limits to prevent frivolous use. Californians’ recall efforts failed for decades before governor Gray Davis was removed in 2003, in a contentious campaign The Guardian dubbed “a circus fit for the fruit and nut state.”

Albertans have long favoured recall. Premier William Aberhart enacted recall in 1936, only to kill the law after the people of High River made him one of its first targets. In the 1990s Reform demanded recall. So did the provincial Liberals. Recall “gives people an element of control over their politicians,” said leader Laurence Decore. “It also gives MLAs the power to tell their leader they can’t vote for a bill, because their constituents wouldn’t stand for it.”

With recall, citizens decide whether or not their representative should be removed before their term is up.

Then along came Jason Kenney. On the 2019 campaign trail he said his government “would introduce a Recall Act allowing voters to fire their MLA in between elections if they’ve lost the public’s trust.” (For clarity he tweeted FIRE in all-caps.) In 2021 his promise—applied to mayors and councillors too—became law. It would be a two-step process. Collect enough signatures, and you trigger a yes/no vote. If constituents vote the politician out, you trigger a by-election.

Kenney’s legislation was criticized as both vindictive and token. It seemed aimed at municipal and NDP politicians, a tool to silence progressive voices. But the National Post’s Colby Cosh, a recall champion, called the law “weaksauce.” A campaign required valid signatures from 40 per cent of a constituency’s voters: for MLAs, often close to 16,000 names; for mayors, hundreds of thousands. Organizers had only 60 days. They couldn’t launch a recall campaign until 18 months after an election and not within six months of the next one.

Proving left- and right-wing critics alike correct, the first target of recall, in 2024, was Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek. The campaign collected 69,344 names, or only 5.4 per cent of the city’s population. Organizer Landon Johnston called the threshold “always impossible.” But the stigma clung to Gondek, who then finished third in the 2025 mayoral race. Johnston parlayed the spotlight into a successful run for councillor in Ward 14. And the campaign, wrote the Calgary Herald’s Rob Breakenridge, “exposed some of the shortcomings of the recall process itself.”

A week or so after my chat at the car wash, I was passing the Bowness Ratepayers Scout & Guide Hall and saw a familiar roadside table and signs. I’d just read in the news that recall papers had been served for Airdrie-East MLA Angela Pitt. I’d seen a video of Calgary-North West MLA Rajan Sawhney abandoning the podium as her audience chants “Re-call! Re-call! Re-call!” A website calling itself “Operation Total Recall” claimed that many more such campaigns were in the works.

One reason for newfound interest in recall was that Danielle Smith had changed Kenney’s rules. Campaigns could now start sooner, just a year after an election. Volunteers had an extra month to gather names. The signature threshold could be lower too, based now on previous voter turnout rather than electorate size. Recall Nicolaides was suddenly no longer alone. I pulled over to ask the volunteers how they felt about this.

On this evening, Tania and another volunteer were confirming by flashlight that a woman who wanted to sign did in fact live in the riding. When the lineup eased, I asked them: “Have you seen the Total Recall website?” They laughed. Tania downplayed their influence. “But something’s definitely happening,” the other volunteer said. “I think the Forever Canadian campaign opened up a lot of eyes.” (Former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s citizen-led anti-separation petition had amassed 456,000 signatures.) “And then the notwithstanding clause—that just blew it up.”

In late October 2025 Smith’s government had invoked the clause to force 51,000 striking teachers back to work, the first time this power to deny Charter rights had been used in Alberta. The move was widely condemned. Though Recall Nicolaides was already well underway by then, the organizers behind Operation Total Recall cited abuse of the notwithstanding clause as their catalyst: “When fundamental rights are set aside, it creates a precedent that affects us all.”

Tania didn’t ask me to sign the petition this time. Maybe she thought I already had. Or maybe she was feeling a surge of validation. Something was happening in Alberta.

Signatories in Calgary-Bow. Yeremiy: “Recall was the only tool I could see to hold my minister and my MLA accountable.”

And then the recall dam burst. November 10: Grande Prairie MLA Nolan Dyck. November 14: Calgary-Fish Creek MLA Myles McDougall. November 14: Morinville-St. Albert MLA Dale Nally. On it went. Jackie Lovely (Camrose). Jason Stephan (Red Deer-South). Searle Turton (Spruce Grove-Stony Plain). Social media was buzzing: Who wants a new MLA? Operation Total Recall was now calling for 44 UCP MLAs, nearly the entire caucus, to be removed.

By the end of the year some 26 recall campaigns had been approved by Elections Alberta. Premier Smith, as MLA for Brooks-Medicine Hat, was among the targets. Recall Nicolaides itself was now only weeks from its deadline—January 21—to collect enough signatures. Further recall applications dried up as either an MLA was deemed “impossible” to recall or citizens watched events in Calgary-Bow and beyond, playing wait and see.

Elections Alberta announced it needed additional staff to verify potentially hundreds of thousands of petitioner names and addresses and to confirm the eligibility of canvassers. This meant a substantial budget increase. A UCP-controlled legislative committee said no, which would have effectively killed recall in Alberta. Their refusal was ridiculed even by staunch conservative pundits, and the committee caved. Wrote Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter: “They [the UCP] made their bed and now they have to lie in it.”

Proponents were required to make their case in a statement not exceeding 100 words. Recall Nicolaides’s Jenny Yeremiy wrote that her MLA, as minister, showed “a clear failure to support public education,” citing privatization, more public funding for charter and private schools, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient staff and inappropriate curricula. MLA Mickey Amery, wrote his complainant, “supported policies that put vulnerable groups at risk and increased the cost of living.” Danielle Smith’s “disregard for local expertise and community voices” left her constituents “without accountable leadership.” Many statements cited the notwithstanding clause.

MLAs mounted a common defence: I do meet with voters, I do listen, our UCP got a mandate from Albertans. But Nicolaides, as the first up, set the tone. His recall, he argued, was illegitimate. The recall process should be reserved for “breaches of public trust, ethical violations or dereliction of duty,” not “dissatisfaction with government policy.” Using recall to “overturn an election,” he wrote, “undermines stable governance and the electoral process.”

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a law they themselves had enacted only months earlier—unanimously, and over the objections of the opposition—wasn’t lost on anyone. Cosh, the pro-recall National Post pundit, likened Smith to Dr. Frankenstein gaping at his monstrous creation. “It is, frankly, just a bit silly for UCP politicians to now insist that recall was only to be used in cases of misconduct or incapacity,” he wrote. “If recall itself is legitimate, its semi-organized use to put collective pressure on governments must be legitimate.”

As recall spread, Kenney chimed in. He’d never intended his law to be used as a weapon, he told the CBC, but as an “ultimate tool of accountability” if a politician did “something absolutely egregious, illegal, grossly unethical.” Years earlier Kenney had given only two justifications to FIRE one’s MLA: If they’d “lost the public’s trust” or “broken promises.”

Elections Alberta’s “Recall FAQs” webpage, at “Valid reasons to recall,” says only: “There is no set criteria.”

Other jurisdictions erect guardrails. Florida, for example, limits recall to cases of “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, and conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.” In Alberta simply being an MLA is enough.

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a recall law they themselves had enacted only months earlier wasn’t lost on anyone.

Alberta’s recall law, as written, created other issues as well. Among the 26 MLAs subjected to recall was Calgary-Beddington’s Amanda Chapman, one of two NDP members caught up in the melee. The proponent, Laurie McCormack, offered as pretext that Chapman “chooses harsh partisan attacks likening Alberta’s elected government to extremists, and backs public sector unions over… families’ real priorities.” Similarly, NDP MLA Peggy Wright (Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview) deserved recall because she—per her complainant—“facilitates the exposure of children to sexualized material.” Wright was said to be “routinely inaccessible” to this constituent and “doesn’t return emails or calls.”

Then there’s the recall effort against Lethbridge-East’s Nathan Neudorf, which appeared to be bogus, organized perhaps by an ally of the UCP MLA himself. The stated case against Neudorf by “Ryan Tanner” was conspicuously lacking specifics: “Recent voting activity from him demonstrates a disconnect and his inability to meet the needs, desires and expectations of those he represents.” As reported by the CBC, would-be canvassers in Lethbridge emailed Tanner to help collect signatures. They never heard back. No petition locations were posted. No website was created. (Ultimately no signatures were sent to Elections Alberta.) But as long as a recall campaign against Neudorf was officially registered, no other one could be started.

Neudorf eventually declared, at the legislature, “I’m not actively involved in my own recall.” As a letter to the Lethbridge Herald pointed out, “This seems like a feeble equivocation. Were you passively involved, or were you aware it was going to happen before stepping back for plausible deniability?”

The law allowed for more abuses. MLA Dale Nally claimed that Joshua Eberhart, his recall campaign’s organizer, “does not vote in provincial elections,” so the effort was thus “without merit.” The campaign was allowed to go ahead, and Elections Alberta later determined Nally had violated election law.

Recall Gondek’s Landon Johnston told CTV News he suspected his petition was used by other conservative political actors for their own data-gathering. “I warned the privacy commissioner halfway through this project,” he said. “Anyone can co-opt this petition for their own gain.”

I was at home, sick, on a snowy mid-winter afternoon when the doorbell rang. On my porch were two older men, wearing parkas, toques and canvasser IDs and carrying shiny elections-grade Recall Nicolaides signs. They identified themselves as fellow Bownesians. “Have you heard about the campaign to recall our MLA?” the shorter man asked.

By now With nearly a third of Alberta’s MLAs being recalled… Oh—I’d heard.

I stepped outside to keep the dog inside. We chatted about Smith, her forcing teachers back to work, her flirting with separatism. The taller man said he’d voted UCP in 2023, and “that was a mistake.” He called Smith “Trumpy.” I said I sympathized with their anger.

But I told them I didn’t have much love for recall. I knew of its dubious record in the US. I didn’t like it when Kenney brought recall north. The anti-Gondek campaign struck me as baseless and sexist. Now opposition MLAs were being targeted out of spite. I was certainly amused by the UCP getting a taste of its own medicine. But I found myself agreeing with aspects of the Nicolaides defence. These were largely policy disagreements. The policies in question were perhaps stupid, or narrow-minded, or cruel. Ideally they’d be indefensible at election time. But none of these recalled MLAs stood accused of a conflict of interest or serious crime. And if one UCP MLA should be recalled for bad policy, so should they all.

The men said none of this mattered. Fact was, the UCP had brought in recall, and what was happening to them now was legal and just.

I couldn’t disagree. But I was sick, and in bare feet, and we could see our breath. The men asked if I’d sign the petition. I said recall didn’t exactly align with my idea of Alberta democracy. They said they respected my position. Then the shorter man, as he turned to walk away, gently pushed back one last time. “You know—they’re [the UCP] changing the rules of our democracy,” he said. “They’re taking away our rights. What else are we supposed to do?”

The Smith government has changed the rules. It not only used the notwithstanding clause to force teachers to work under contract terms that 90 per cent of them had voted to reject, it used the clause three more times that fall to override Albertans’ rights. It gave itself the power to decide whether a proposed referendum question violates the Constitution. It changed election laws, reinstating corporate and union donations to parties and political action committees (PACs) and suppressing the vote by restricting special ballots and requiring more ID. University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley wrote that these changes, alongside making recall easier, “mark another step in the Americanization of Alberta’s democratic institutions… and are the latest in a long list of democratic transgressions in this province.”

Campaign volunteers, fall 2025. Yeremiy calls recall a “gift” from the UCP: “It’s helping us build from the ground up.”

When I spoke on my doorstep with the gentlemen from Recall Nicolaides, they said the team had collected “maybe 6,000” signatures. Their aim was 16,006 signatures, or 40 per cent of the voter turnout in Calgary-Bow in 2023—and, really, they needed still more names to be on the safe side. Their three-month timeframe was fast closing. It didn’t look good for the campaign. And a more personal deadline was also looming. I had to decide if I’d add my name to the petition.

I decided to call Yeremiy. The woman who’d organized against Nicolaides—and inspired citizens from Medicine Hat to Grande Prairie to take up pens against their own MLAs—had told media she’d never planned to launch a recall, not even after Smith eased the rules. She’d tried to meet with Nicolaides to share her concerns. He dismissed her. When they finally spoke, at his office, he was aggressive and threatening. And so recall, she told the CBC, was “the only tool I could see that was capable of holding my minister and my MLA accountable.”

I asked her what she’d thought when Kenney brought in recall. “I remember wondering: What are they up to?” she said. “And then I remembered it being applied to Jyoti Gondek and thought, Oh, that’s what it’s about. I get the impression it was put in place in case the NDP got elected [in 2023], so they had a way to undermine the government.” She found that others troubled by Nicolaides’s record nonetheless had misgivings about recall. “[People] commented at the doors and at various signing locations about the recall action—not wanting to support it in any way.”

She said that “the way I could justify it” is that this UCP government doesn’t listen. “People who put forward thoughtful alternatives for this province are completely ignored.… And when [an MLA] does stand against anything within that party, they’re dismissed from their roles.”

Yeremiy believes this lack of accountability is getting worse. “I can use a specific example,” she said. “When the Eastern Slopes were opened up [to coal mining in 2020], it caused public outrage, and there was a response from the minister at the time. She reversed the action.” In fact, Kenney’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, had said that the 44-year-old policy protecting parts of the Rockies would be reinstated and that citizens would be consulted if her government ever again tried to make changes to it. “An important part of being a responsible government,” Savage had said, “is to admit when you’ve made a mistake and to fix it.”

But the Smith-era UCP is shameless, said Yeremiy. They’re unwilling even to slow down, let alone reverse. “We’ve seen that with coal. We’ve seen that with healthcare. We’ve seen that with education. We’ve seen that with the renewables moratorium. Literally everything this government has done, there’s no means for the public to put a stop to it.”

Yeremiy said the three-month-long petition effort had been “exhausting.” I wasn’t exactly surprised when she told me they were unlikely to get enough signatures to trigger a recall vote. But then she described the campaign in a surprising way. “They [the UCP] have given us a gift with this recall legislation,” she said. “It’s forcing us to speak with our neighbours. In the environmental and social justice movements, there’s a lot of camaraderie and solidarity. But at the end of the day we have to be able to talk to the people who live beside us.” She described a recent Eastern Slopes meeting in Canmore. “It was mostly local, and they offered great thoughts. But the challenge is we’re not bringing new people along. So what [recall] is doing, its gift, is it’s making us speak with people who normally aren’t interested in these important issues.”

I’d been thinking for weeks about recall as a provincial issue. But Yeremiy wasn’t focused on other recall efforts across the province. She was organizing dozens of her neighbours, many she’d never met before, to engage in local politics. They in turn were speaking with their neighbours, thousands of them, at the car wash, at roadsides, on doorsteps. About politics. About important issues. Class sizes. Charter rights. Representation. They were, as community organizers like to put it, “connecting with systems of power to enact change.”

This idea “came from my being a geophysicist and liability expert,” Yeremiy said. “We have to do land-based organizing. I go to meetings, talk about the land, have conversations. But the challenge, with people all over the province, is we’re not doing it in our own community. So recall is ultimately about governing ourselves. That’s what this gift is. It’s helping us understand how to build from the ground up.”

On a Sunday afternoon in late January I drove to the Foothills United Church in Bowness. My eldest daughter was with me. We’d been running errands; this was our last stop. The church, built in the 1940s and plastered in white stucco, had a Recall Nicolaides sign poking out of its dead grass. People were filing in through the main doors.

We saw Tania at the petition-signing table in the vestibule and said hello. She hadn’t seen my older daughter, her former student, in nearly eight years. Two other women, volunteers I hadn’t yet met, were at the booth. It was loud, but we chatted awhile. Their signature-collecting efforts would “absolutely fall short,” they said, their deadline now days away. Probably well short. But today was a celebration. A band was playing in the main church space. A Raging Granny passed by in an oversized floppy green hat. My daughter returned to the table with a cookie and a handful of pretzels.

I remained unconvinced about the idea of recall. If anything, Alberta’s recall insurgency strongly directs us to fix representative democracy. Rather than try to pick off MLAs between elections, one by one or 26 at a time, we need to curtail the vast power of party leaders, demand more free votes in the legislature, disallow corporate donations to parties, and protect the authority of independent watchdogs. And our elections must be proportional. First-past-the-post poisons the well, often elevating to positions of power “representatives” who are supported by a fraction of their electorate and ignore everyone else. Small wonder we end up in acrimony.

And yet I’d spent more time than ever over the past three months—outside of an election period—talking about politics with people in my community. I’d met neighbours. I’d discovered they had similar concerns to mine. Recall Nicolaides canvassers had done this and then some. A few told me the campaign had awakened them to the power of organizing. It had even given them hope. One volunteer, Rob, told me he’d had fun: “Just going out and collecting signatures has been such a positive experience.”

Yeremiy would be asked by a Calgary Herald reporter whether too few signatures would constitute failure. “Not even a little bit,” she said. “I feel so much more empowered than I did before this started. Most people involved in this petition have never been in politics before, (but) they felt compelled to do something, watching the misdirection of this government.”

Tania handed me a pen. I signed the petition. My daughter cheered. This list of names was an imperfect but unmistakable message to my MLA, my government and every citizen of Alberta. And if I couldn’t get behind recall itself, I would stand with my neighbours.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views. His “We Could Prevent a Mass Shooting” (Dec 2024) and “Who Wants Albertans to Gamble More?” can be found in AV’s online archives.

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We’ve all seen how that has been going for the United States, and, frankly, for the rest of the world. The only word that captures it is “revolutionary.” Project 2025 has turned the US on its head and reset the country’s relations with everyone else.

There are probably only a few dozen people or so who have actually read the 920-page Project 2025 cover to cover. I don’t count myself as one of them. But I did read Alberta’s own little version of the document, and it was illuminating to say the least.

Like many Albertans I’ve been struggling to keep pace with the rate at which the UCP has legislated since Danielle Smith took the helm in 2022, often in unconstitutional ways that target minorities and override treaty rights. They have passed legislation, often in the middle of the night, that will leave extraordinary impacts on citizens of the province, alter the nature of our democratic society and could ultimately see Alberta remove itself from Confederation. On four occasions they have invoked the notwithstanding clause to override Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some people, such as federal justice minister Sean Fraser, have described this approach as a form of “democratic backsliding” designed “to cater to a unique political opportunity that may be a good fundraising email but will potentially violate constitutionally protected rights of vulnerability.”

Similar to our neighbours in the US, Albertans are in our own anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex, in which we’re being pulled into the unknown by a MAGA-adjacent far-right UCP government.

It might have helped to see some of this coming. Turns out we could have, if only we’d read the Free Alberta Strategy sooner.

The Free Alberta Strategy was written in 2021 by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From at the height of anti-Trudeau sentiment in the province, and in the altered-reality state of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when so many radical ideas were incubated in a stew of isolation and myopia-inducing screen time. Anderson is a lawyer with a history in provincial politics who is now premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff. Cooper is a political science professor at the University of Calgary. From is also a lawyer.

The document is a shade under 50 pages and contains a smattering of footnotes from Ted Morton, Jack Mintz, Lorne Gunter, Preston Manning, Pierre Poilievre and the Fraser Institute. Not exactly a non-partisan affair. And it certainly isn’t written with any attempt at neutrality or objectivity either. On the contrary, it is laced with incendiary rhetoric that seeks to demonize eastern Canada in simplistic and snide ways. It sets Alberta up as an oppressed victim of Confederation that has been “pillaged” by a federal government that has become an “existential threat to our province’s economic viability and the core freedoms of our people.”

The strategy asserts that “Ottawa has fundamentally breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta.” Accordingly, it has become incumbent upon the provincial government to “repudiate this arrangement on behalf of its people, to renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation.”

The authors then call on the government of Alberta, which at the time was led by premier Jason Kenney, to pass a Sovereignty Act that would allow the province to disregard all federal laws at its discretion; turf the RCMP and replace it with a provincial force; create independent provincial legislation for financial institutions, presumably to end federal regulatory oversight over banks working in the province; end equalization transfers; opt out of federal health, education, resource development, environmental regulation and property rights; replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta version; do the same with Employment Insurance; replace the federal government in international diplomacy and negotiation; and give the provincial legislature the power to make all future judicial appointments.

These are the strategic moves the authors believe will “offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.”

Albertans are in an anti-democratic revolutionary political vortex.

According to the authors “a vast majority of Albertans” agree that the province in recent years has been “economically terrorized by the Government of Canada.” “Eco-extremists,” they say, have looted the province of “well over $600-billion” through transfer programs.

Anderson, Cooper and From blame the federal government for increases in suicides, bankruptcies and overdoses. And they suggest the feds have “commenced a deliberate strategy to phase out and eliminate Alberta’s largest and most critical industry.” Policies such as the carbon tax, clean fuel regulations and environmental impact assessments are characterized as “assaults.”

All of this dramatically sets up an extortion play which is the core of the strategy: “In the event that Ottawa refuses to recognize Alberta’s provincial rights of sovereignty, and instead continues its strategy of economic tyranny, co-opted management of our resource sector and the marginalization of our citizens, it may leave our province with no other recourse but to leave Confederation entirely.”

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism. It’s a “do what we say or we are done” extortionist strategy that is rooted in an inflated sense of grievance that doesn’t jibe with any discernible reality.

Politicians and political scientists are careful to acknowledge the real sense of grievance that some Albertans feel vis-à-vis their relationship with the federal government. You can’t argue with people’s feelings after all, but you can take issue with how they choose to rationalize and justify them. There’s nothing on the public record that could plausibly support characterizing the federal government’s relationship with Alberta as something equivalent to economic terrorism, as the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy assert. To the contrary, since 2010 oil production in the province has more than doubled, from two million barrels a day to 4.1 million barrels a day.

The Free Alberta Strategy didn’t get much traction with Jason Kenney’s UCP, perhaps because in year one of Kenney’s reign Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, ramped up investment in the TMX pipeline, which runs from Edmonton to tidewater at Burnaby, BC. The project eventually cost the federal government $34.2-billion. Even for Kenney it would have been a stretch to describe this massive outlay of public dollars as an “assault” or a form of “terrorism” committed against his province by the evil overlords in Ottawa.

But since Kenney was given the bum’s rush by the far-right separatist wing of the party he created, the strategy has come back into vogue. In fact, Kenney’s successor, premier Smith, is hewing closely to much of the plan.

Before going further it’s important to be fair to the authors of the Free Alberta Strategy and not paint them as being fully responsible for planting the anti-democratic seeds the UCP has sown since.

The trio of Anderson, Cooper and From were careful to recommend a transparent, democratic approach to adopting their strategy and, if necessary, a democratic approach to ending Alberta’s place in Confederation. They prescribed that their strategy be adopted first as official policy, that the policy be outlined clearly to Albertans and that there should be a democratic process to give the government the mandate to pursue the strategy.

Once the democratic mandate was in hand, after a successful electoral victory with the Free Alberta Strategy as a platform, they suggested a pre-referendum blue ribbon panel on provincial secession be held and that a detailed plan be drafted by policy experts, lawyers and members of the private and public sectors that would cover the full ambit of requirements to establish an independent Alberta. They argued for a full year to be given to consultations, discussions and debates on the merits of the plan and its risks and rewards.

Danielle Smith’s UCP did not follow this recommended process. Just as Donald Trump dishonestly denied any knowledge of Project 2025 during the last presidential campaign and then proceeded to implement vast portions of its radical agenda within his first year back in the White House, Smith’s UCP did not campaign on the Free Alberta Strategy’s tenets but have embraced them wholeheartedly since forming government. Smith’s UCP don’t, therefore, have a democratic mandate to pursue these ideas, by any standard. Yet they have implemented the components of the strategy at a ferocious pace.

First, through Bill 54, which made it comprehensively easier to bring about a secession referendum by reducing the number of signatures required, and then Bill 14, which was passed in order to eliminate any bearing the Charter of Rights of Freedoms and the Treaties might have on the process, the UCP has shown it intends to construct a credible threat of separatism that it can use to extort the rest of Canada.

They have taken the Free Alberta Strategy into Trumpian territory by running on one set of issues and governing on their opposite. Believe it or not, the planks of the UCP’s winning 2023 campaign platform were tax cuts, safe streets, mental health supports, education and career training, investing in tourism, improving healthcare for women and children, and a guarantee to maintain public healthcare. None of the ideas included in the Free Alberta Strategy were campaigned on by Smith’s UCP.

However, in December 2022, just two months after Smith won the leadership of the UCP, her party introduced the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which achieves one of the Free Alberta Strategy’s major milestones. This really should have been a wake-up call to the electorate that under Smith’s leadership the UCP would tack hard to the right. “It’s not like Ottawa is a national government,” said Smith after the legislation passed its final reading at 1 a.m. on December 7.

UCP leadership candidates debated the Free Alberta Strategy in June 2022; most of them opposed Alberta acting as a sovereign jurisdiction. Travis Toews said it would create chaos and scare off investors. Brian Jean: “Telling Albertans… not to follow some laws is frankly irresponsible.” The winning candidate, Danielle Smith, endorsed the Free Alberta Strategy.

Provisions in the Sovereignty Act armed Smith’s government with a set of new powers to disregard federal laws at its own discretion. In effect, this kneecaps the role of the courts in this province, by setting the provincial legislature as the arbiter of the constitutionality of federal law.

In a radical revision of constitutional democracy, the act allows the provincial cabinet to decide whether it is in or out on specific aspects of federalism, including federal regulations and even enforcement of the Criminal Code by provincial entities. The dean of the University of Calgary’s law school, Ian Holloway, called the legislation an “unconstitutional gambit” and accused the premier of “engaging in a game of political chicken.”

Smith’s government furthered this line of legislation in late 2025 with the International Agreements Act, which seeks to put the province on an equal plane with the federal government when it comes to managing international relations. It asserts that no international agreement signed by the federal government is binding on the province. Something like a major climate change agreement would presumably not be binding on Alberta unless agreed to by the provincial legislature. This assertion of provincial autonomy over international relations runs counter to all norms of statecraft. But it is a tactic explicitly described in the Free Alberta Strategy, which states in its section on international relations that Alberta “can no longer afford to entrust its interests to hostile and unreliable federal governments. It must take full control of its own international and interprovincial trade and commerce.”

The UCP has also moved to establish its own police service. The Alberta Sheriffs Police Service (ASPS) was created through Bill 4, which came into force in November 2025 as the Public Safety and Emergency Services Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2). There remains a great deal of ambiguity with respect to these sheriffs’ purpose, jurisdiction and relationship with other police services in the province.

The sheriffs were originally established to do prisoner transport but evolved to take on traffic control roles and security around the legislature grounds. The latest evolution of the service appears aimed at broadening their authority and increasing their complement to the point that they could eventually be in position to take over from the RCMP at the end of the current policing contract, which expires in 2032.

Setting up a provincial police service is no easy task and doesn’t happen overnight or without extraordinary cost, so this is a half measure less by choice than by necessity. Nevertheless, it is a move drawn from the Free Alberta Strategy, which advocates removing the RCMP—perceived as an extension of federal authority—from its policing role in the province. It is notable that this is being done against the grain of overwhelming public opinion. A survey conducted for the National Police Foundation on the prospect of an Alberta provincial police force found only 31 per cent of respondents were in favor of replacing the RCMP, while three-quarters were satisfied with the policing services received from the Mounties. Seventy-one per cent of respondents said they felt the public had not been adequately consulted on the proposal, and 81 per cent said there were more pressing issues for the province to address.

On January 23, 2026, the premier sent prime minister Mark Carney a letter threatening to withhold “the necessary funding to support any new judicial positions in the province” until the federal government agreed to make significant changes to how judges are appointed in Alberta. Following the Free Alberta Strategy’s extortion tactic to a tee, and its strategic direction to assert greater autonomy over judicial appointments, the premier has for now stopped short of the nuclear option articulated by Anderson, Cooper and From, which recommends the provincial legislature appoint all future judges serving in Alberta.

Instead, the premier is proposing a major reform of the appointments process that would see the establishment of a special advisory committee comprising “four non-partisan experts—two from Alberta and two appointed by the federal government.” The committee would make recommendations to the two ministers of justice (federal and provincial), who would then be expected to “work collaboratively to identify the successful appointee(s).”

“Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal… and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad.” —barry cooper

The premier also wants this committee to influence appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada and make recommendations to the prime minister about who should fill vacancies on the top bench.

Federal justice minister Sean Fraser saw the letter as a threat to judicial independence and the rule of law, and told media “it’s essential that we have a judiciary who’s able to make decisions without fear or favour amongst those who have the power to appoint or, in theory, remove a judge from the bench.” The Canadian Bar Association and its Alberta branch also expressed “grave concerns” about premier Smith’s proposal, which they saw as a threat that if carried out would ultimately “punish Albertans by limiting access to a properly functioning justice system.”

Under Smith’s leadership the UCP has also toyed with the idea of breaking with the Canadian Pension Plan and establishing a provincial plan instead. Smith floated the idea—one of the main pillars of the Free Alberta Strategy—as part of a 2023 survey she put to all residents of the province who wanted to participate. It took 21 months for her government to finally release the results of the survey, which showed that only 10 per cent of respondents supported the idea of an Alberta Pension Plan.

The other tactical moves recommended in the Free Alberta Strategy—legislating an end to equalization payments and establishing an independent banking act—have yet to be attempted by Smith’s government.

Rather than co-operative federalism, this is shakedown federalism.

The shakedown approach to federalism that is the hallmark of Smith’s government clearly has its intellectual roots in the Free Alberta Strategy. The approach derives from an understanding of Confederation as being fundamentally unfair to western Canadians, who, according to one of its authors, Barry Cooper, have been under the thumb of an imperialist power structure seated in Laurentian Canada since before Confederation. It seeks to use the ultimate threat of separation as leverage to reset the terms of the Canadian federation.

For his part, Cooper—a committed separatist—does not believe the Laurentians are capable of comprehending “what they have done.” In an interview for this article, he characterized this as a “failure of imagination” to meet “the just complaints of Alberta and Saskatchewan.”

In June 2020 Cooper joined BC political talk show host Stuart McNish on Conversations that Matter to discuss Alberta separatism. Cooper articulated his theory that western Canadians have been exploited by the Ontario/Ottawa/Quebec imperial complex and went on to expound a sense of fatalism about the future of Canadian federalism. In his view, western Canadians will eventually conclude that the relationship with Laurentian Canada will never change or evolve in meaningful enough ways to make it worth remaining in Canada.

According to Cooper: “Eventually you have to do something. Of course it is treasonous, of course it is illegal, and of course it is going to be very unpleasant, and we’re going to have to have… help from abroad. We’re going to have to rely on the Americans. It will depend on whether or not Saskatchewan and Alberta have leaders who are willing to understand the very serious implications, which means among other things getting the Americans on board.”

Here, Cooper seems to have presaged the now well-publicized efforts of the Alberta Prosperity Project to conscript the help of the Trump administration in their efforts to split Alberta from the rest of Canada. And while the Smith government hasn’t overtly and explicitly declared its separatist intentions, nor openly courted the Trump administration’s support in becoming an independent state, it has legislated in a MAGA-adjacent, far-right fashion.

With Trumpian disregard for constitutional norms, Smith’s government has used the notwithstanding clause to attack the rights of organized labour and of gender diverse people in the province. With Trumpian xenophobia it has signalled an intent to crack down on immigration and the rights of immigrants and refugees in the province. It has introduced two-tier healthcare through Bill 11, and encouraged two-tier education by subsidizing private schools at the highest rate in Canada and increasing funding to charter schools at a rate three times higher than its increase to public schools.

These moves could be construed as a method of demonstrating the UCP’s alignment with the Trump administration. This is not insignificant, particularly in light of the US’s November 2025 National Security Strategy, which states that “we will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.”

Under premier Jason Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister in the Harper government and a committed federalist, the Free Alberta Strategy barely made an impression. Under premier Smith’s UCP, the strategy is being aggressively implemented.

Cooper was forthright in stating that while he hasn’t spoken with either Rob Anderson—now the premier’s chief of staff—or premier Smith in a number of years, he is “quite supportive of what she has done.”

The Free Alberta Strategy provides a clear window into the strategic logic and tactical moves premier Smith’s UCP will make in destabilizing relations with the rest of Canada and setting Alberta on a path to separation. As Project 2025 has done in the US, the Free Alberta Strategy has begun to fundamentally alter Alberta politics and society. It’s a reckless and anti-democratic plan that seems hell-bent on destroying Canada. Canadian citizens can orient themselves amid the chaos by understanding that Smith and her government are intent on pursuing the Free Alberta Strategy to its logical conclusion. If they want a preview of where this is all headed next, they need only keep an eye on our neighbours to the south.

Patrick Lennox is the author of At Home and Abroad: The Canada–US Relationship and Canada’s Place in the World.

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I trekked down to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union hall in Edmonton’s Strathcona industrial park on a pitch-black November evening to check in on the state of the federal NDP leadership race. About two dozen union men were there to hear the local leadership candidate, Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, discuss her plan to resurrect Canada’s social democratic party from its worst-ever election defeat.

Of the five candidates pursuing the leadership, McPherson is the only sitting MP, making her the only contender able to introduce legislation. Her recently proposed private member’s bill to ban employer-dominated “company unions,” which earned McPherson a legal threat for specifically naming the Christian Labour Association of Canada, was a big hit at the union hall that night.

Whoever leads the federal NDP after the votes are counted on March 29 in Winnipeg will have a daunting task ahead of them, inheriting a rump party of seven seats and without official party status in the House of Commons. Whether the next leader is McPherson, Avi Lewis, Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston or Tony McQuail, they will have to chart a path back to electoral relevance.

That path will have to start with the NDP’s traditional base, the working class, whose votes the Conservatives have made a concerted effort to attract under Pierre Poilievre. Writing in the Windsor Star, journalist Trevor Wilhelm noted that in the 2025 federal election, “multiple former orange NDP strongholds once propped up on union shoulders turned Tory blue,” including Windsor-West and London-Fanshawe in southwestern Ontario and Elmwood-Transcona in Winnipeg. The NDP will try to win back members of this socioeconomic group—people who engage in wage labour, working in manual or service-related jobs that lack the economic security and control over their working conditions enjoyed by salaried professionals, workers who can be but aren’t necessarily unionized.

In an interview at the IBEW hall, James Ball, president of Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 730, recognized that the next NDP leader “has a bit of a struggle ahead of them.” With workers’ wages falling behind inflation, even as they secure gains through collective bargaining, Ball said, “a lot of workers are angry.” Poilievre’s Conservatives are winning them over by “really leaning into the rage bait,” with the leader’s tirades against immigrants, “woke ideology,” “vaccine vendettas” and “global elites preying on the fears and desperation of people to impose their power grab.” McPherson is well suited to winning these voters over, Ball said, because of her campaign’s emphasis on “meeting them where they are and understanding what they need.”

Heather McPherson on the the picket line with postal workers, Edmonton, September 2025

McPherson believes that a major NDP failure isn’t so much what it’s saying but how it says it. “The reason Poilievre was able to resonate with so many people is because he had a disciplined message. He was talking about issues that matter to Canadians,” she said in an interview a couple days before the IBEW event. The NDP, she added, needs to counter Poilievre’s language of anger and fear with a “simple, hopeful” message that at the same time promises policies that appeal to working people.

At her September campaign kickoff, McPherson said the party needs to “stop shrinking into purity tests and pushing people away.” One of her caucus colleagues, Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan, said she was “appalled and deeply disappointed” by McPherson’s use of the phrase “purity test.” “That framing is frequently used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled and immigrant workers—who now make up a major part of the labour movement and the working class,” Gazan wrote on Twitter.

I asked McPherson to clarify who in the NDP is administering purity tests and against whom. She responded in general terms, referring to a tendency in certain progressive circles in which “if you use the wrong words, somehow you get excluded,” which she said is anathema to building a larger movement.

She invoked, by contrast, Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoralty campaign in 2025, “which I think we’ve all been invigorated by.” McPherson said Mamdani spoke to people “about the things that mattered to them, and he spoke to them in a way that was simple, digestible and easy to access.” His campaign was laser-focused on issues of affordability, a priority from which the candidate wouldn’t waver.

Canada’s social democratic party is coming off its worst-ever election defeat. It lacks official party status in the House of Commons.

The NDP’s messaging, said McPherson, ought to focus on three closely interrelated issues—jobs, housing and the cost of living. “Until those issues are being addressed, we can’t reach Canadians,” she said.

The first leadership campaign policy McPherson unveiled was her housing platform, the centrepiece of which is to establish a federal Crown corporation to build housing in partnership with municipalities, organized labour and Indigenous governments, with a goal of building 1.2 million non-market housing units within a decade. Carney’s Build Canada Homes, by contrast, is focused on offering market-based incentives to private builders. McPherson’s policy also includes creating a National Renters’ Bill of Rights that would cap rent increases and prevent “unfair evictions,” banning real estate investment trusts from accessing public housing funds, and converting corporate-owned housing into co-op or non-profit units through a public buy-in program.

The second policy proposal the McPherson campaign produced was to put “power back in the hands of the people who make the NDP work” by engaging members in discussions around policy, candidate recruitment and training, giving constituency associations more resources and autonomy and hiring regional organizers to enhance coordination between them.

Avi Lewis with Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 243 members at Niagara College, 2025.

Avi Lewis’s background is not one you might expect from someone leading a left-wing populist insurgency within the NDP. His grandfather, David Lewis, led the party from 1971 to 1975, and his father, Stephen Lewis, was the Ontario NDP leader from 1970 to 1977. Both worked to purge the party of the leftist Waffle movement in 1972.

The younger Lewis’s leadership platform is focused on offering a series of public options in major areas of the economy to challenge the concentration of corporate power, a radical proposal he says will substantially lower consumer costs. Echoing the Mamdani campaign, Lewis is proposing a series of publicly owned grocery stores across Canada, which The Globe and Mail dedicated a Thanksgiving Monday editorial to arguing against—a source of pride for Lewis. “It was significant to me that we had really landed on something that the elites in Canada don’t want to talk about,” said Lewis in an interview, “that they felt the need to respond to it after only three weeks of campaigning from one candidate in a party with only seven seats.”

Despite what the Globe editorial board says, Lewis believes this policy in particular has widespread support. “Working people are pissed off and exhausted by getting ripped off at the grocery store, and these populist-left economic policies for public options are popular across the political spectrum,” he said.

The Lewis platform also calls for a series of regional public telecom companies modelled after the success of SaskTel; postal banking, which is a reality in France, Germany, Italy and the UK; and a public non-profit pharmaceutical manufacturer, which Canada used to have with Connaught Labs before it was privatized by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government. Like McPherson, Lewis wants to establish a national public housing builder, but his would build a million (rather than 1.2 million) non-market housing units within five years (rather than 10).

Lewis cautions that when politicians and media refer to working-class voters, they’re often referring to one segment of the working class, which he describes as “white skilled-trades guys in hard hats.” These are the workers with whom Poilievre has taken hundreds of photo ops as part of his concerted effort to attract them. “That’s a really important part of the working class,” said Lewis, “but they’re far from the whole story.”

A much larger cross-section of Canada’s working class toil in the service and care sectors. Many of these workers, which include everyone from Tim Hortons employees to long-term-care nursing aides, live in the suburbs, where Lewis acknowledges the NDP has “huge inroads to make,” and are first-generation immigrants. “Those are jobs dominated by women, with a huge proportion of racialized women, and they are underpaid and undervalued, and, in my view, some of the most essential workers in our economy,” said Lewis.

In addition to being “work that builds and maintains the connective tissue of society,” Lewis emphasizes that these sectors also have “very light footprints environmentally.”

On November 27, about a dozen Edmontonian supporters of Lewis gathered in the basement of the Whyte Avenue Boston Pizza to watch the NDP leadership debate on TV. One of them was Stephen Buhler, a former oil and gas worker from rural Alberta who used to manufacture mechanical seals for pipelines and now works as a machinist at the University of Alberta.

Buhler said he finds Lewis’s campaign refreshing because he advocates “bold” policies, such as a public grocery option, “that actually get people excited,” instead of engaging in endless compromises to appeal to “some person that, frankly, doesn’t exist.”

“When I was working in oil and gas, what I really wanted was an option that was not oil and gas. I wanted to help build future solutions that actually protect the planet and ensure we’re not stuck with the oil and gas roller coaster over and over again,” he said.

Rather than engaging in “process after process after process” and “working around the edges” to determine which specific set of focus-group-tested policies the public wants to see, Buhler believes the job of a political leader is to offer bold solutions that will materially improve people’s lives. “I’m seeing Heather McPherson talk about how she wants to consult people. She’s not really giving anything that we can really chew on,” he said. “It’s just kind of vibes.”

The key to winning back working-class support is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities.

Rob Ashton on the picket line with striking Ontario nurses in late 2025. Ashton, as a longshoreman, is something of a rarity in federal politics—a party leadership candidate who comes directly from the shop floor, the rank and file of workers.

No leadership aspirant has put workers front and centre more than Rob Ashton, a dock worker who has served as president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for more than a decade. He speaks explicitly of “class war” and the need for the NDP to be “unapologetically loud” in fighting it. “All we see happening is our lives getting worse, the working class,” he told The Tyee. “We’re all getting screwed, and we’re all getting lied to, election after election after election. I’ve had enough of it. This is a time where workers—Canadians—need a true voice in Ottawa.”

Ashton’s “Worker Power Plan” pledges to require that workers have seats on corporate boards (although he doesn’t specify how many), to repeal section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, which the federal Liberals have repeatedly used to order striking workers back to work, and to replace the temporary foreign workers program “with a fair program, built from the ground up to protect all workers, their status and their labour.”

His advocacy for dockworkers’ interests has, however, placed him in the awkward position of being open to a repeal of the federal tanker ban on BC’s northern coast, which position earned him praise from Alberta’s UCP government.

Tanille Johnston, the federal NDP’s first Indigenous woman leadership aspirant, touted her working-class upbringing at her October 9 campaign launch, noting that her father was a miner and her mother was a small-business owner. “They taught me what perseverance looked like—that if you work hard and care for your family, act with integrity, you could lead a good life,” she said. “But today so many Canadians are finding that that promise is a lie.”

Johnston, a social worker in addition to being a city councillor, has proposed implementing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, which BC’s NDP government introduced in 2024 in collaboration with the BC Nurses’ Union, on a national scale. She also speaks of adopting national rent control, and fully incorporating pharmacare, dental care, vision care and mental health care into the public healthcare system. “We’re finished with half measures,” Johnston proclaimed at an October NDP leadership forum in Nanaimo.

Tony McQuail, an organic farmer from Huron County, Ontario, wants to collaborate with the Greens to ensure there’s only one candidate from either party running in each riding, and advocates “degrowth” economic policies in which the corporate pursuit of endless economic growth would be abandoned in favour of democratic decision-making about resource allocation.

McPherson says the NDP needs to be “unapologetically interested in winning”—not aiming to be “the conscience of Parliament.”

The NDP convention in Winnipeg falls roughly on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 federal party convention in Edmonton, where members voted to turf leader Tom Mulcair, who sharply departed from the NDP’s social democratic roots with an ill-fated pledge of balanced budgets. But it was also where Lewis set off a firestorm by proposing a policy resolution on the Leap Manifesto, a controversy with reverberations in today’s leadership race.

The 1,300-word blueprint for a green economy, including expansion of the low-carbon care economy, was written by Lewis, best-selling author Naomi Klein (his wife) and journalist Martin Lukacs, who now serves as a policy adviser to the Lewis leadership campaign, alongside a group of environmentalist, labour and Indigenous leaders.

The most contentious detail in the manifesto was its call for an end to “new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future,” a thinly veiled reference to pipelines, which Alberta’s NDP government was pursuing vigorously at the time the manifesto reached the floor of the federal NDP convention.

Then-premier Rachel Notley called the document “naive,” “ill-considered” and “very tone-deaf.” Environment minister Shannon Phillips, whom Lewis had endorsed during the 2012 provincial election, gave a closed-door speech to the federal caucus, disparaging those who suggest “we should shut down, in the short or even medium term, the industry that powers this province and this country.” This sentiment was echoed by Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who called the Leap Manifesto a “radical anti-Alberta resolution,” and Alberta PC leader Ric McIver, who suggested it reflected “radical socialist ideology.”

For McPherson, who wasn’t yet an MP at the time but was an active party member, the Leap was a “ridiculous political policy” and “vanity project.” “My opposition to it certainly wasn’t opposition to the messages within it,” she said in our interview. “It was opposition to how it was brought forward and how it undermined the work of our membership.”

But elements of the party membership were on board for the manifesto. In the months between the Leap’s release during the 2015 federal election campaign and the NDP’s 2016 convention, the Canadian Press reported that more than 20 NDP riding associations had endorsed it.

Lewis worked on the Leap resolution with former MPs Meghan Leslie, Craig Scott and Libby Davies, as well his aunt, former Ontario NDP president Janet Solberg. The former MPs kept Mulcair in the loop about the resolution every step of the way, who relayed it to the Alberta NDP leadership, said Lewis.

Because the resolution was so low on the list of resolutions for the Edmonton convention, Lewis had to make his case before a prioritization panel about why it should be debated at all. “The Alberta NDP didn’t send anyone to speak against that,” he recalled, “because they already knew that the resolution was coming, and they’d already agreed that it should have a chance to be voted on by the delegates.”

The motion ultimately adopted by the party membership by a wide margin called for elements of the manifesto to “be debated and modified on their own merits and according to the needs of various communities and all parts of Canada.”

NDP leadership contenders (left to right) Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson and Tony McQuail

Jen Hassum, the executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a think tank named after late federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent and which advocates for social democracy, argues there’s been a “class detanglement” in recent decades, in which parties that have historically appealed to blue-collar voters, such as the NDP in Canada, the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, increasingly draw their support from a higher-income, university-educated professional class.

Hassum attributes this phenomenon to the rise of neoliberalism, with its promise to workers that “deregulating and selling off government assets is going to lead to greater competition, cheaper costs and therefore perhaps a better standard of living.”

But “that didn’t materialize at all,” she told me. “In fact, what happened is the rise of private equity squeezed people for their time, their energy and their money, to the point where working-class people have very limited time and resources, and even very little trust, to be able to participate in politics.”

In New York City, Mamdani was able to partially reverse this trend, with exit polls showing him winning among voters who made between $30,000 and $200,000 a year, tied with former governor Andrew Cuomo among those who make between $200,000 and $300,000, and losing among both those who make less than $30,000 and those who make over $300,000.

The reason he did so wasn’t only due to his affordability-oriented policies or effective communication. “Good policy in a vacuum is just good policy,” said Hassum. What made the difference was his ground game. Mamdani’s network of thousands of canvassers, many of whom cut their teeth with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, literally met people where they were at to pitch their candidate to the masses while traditional media dismissed him as a far-left extremist.

The relationship between policy, communication and organizing is “symbiotic,” said Hassum. “The secret to organizing is that that’s actually how a campaign ought to learn about the policies that move people, and even the words to use to tell the story and to tell the bigger narrative.”

There’s a lesson here for the NDP as it rebuilds. “Something that I really hope to see from the NDP is a resurgence in having volunteers—regular, typical, ordinary people—do the work of reaching out within their communities and do that base organizing,” Hassum said. The NDP has the priorities and interests of most Canadians at heart, she argued. “Any seat in this country can be flipped, because our interests are aligned.”

Speaking on stage at the IBEW union hall last November with Local 424 assistant business manager Scott Crichton, McPherson said the NDP’s failure to resonate with working-class voters was especially tragic because “we’d somehow lost touch with people that we were supposed to be representing,” leading to a two-party duopoly outside of Quebec led by people who are entirely uninterested in labour issues. “Mark Carney does not give a damn about working-class Canadians, and Pierre Poilievre—he doesn’t even know what they are,” said McPherson. “This guy has literally never done anything except work in the House of Commons, basically just getting into fights.”

Crichton told me that the “key” to winning back the working class is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities, and to clearly state these in the party platform, as opposed to offering “rhetoric and jargon.”

For McPherson, the NDP needs to be a party that is “unapologetically interested in winning.” “I have no time for folks who think we should be the conscience of Parliament,” she added. “That’s not what I want to do. I want to elect more New Democrats, and I want us to be able to win.” She looks to the provincial NDP governments of Wab Kinew in Manitoba and David Eby in BC as models to emulate. “We’ve seen how when provincial parties across the country are able to win, they can fix things for Canadians and make life better for Canadians,” said McPherson, who’s been endorsed by former Alberta premier Notley and environment minister Phillips.

But before the federal NDP can win, McPherson said, there’s a need to “rebuild our party in a way that respects the membership.” In recent years, she said, the party “has treated our members, frankly, like some problem to be solved, not like the base of our movement.” This means working with local riding associations—and not only in ridings deemed winnable, but across the country, because those are the people who can provide insight into how to win on the ground.

McPherson credits the Edmonton Strathcona NDP riding association with flipping the long-time conservative seat to the NDP for the first time in 2008. In 2025, McPherson’s 47 per cent support was the highest share of the vote that any NDP candidate won. “We did the work, we knocked on the doors, and we talked to folks about the things that mattered to them,” she said. “And now it’s the strongest seat for the NDP in this country.”

Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based journalist interested in politics, the media and corporate power. He’s the author of Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024).

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I feel the headache coming on, and I haven’t even mentioned “notwithstanding” yet. To legislate in this way, denying or suspending some aspect of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is called “invoking the notwithstanding clause.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself. The “withstanding” part seems simple; just a modified way of saying “standing with.” We get that, right I stand with you on the matter of children not being allowed to throw stones at one another on the playground. I find “notwithstanding” much more difficult to get my ahead around. If it’s easy-peasy for you, well, carry on. No sense wasting your time.

In its more normal use, notwithstanding isn’t hard to fathom. E.g., “Notwithstanding the rainstorm, the teams continued to play baseball.” Trust me, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause is not so simple. It’s more like: “We stand with you on the safeguarding of our sacred rights and freedoms—until we don’t.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself.

As I searched for a helpful definition of the political use of the word notwithstanding, I was delighted to find a reference to Wayne’s World. Some of you won’t get this reference, so pardon me as I explain. In the 1990s, comedians Dana Carvey and Mike Myers came up with a sketch for the comedy show Saturday Night Live. Dana played Garth, and Mike played Wayne, two teenage stoners who create a TV show called Wayne’s World that they broadcast from Wayne’s parents’ basement. It was a huge hit and went on for years, became a movie etc. If it’s something new to you, use Wayne’s World as a search term on the internet, and you’ll be watching a sketch in about a minute. One of Garth and Wayne’s signature moves was to say something that sounded out of character for them; i.e., serious or respectful. Then they’d pause and both would say, “Not!”

And that’s exactly how Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause part of section 33 works: “We agree to abide by the rights and protections of Canadian citizens as set out in the Charter—Not!”

When a word is troubling me, I look up its origins. The etymology of “notwithstanding” is an eye-opener. It doesn’t come from the modern world, as I thought for sure it would. I was looking for a definition like “a bureaucratic term invented to fuzzy up a simple concept.” But it’s actually a very old word (Olde and Middle English): widstandan. The ancient meaning was “to stand against or resist.”

A lovely thing in one of the etymologies I consulted was that the “wid” part of “widstandan” contains a very old connotation of the word “with”: that is, “with” as negative! Who knew So, when you say to someone “I’m with you on that,” and they stomp off, you might just be dealing with a historical etymologist.

So, in other words, the folks who invented the notwithstanding clause really did mean that it should convey the idea that we’d stand with one another on these grave matters of our rights and freedoms as Canadians—until such time as someone might wish to use the negative connotation of “with” and not be with you at all.

In the present instance of Alberta’s using the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—or, at least the first time Alberta used it, as this government has since invoked the clause three more times—the UCP government is saying (and this is not a direct quote):

“We do acknowledge that Alberta teachers have a Charter right to organize, which includes the right to form and join unions (under freedom of association). But we thought the teacher strike had gone on rather too long, so we used s. 33 of the Charter to force teachers back to work.” The notwithstanding clause had never been used in Canada to end a strike before.

When some new use of the notwithstanding clause is found, it generally goes to the courts for further argument and analysis. So someday, somewhere far down the road, we can probably expect a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that (no matter what the decision is) will be of little use to the Alberta teachers who went on strike last fall and were ordered back to work. But it might help teachers’ unions and other unions in the future.

Will Garth and Wayne of Wayne’s World be invoked in the eventual Supreme Court decision Likely—not.

Fred Stenson has published 20 books. A new novel, Carpenter Creek, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in fall 2026.

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I was here on the lookout not for the last vestiges of a summer harvest, but for a guy wrapped in the Canada flag—literally, according to vendors. He was here just minutes ago, they told me. He was one of an army of volunteers across Alberta carrying clipboards and inviting people to sign a petition asking the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”

A simple enough question, you’d think. But in Alberta these days nothing is simple.

My flag-wearing volunteer was here, no doubt about it. He left behind evidence in the form of vendors who not only supported his petition but were happy to explain why. “I signed it,” said Julie Morrison, who runs the “Weird Neighbour” kiosk, selling pins, fridge magnets and custom mugs. She told me she believes in having a strong federal government. And she’d welcome the petition question becoming a referendum question in Alberta. “I like how it blocks them [the separatists] from ever doing this again,” she said. “We don’t need any more strife in our province. We don’t want to see every year there’s a new group, a new radical group that wants to separate, right?”

The petition was at the heart of the “Forever Canadian” initiative. The campaign was created by Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister who rose to become deputy premier. Now Lukaszuk is architect of this anti-separatist initiative, which aims to counter a pro-separatist movement being egged on by premier Danielle Smith.

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In a September Globe and Mail op-ed, Lukaszuk spelled out his motivation. Most Albertans, he wrote, love being Canadian. When anger at the federation does flare up, “the stronger will of Albertans and their pride in Canada douses the flames of separation, and we’re able to get back to the business of building a strong future for Alberta within Canada.” But recent more strident talk of separation is doing harm, he added. “[It] damages Alberta’s reputation, creates uncertainty, drives away talent and investment and divides communities.”

In an interview during the height of his campaign, Lukaszuk bristled at the suggestion the Forever Canadian initiative is partisan or the beginning of a political movement. “No one could ever say this is an NDP thing or a Liberal thing or a Conservative thing, because they’re all, in virtually equal numbers, engaged in this campaign and supporting it,” he said. “The overarching motivation is just pure love of this country.”

Lukaszuk said the campaign was keeping him “extremely, extremely busy” and that he was pleasantly overwhelmed by the response. He pointed to 5,000 volunteers who organized hundreds of petition-signing venues across the province, whether permanent ones inside local businesses or pop-up tables outside sports events, concerts, book fairs or anywhere else Albertans congregate for a few hours, such as the Smoky Lake Pumpkin Fair and the Andrew Garlic Festival. Lukaszuk also took a multi-week turn driving the group’s maple-leaf-adorned “Unity Bus” across Alberta to collect signatures. He said his daughter spotted a car sporting a “Forever Canadian” bumper sticker. Other volunteers noticed lawn signs. Amazing, he said—because his group didn’t produce any merchandise.

When it came to signing the petition, you had to be at least 18 years old, a Canadian citizen and a resident of Alberta with a physical address. And you had to sign in person.

Lukaszuk told his volunteers they weren’t conducting a sales pitch. They weren’t to entice people to sign, or engage in arguments, or even make the case for Albertans to reject separation. They were simply to invite people to sign. If someone said no, leave it at that.

Lukaszuk told me people had been signing up in droves. Forever Canadian’s official goal was to get at least 300,000 names, verified by the rules set by Elections Alberta, to move the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?” to the legislature for approval as an official referendum question in 2026. Privately, however, Lukaszuk told me he wanted to get many, many more signatures than that, because clearing the official bar so easily would itself send a message to the Smith government and all Albertans.

When I ask people why they’re signing, pretty much everyone gives me a quizzical look. The answer is so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen.”

When I asked people at various pop-up events why they were signing, pretty much everyone gave me a quizzical look, as if I’d asked a stupid question. The answer was so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen,” said Janet Johnstone, as she stopped by the booth at a dog park in south Edmonton. “I was born in Edmonton. I’ve lived here all my life. I love Alberta. But I’m Canadian.”

For Albert Kwong, who immigrated from China in 1978 and has lived in Alberta ever since (save five years in Ontario and 18 months in Vancouver), a united Canada makes sense economically and practically. “In a big Canada we support each other,” he said. “I think that’s the best way to do it, right?” And we can visit each other, too. “I just came back from the east coast,” he told me. “I can go to Toronto, go to the west, to Quebec. I don’t worry about applying for a visa. When I go to China, I need a visa.”

Lukaszuk said he heard hundreds of emotional stories, including from a woman in her 90s from Vegreville who asked a campaign volunteer to come to her home so she could sign the petition to honour her late husband who fought for Canada in the Second World War. Or the family that drove from Fort McMurray to Edmonton to sign the petition rather than wait for a pop-up event in town. (The campaign eventually got to Fort McMurray anyway, in late summer, with a petition signing in front of Mitchell’s Café.)

Lukaszuk said some Albertans signed with a mixture of love and a bit of anger: “A lot of them, refugees and immigrants as well, are mad. They’re angry. They say, ‘You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.’ They just think it’s pathetic that we got ourselves into a situation where we actually have to declare our love for Canada, because it should be so obvious.”

Putting aside the monumental legal, economic and cultural barriers to separation, including outspoken opposition from First Nations, most Albertans are for staying in Canada. A Leger survey in May 2025 showed that 67 per cent of Albertans oppose separation. A CBC-commissioned poll, also in May, indicated that even though support for separation had grown from 12 per cent in 2020 to 17 per cent in 2025, 67 per cent of respondents disagree that Alberta would be better off if we separate from Canada.

But it wasn’t just everyday Albertans signing the petition. Lukaszuk’s initiative resurrected a number of other “old” Progressive Conservatives, once powerful and well-known local politicians who had disappeared into the annals of time, along with their party, but were now popping up like prairie dogs at sunrise.

Former premier Ed Stelmach, now retired and living on a homestead founded by his grandparents in northeastern Alberta in 1898, jumped back into the public arena with a social media post urging Albertans to sign Lukaszuk’s petition. “I support a strong Alberta within a strong Canada,” he wrote. In August Stelmach went on Ryan Jespersen’s Real Talk podcast. “I’m worried that if we rush into something like separation, do we end up with Brexit?” he asked, referring to the disastrous British vote to leave the European Union.

Two former conservative Alberta MPs, Ian McClelland and Brent Rathgeber, also endorsed Lukaszuk’s initiative, with Rathgeber going one step further to help manage the campaign.

They were joined by Richard Starke, a former PC MLA from Lloydminster, who, following the UCP–Wildrose merger in 2017, sat as the lone Progressive Conservative in the assembly. “I’m no separatist, I can tell you that right now,” Starke told me. “Separation from Canada would be an absolute unmitigated disaster for Lloydminster. We’d have a national border going down the middle of our city. It would be a train wreck.” He argued that by giving a sympathetic ear to a separatist sentiment, premier Smith is simply trying to score points with her base. “If an Alberta politician wants to gain some traction, we bad-mouth Ottawa, right That’s especially true when there’s a Liberal government in power.”

Danielle Smith’s critics from NDP and liberal points on the political spectrum also expressed support for Forever Canadian. Lukaszuk insists his initiative has nothing to do with partisan politics. But it’s impossible to entirely disentangle the issue of separation from politics. Premier Smith has introduced a series of policy changes to achieve her goal of creating a “sovereign Alberta” within a united Canada, a statement her critics call oxymoronic. Her tactic is a significant and, for many Albertans, troubling break from Alberta’s political past, where for decades premiers chronically railed against Liberal federal governments but stopped well short of encouraging separatists.

As premier 20 years ago, Ralph Klein suggested that on any given day 15 per cent of Albertans supported separation, a number he said he could manage. But in 2003 Klein had to deal with loud separatists at a PC annual general meeting. He ended up promising to push Ottawa for more provincial powers. But Klein clearly rejected splitting from Canada. “I cannot honestly see myself saying, ‘Here is a separation question, and dammit, unless you listen to us and unless we get our own way, unless you do this, unless you do that, we’re going to separate,’” Klein told reporters. “I don’t first of all see myself doing that, and I don’t know how the feds would buy it.”

A lot of petition signers are mad. They say, “You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.”

Twenty-some years later, premier Smith is hoping the federal government will buy it, or at least take separatist sentiment seriously enough to give in to her government’s demands for more pipelines to help Alberta companies get more oil and gas to markets. To do that she’s trying to create a base beyond diehard separatists.

A September 25, 2025, Substack by U of A Ph.D. student and researcher Sam Goertz—“Is Separatism Mainstream in Alberta?”—looked at the complexity of Albertans’ feelings about Confederation. His work was based on extensive interviews done by the Common Ground initiative, which aims to find ways for progressives and conservatives to talk to each other, because “[c]itizens appear to have lost the shared sense of purpose and values necessary to debate matters of the public good respectfully, without alienating or disparaging their neighbours.” The project constructed an imaginary “typical” Albertan called Joe, who is not a separatist but is separatism-curious. “He wants Alberta to remain in Canada and make it work, but life has been getting harder lately, and maybe things would be better if Alberta went it alone,” Goertz wrote. “Or at least, Alberta needs to do something more drastic to get a better deal with Ottawa. [Joe] feels that Alberta has little power and that Albertans are neither well respected nor understood by the rest of the country.”

In late September I met a version of Joe at a pop-up event at an Edmonton dog park. He was biking home from work and stopped to chat with a couple of the Forever Canadian volunteers he recognized as neighbours. But he wasn’t prepared to sign the petition.

“I’m in the oil and gas sector,” he told me. “And I want to be a part of Canada. But I do see why people have frustrations, right?” He said he thinks his wife signed the petition a few weeks before. “I’m not against signing,” he added. “But I have some concerns, and I don’t know if people’s voices are being heard.”

When I asked for his name, he hesitated and said to simply call him “Brad,” because politics has become too divisive and he didn’t want to be a target. “People are very confrontational right now, and if there’s a reason to be frustrated with you for not being 100 per cent one way or the other, because you have some unanswered questions, I think people, unfortunately, want to spit venom.”

Some pro-Canada anti-separatists—even as they were eager to sign the petition—told me they were wary of Lukaszuk’s motivation. His criticisms of the premier go way back, to when he was a PC minister and she was leader of the Wildrose.

Lukaszuk has heard these and similar concerns: “Some politicians are reticent to get involved, because there’s a fear I may turn this into a political party and maybe unseat them or take over their leadership,” he said. “But that’s irrational for two reasons. One, because that’s not what I’m doing. That’s not what my plan is, period.”

The other reason, he said, is that the politicians, past and present, supporting his stay-in-Canada effort represent a wide range of views that would have trouble coming together. Political strategist Stephen Carter, who worked on Naheed Nenshi’s campaign for mayor of Calgary, agreed. “People can mark their ballot against separation in a referendum and then still choose Danielle Smith [in a general election],” he told me.

Lukaszuk said his ultimate goal is to not have a referendum at all. “I’m the last one who wants a referendum on Alberta separating or staying in Canada,” he said. “We don’t need to have a referendum.” Rather, he wants the legislature to adopt a formal policy rejecting separation. But he said it can’t end there. “Those who are either hesitant to sign or who are actually outright pro-separation… I may disagree with them, but they definitely feel that way, and we need to address that.”

One benefit of the Forever Canadian campaign, he said, is that it has helped to bring Albertans’ grievances into clearer focus. “Certain demographics are starting to reveal the epicentre of this anger,” said Lukaszuk. “There’s work to be done. When this campaign is all completed, we’re not going to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, separatism isn’t real, it’s not a threat.’ Because if we don’t start addressing some of these issues, fixing them and educating people on how things really work in Canada, this separatist movement will grow.”

The petition was the largest in Canada’s history, he said, adding the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

On October 28, 2025, Lukaszuk announced the campaign had “smashed” its goal. Standing in front of stacks of 61 boxes of petitions containing 456,388 signatures, he told reporters Albertans had sent a clear message: “Alberta is and always will be Forever Canadian.” The petition was the largest in our country’s history, he said. But he added that the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

Elections Alberta said it would verify the signatures and announce its results no later than January 6, 2026.

At farmers markets and dog parks and garlic festivals and beyond, across the entire province, the Albertans who signed Lukaszuk’s pro-Canada petition did so for reasons both unique to their own lives but also common to the group. One university student in downtown Edmonton told me he wants to keep together a country that so many of his forebears built: “Canada is a group of people made up of many other groups of people,” he said. “It’s not what we stand for as Canadians to be separating out into smaller chunks. We’re a country of immigrants and we’re a country of people who came together. Why would we want to disassemble something that we worked so hard to put together?”

Graham Thomson has covered Alberta politics for decades and writes a bi-monthly column for Alberta Views.

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Ordinary Albertans would be forgiven for not knowing what to believe.

Further fuzzying matters was Pollara’s declaration that its figure on separation was “the highest recorded by the company” since 2021. But even this surging support for Alberta separation was dwarfed by the Leger poll. And then Abacus flatly declared “Support for separation is low.” Its report concluded: “There is not a widespread appetite among the public for such a significant constitutional rupture.”

Polling—also called surveying—takes many different forms, and in Alberta this year we’ll see poll numbers touted by separatists, and other numbers cited by their federalist opponents. With so much on the line, how useful is polling for providing accurate insights into what people want?

Public opinion polling started in Canada during the 1940s. The first national poll was conducted by the Liberal Party in 1942 to try to determine the likely outcome of a plebiscite on conscription. The first election poll was done by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion in 1945. The first political poll—used to help craft a party’s electoral strategy—was by the Quebec Liberals in 1959. Yet only since the 1980s have national polls been conducted regularly. Polling of public opinion at the provincial level is now routine as well.

Sometimes polling itself becomes the story. For example, during Alberta’s 2012 election, most pollsters projected a win by the Wildrose, led by Danielle Smith. As it turned out, the Progressive Conservatives under Alison Redford were the victors by a comfortable margin. “Clearly something’s wrong,” pollster Bruce Cameron told the CBC afterward. “I’m concerned about the impact on the credibility of the profession.”

Similarly, the 2017 civic election in Calgary was marked by conflicting polls, one of which suggested incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi was losing badly. A post-election investigation by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) noted that “accurate public opinion polling can provide voters with information about the views of their fellow citizens [and] draw voters’ attention to particular candidates and issues.” It found that several polls by Mainstreet Research, commissioned by Postmedia, had been “seriously, methodologically flawed” and had “significantly affected the course of the campaign,” including by throwing Nenshi on the defensive and dooming the third-place candidate’s campaign.

The chief differences in polling techniques can be categorized according to the how (methodology) and the what (the content of the questions).

The “how” of polling constantly evolves. In his history of polling in Canada, Christopher Adams suggests polling had several precursors, including censuses, the first of which was conducted in 1666 by the intendant of New France. Another precursor is the market survey. In 1929, for example, the Canadian Business Research Bureau interviewed thousands of users of various products to learn what they “actually think and know about the goods.” Over time, market research acquired the sheen of academic rigour. W.W. Goforth, who taught economics at McGill, was hired by the ad agency Cockfield, Brown & Co. in 1928. In this early period, data-gathering included face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews and mail-in surveys.

The possibility of polling errors became apparent even in those early days. In 1919 the Winnipeg Free Press asked readers to complete a questionnaire about cars and accessories and mail it back. Questions included “How much have you spent for accessories [since the car purchase]?” Bertram Brooker, an ad executive, wrote in Marketing and Business Management in 1924 that surveys of this sort presented many problems, including an inability to control the sample size and to screen respondents. This survey, for example, failed to screen people who didn’t own or regularly use their car.

A major development in polling in the 21st century has been the decline in telephone surveys and the rise of the online variety. Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, for example, conducts all of its surveys and studies through the internet, citing a Pew Research study showing that response rates for phone interviews had dropped to only 6 per cent in 2018.

One pollster that remains attached to telephone surveying is Janet Brown. The company she uses, Trend Research, is based out of Edmonton. “The secret sauce is Albertans calling Albertans,” says Brown. She uses cell numbers and landlines, and says people are more inclined to stay on the line—or pick up in the first place—if they believe they’re talking to someone in Edmonton rather than in Montreal or outside Canada entirely. The company makes five attempts to reach a person before giving up.

The MRIA report on Calgary’s misleading polls in 2017 singled out Mainstreet for not calling enough cell phones, thus ignoring younger voters and creating an unrepresentative sample.

Frank Graves, founder and president of EKOS Research, however, isn’t as sold on telephone polling. “There is a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the mode of contact,” he says. “Whether or not you call someone, email them, do an intercept survey in the street or in their home—they all have different strengths and weaknesses.”

What Brown, MRIA and Graves would agree on, however, is that good polling requires a representative sample. This means, as the Pew Research Centre puts it, that any sample is “assumed to be representative of the larger population on any question we might be interested in.” Pollsters use various techniques to improve the reliability of a sample. One is weighting, or adjusting the relative contribution of respondents. People who participate in polls don’t necessarily reflect the general population. For example, they’re more likely to have a postsecondary degree. The pollster’s answer to this problem is to “weight down” the responses of postsecondary graduates in their final results.

Brown argues that polling in Alberta tends to underestimate the conservative vote and overestimate the progressive one. “Pollsters make the same mistakes over and over again,” she told the CBC in November 2020. It’s a message she reiterated to Alberta Views. Her theory is that progressive Albertans are more likely to participate in polls and that it takes strenuous attempts to reach more-conservative voters—by phone—to correct for this bias. “I sometimes joke that progressive people will tell you their opinions all day long,” she says. “Conservatives are a little bit more cautious, a little bit more reticent, and don’t want to be probed as much.”

Members of the public are sometimes invited to participate in opinion surveying. Once recruited, they’re part of what’s called a “panel”—a cohort asked to respond to survey questions. The most reliable panels are selected through probability-based sampling; the very best kind—online or offline—are those in which respondents are chosen at random. To do that perfectly would require a comprehensive list of the entire population or at least the target population. But such lists aren’t usually available, so pollsters use a variety of probability-based techniques to try to ensure that their samples (their panels) are constituted in such a way as to minimize sampling error.

It is important to distinguish between probability-based panels and opt-in samples. “Opt-in” means the respondents weren’t chosen at random; rather, they were invited to participate. The Pew Research Centre has concluded that opt-in sampling is only half as accurate as probability-based panels. However, opt-in sampling can be conducted in such a way as to improve its reliability. Canada’s Angus Reid Forum is an online panel composed of people selected through online ads on numerous, diverse websites. The company claims its panels “reflect the general population by continually verifying and recruiting so that the socio-demographic characteristics of each sampling region match actual sub-populations according to both the census and electoral data.”

Polling is, of course, ultimately about the answers to the questions—the what. Questions can be asked in numerous ways, including as neutrally as possible. Or questions can be selective, or leading, or presented in a specific order if a certain result is desired. Sometimes this takes the form of what is called “push polling.”

This is what the provincial government’s Alberta Next Panel has been accused of. In early 2025 Albertans were invited by the government to give their opinions, ostensibly to help the government choose its policies. A St. Albert Gazette editorial in August 2025 argued the surveying conducted through the Alberta Next website was more accurately described as push polling. “You can frame the questions in such a way that every answer is a version of your view, or [the questions] simply don’t include any option to oppose that view,” wrote Gazette staff.

The Alberta Next website, for example, offered ideas on “how to strengthen our sovereignty,” including ending equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, forming a provincial police force, and withholding social services from immigrants. University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young said, “The subject matter of the Alberta Next questions and videos are very much informed by the groups that we might call the UCP base.” The survey itself, which closed October 10, purported merely to consult Albertans.

On the topic of immigration, however, respondents (whether online or at the town halls) were required to first watch a short video, then were asked “Should Alberta take more control of the immigration system to counter Ottawa’s open-borders policies?” They were then presented with the following statement: “Ottawa approved 1.2 million people under the permanent and temporary immigrant streams in 2024. This is four times more than was approved in 2014 under prime minister Stephen Harper.”

Finally, respondents were asked to choose from three options:

• Far too much—immigration should be brought down [to] under 2014 levels;
• Definitely too high, and immigration needs to be brought down to 2014 levels again;
• Acceptable—I have no issue with immigration levels being this high.

Given this context, respondents’ answers were a foregone conclusion.

As of late November, none of the Alberta Next survey results had been released to the public. But premier Smith says she’ll use those results to assess which proposals will move to a referendum and which her government will legislate directly.

A investigation in 2017 found several polls in Calgary had been “seriously, methodologically flawed.”

Polling on support for Alberta political parties is conducted regularly. For those that pay for it, Janet Brown and journalist Paul McLoughlin release the monthly “Wild Ride” update, showing, e.g., how the UCP and NDP are faring. Accompanying charts track party support over time.

Polling such as this is sometimes criticized for its oversized impact on public discourse. For example, a poll by Brown in the late stage of the 2023 campaign, which contradicted other polls by showing the UCP ahead in Calgary, was leaked to the press. As political commentator David Climenhaga wrote, “This [survey] does change the narrative of the last two weeks of the election campaign—and that’s why it was leaked.”

Episodes like this colour the public perception of polling. “If you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavorable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put,” wrote E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann for the Brookings Institution. The authors add that “public opinion is an illusive commodity.” Not all polls are created equal. Some are well constructed and designed to be credible; some are not. Some polls do seem to push people to give the answer that those who commissioned the polls want.

This is arguably what Brown herself did when she found support for a potential provincial pension plan. The poll, commissioned by the Smith government and conducted in April and May of 2025, asked Albertans how they would vote in a referendum on a variety of proposals, including “Replacing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) with an Alberta Pension Plan (APP) that guaranteed all Alberta seniors the same or better benefits than the Canada Pension Plan.” Fifty-five per cent of respondents said they’d vote for the APP, while 45 per cent said they’d vote against it. But as CBC journalist Jason Markusoff noted, the question added a new nuance to the previous binary of CPP vs. APP. It posited a “guarantee of no financial risk for pensioners,” he wrote, “an assurance that could depend largely on how much of the total CPP pie Alberta would get as its starting pot, a figure that remains in dispute.” Who wouldn’t prefer something with no downside?

Whether using leading questions or not, polling has an effect on its audience. “There are concerns that inaccurate voting intention polling has a negative impact on the conduct of elections due to its influence on voters, the media and political parties,” concluded the Select Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media, struck by the UK’s House of Lords. The committee was a response to three consecutive cases of polling getting it wrong during critical moments: the UK’s 2015 and 2017 general elections and the 2016 vote on leaving the European Union—the infamous Brexit referendum.

The committee noted a number of theories on how polling results impact voters. One of these is the “bandwagon effect,” in which people get on board with an idea because they see many other people doing the same. The obverse of this is the “underdog effect,” which can encourage people to “adopt a minority view out of sympathy.” Polling can also affect voter turnout. Academics showed the committee evidence “that turnout is higher in elections that are anticipated to be close.” Conversely, if a poll tells someone that their candidate is losing badly, they might not bother voting at all.

So what do we really know about support for Alberta separation In an interview with Alberta Views, Dennis Modry, the founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), which is leading the separatist charge, says his movement enjoys a “plurality” of support, meaning that more Albertans want to separate from Canada than remain undecided or want to stay in Canada. And he argues polling underestimates separatist support. “We still live in an era of cancel culture,” he says. “Oftentimes, people won’t respond to a question that they perceive as possibly controversial or that has any risk of cancelling them in any way.”

A further wrinkle is that not all polling companies are created the same. Cardinal Research, for example, released a poll in October 2025 suggesting that 11 per cent of decided voters in Alberta support the new provincial Republican Party. It was the first poll to show significant support for the separatist Republicans; CBC polls analyst Éric Grenier called it “a bit of a jaw-dropper.” But a Toronto Star story noted that Cameron Davies, leader of the Republican Party, had until recently been a part-owner of Cardinal Research. Until the Star story came out, media coverage omitted that potential bias. The Lethbridge Herald quoted Davies: “What [the poll] shows is our message is resonating with Albertans; we’re getting out there, we’re doing the work.”

The Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), which represents pollsters, cautions that the publication of political-poll results “carries with it the potential for great consequence,” including the risk of misleading voters or eroding public trust. The council asks that journalists, before publishing a poll’s results, consider how questions were phrased, sample sizes and margins of error. It also asks “Who’s the sponsor, and what’s their interest in the topic?” CRIC quotes a former US network TV director: “When assessing whether to publish the results of a poll, media need to apply the same degree of journalistic critical practices and skepticism that they would to any other source of information.”

One of Modry’s main adversaries, Thomas Lukaszuk, leader of the Forever Canadian campaign, believes support for Alberta separatism is much more modest. “I think it’s fair to say approximately 10 per cent of Albertans are 100 per cent determined to separate from Canada,” he says. Lukaszuk’s impression is based in part on months of collecting signatures from hundreds of thousands of “pro-remain” Albertans. Meanwhile, he believes separatists themselves are divided. “That 10 per cent is further subdivided between those who’d like to join the US [and] those who somehow envision forming a new country.”

Polling conducted by Janet Brown, commissioned by CBC, has offered a more nuanced picture. In her survey of 1,200 random Albertans, conducted in May 2025, 22 per cent of respondents identified as “committed separatists.” Her survey suggests that a further 14 per cent identify as “soft separatists”—frustrated, perhaps, but not especially keen to leave Canada. They tend to approve of premier Smith’s attempt to forge a new relationship with Ottawa.

A deeper dive into Brown’s polling data offers further insights. John Santos, Brown’s data scientist, explained: “Of those who are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident in their ability to save for retirement, 36 per cent would vote for separation; conversely, only 22 per cent of those who are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in their ability to save for retirement would vote for separation. This is very much an issue of financial security.”

This survey and others suggest the drivers of separatism in Alberta aren’t cultural or linguistic as in Quebec. They’re economic. The U of C’s Lisa Young argues separatists believe “Canada has stood in the way of Alberta’s prosperity because of [federal] environmental regulations.” Lukaszuk observed something similar: “We found that cities, towns and other areas that are very much reliant on the oil and gas servicing industry tend to be more pro-separatist.”

Frank Graves of EKOS suggests that surveys on Alberta separatism are being swayed by misinformation. He shared with Alberta Views preliminary results of polling he conducted on behalf of the labour movement. “The level of misinformation in Alberta is the highest in the country,” he says. In polling on the role of false information in Alberta politics, EKOS asked a number of screening questions. Respondents were asked whether certain statements were true or false. For example: “Deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines are being intentionally hidden by the government.” This process helped EKOS identify respondents that have been swayed by falsehoods. Graves believes that susceptibility to misinformation is the most “powerful predictor” of support for separating.

Not all polls are created equal. Some seem to push people to answer questions a certain way.

So, what ultimately explains the difference between Pollara’s 24 per cent, Leger’s 41 per cent and Abacus’s 18 per cent support for Alberta separatism Perhaps subtle changes in the wording:

“If a referendum were held on your province’s sovereignty, would you vote FOR or AGAINST?” (Pollara)

“If a provincial referendum were held tomorrow on whether or not your province should separate from Canada to form its own country, how would you most likely vote?” (Leger)

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?” (Abacus)

Leger gave respondents the option of “strong support” or “somewhat support,” then combined these to show “support for separating.” Pollara’s choice was starker: “Stay or separate?” And Abacus seemed to be asking for a prediction. The questioners had different sample sizes, weighting strategies and survey methods. One survey prompted respondents with a question about Liberal leader Mark Carney; another prefaced its survey by asking how closely respondents have been following the news. Respondents may have been influenced by the looming federal election, or by financial insecurity, or by misinformation, or even by other surveys they’d seen.

For his part, Graves didn’t want to speculate on the differences. “If I were doing this,” he says, “I’d do random control assignment testing. A random portion is assigned to version A of the question, and the other is assigned to version B.” This would be the only way to determine whether or not the way the question was asked had a bearing on the result.

Many more such surveys will be released this year. The stakes are high—Albertans could soon face a separation referendum. And the ultimate poll will come at the ballot box.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Laurence Miall lives in Edmonton. He has written for Jacobin, the CBC and Alberta Views, and is a former editor of carte blanche.

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