Alberta’s separatist movement is not what it appears to be. Behind the cowboy hats and grievance speeches about equalization payments lies something far more serious: a documented foreign influence operation, backed by the Trump administration, designed to use Alberta’s legitimate frustrations as a crowbar to split Canada apart and hand its oil, water and critical minerals to the US. This is not speculation. The meetings happened. The documents exist. The pattern is visible to anyone willing to look directly.
When key Trump adviser Steve Bannon compares Canada to Ukraine, he is not speaking in metaphors. He means it literally. The man who helped design the intellectual scaffolding of the MAGA movement has openly argued that Canada, like Ukraine, is a resource-rich neighbour in America’s strategic backyard that must be brought to heel. Whether through economic coercion, political destabilization or outright annexation, the message from MAGA’s most ideologically committed operatives is consistent: Canada’s independence is an inconvenience to American power.
That argument is no longer just rhetoric.… A fringe separatist movement [met] with Trump administration officials in Washington and received tacit support from the province’s premier. The question journalists and security experts are asking is not whether this is happening. It clearly is. The question is whether it represents a serious strategy to fracture Canada from within.
There is compelling evidence that it does. Journalist John Last, writing in The New Republic, offers the sharpest picture yet of what he calls a “fifth column” strategy. He refers to the Spanish Civil War general Emilio Mola, who boasted that his four columns of soldiers would be met inside the city by a fifth column of sympathizers. Last argues that if Trump were ever to move against Canada, he would find that fifth column already waiting in Alberta.
Last is not prone to hyperbole. He is a journalist based in Ottawa who closely covers Canadian politics. His reporting documents a web of connections between the Trump administration and the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), a separatist organization whose leaders, in Last’s words, are “steeped in the conspiracy-addled world of the extremely online right.”
The ideological engine behind all of this is Bannon. Last notes that Bannon “has explicitly compared Canada to Ukraine” to frame what needs to happen next. In Bannon’s worldview, Ukraine was a liberal, Western-aligned country sitting on strategic resources at Russia’s doorstep. He watched Putin use separatist agitation in the Donbas to lay the groundwork for a larger annexation. Canada, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves and an Arctic frontier of enormous strategic value, fits the same template.
In January 2026 Bannon made his argument explicit, telling his audience on the Real America’s Voice network that Canada’s Arctic north, once a natural barrier, had become the country’s “soft underbelly.” He said Canada “could be the next Ukraine,” populated by “people who are hostile to the United States.” These are not the words of a commentator speculating about geopolitics. They are the words of a strategist identifying a target.…
Behind the cowboy hats and grievance about equalization lies a foreign influence operation backed by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration has been careful to maintain plausible deniability, with officials telling NBC News that no senior staff were present at the meetings [with the APP] and that no commitments were made. But the engagement itself is extraordinary. NBC News reported that State Department officials met at least three times with APP leaders to discuss topics including currency conversion and border security, as well as the practical logistics of a breakaway province integrating with the US.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered a more telling signal when he appeared on a podcast hosted by far-right commentator Jack Posobiec during the World Economic Forum in Davos. He described Alberta as “a natural partner for the US,” noted the province’s rich resources and independent spirit, and then mused: “Rumour [has it] that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not.” When Posobiec pressed him, Bessent said, “People are saying, people are talking. People want sovereignty. They want what the US has got.”
That is a senior American cabinet official, at one of the world’s most visible economic forums, publicly amplifying a separatist movement within a NATO ally. Other MAGA figures have been even less subtle. Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee has openly cheered Alberta’s independence movement, according to Axios.
National security analyst Brandon Weichert, a senior editor at The National Interest, appeared on Bannon’s show in November 2025 and argued that Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state is coded language referring specifically to Alberta, which Weichert called “the linchpin” of American annexation strategy. Writing in The Walrus, Patrick Lennox, a former RCMP intelligence officer, noted that Weichert’s prediction preceded the Trump administration’s move on Venezuela by six weeks, adding credibility to the broader strategic picture.
Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is the Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy (NSS) document. To quote it directly: the government will “reward and encourage… movements broadly aligned” with its strategy to dominate the western hemisphere and secure control over its natural resources.
Lennox explains what this means in practice. The NSS, he argues, “intends to interfere in the domestic politics of other countries and to do so in a way designed to empower MAGA-adjacent voices.” In Alberta, he notes, one of those voices is the APP…
Last draws the strategic parallel bluntly: “Lennox sees troubling parallels between America’s engagements with the APP and Russia’s tactics in Ukraine’s Donbas region, which laid the groundwork for a more forceful annexation.” The scenario he describes is straightforward. If a referendum yields a narrow “no” vote on independence, the APP and its American backers can claim the result was rigged, call for the “liberation” of an oppressed minority, and invite American intervention to protect Alberta’s strategic resources.
The US intends to interfere in other countries’ politics and empower “MAGA-adjacent voices” such as the Alberta Prosperity Project.
Premier Danielle Smith has carefully positioned herself as a federalist who merely supports Albertans’ right to self-determination. But her actions tell a different story. She was among the first Canadian officials to travel to Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s election, a trip Last describes as “kissing the ring.” She has consistently aligned her policy agenda with MAGA positions on climate, energy, gender and governance.
More significantly, she has repeatedly refused to denounce those who advocate breaking up the country. According to reporting by The Tyee, she privately told a separatist leader that she would become prime minister of an independent Alberta.…
Smith’s strategy may be more cynical than conspiratorial. Former premier Jason Kenney, no fan of separatism, told Last that much of the support base consists of “frustrated federalists” seeking concessions from Ottawa rather than genuine separatists. But as Last notes, if that faction is large enough, it might not matter what they actually want. The machinery of a referendum, once set in motion, does not require good faith to produce dangerous results.
What gives this operation its reach is a sophisticated social media campaign that, at least in part, appears artificially amplified. CBC News reported that MAGA-affiliated accounts were pushing narratives about Alberta as oppressed and exploited, often using AI-generated content. Lennox told CBC that the campaign includes AI-generated memes designed to make Alberta seem culturally Texan, as if the province were full of American-style individualists yearning for freedom.
The echoes of Russia’s 2014 disinformation campaign in eastern Ukraine are unmistakable. Russian propaganda before the Donbas separatist takeover emphasized the cultural distinctiveness of eastern Ukrainians and their supposed affinity for Russia. The current campaign in Alberta follows the same template: manufacture the impression of a population straining against a foreign-feeling federal government, normalize the idea of separation, and let political actors do the rest.
Maria Popova, a political scientist cited by CBC, warned that Alberta politicians playing with separatist fire risk the same dramatic miscalculation that Donbas politicians made in 2014. They thought they could use separatist agitation to extract concessions from Kyiv. Instead they got an armed takeover, coerced referenda and eventual annexation by Russia.…
No foreign influence operation functions in a vacuum. It requires a domestic information environment already tilted in the right direction. In Alberta that environment has been carefully, if not always consciously, constructed over the past decade through a mix of American-owned legacy media, partisan digital outlets and a social media ecosystem driven largely by bots and artificial amplification.
The foundational layer is Postmedia. Two-thirds of Canada’s largest newspaper chain is owned by Chatham Asset Management, an American hedge fund based in New Jersey. That fact means that the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen and National Post, papers millions of Canadians still rely on for local and national coverage, ultimately answer to foreign financial interests. Canada’s broadcasting regulations cap foreign ownership of television and radio stations at 20 per cent. Newspapers carry no such protection, which is how a suburban New York hedge fund came to own the dominant print voice of Alberta.
The ideological direction of that ownership is documented. Canadaland reported that Postmedia directed its publications to be more “reliably conservative.” Chatham Asset Management also holds majority ownership of American Media Inc., which owns the National Enquirer. David Pecker, who ran American Media and is known for his personal relationship with Donald Trump and his role in suppressing damaging stories about him, served on the Postmedia board before resigning in 2018 over his hush-money arrangements on behalf of, among others, the president of the US.
Whether Postmedia is a willing participant or an unwitting structural enabler of the separatist narrative is genuinely complicated. There is no evidence of a boardroom directive to promote Alberta independence. Instead, the ownership structure produces conservatively tilted coverage in the very province where the MAGA-aligned separatist movement most needs sympathetic framing, and the regulatory environment allows it to operate without the scrutiny that would apply to a broadcaster in the same position. One letter writer to a Cochrane community paper captured the irony precisely: the US will not allow a popular Chinese phone app to operate under foreign ownership for national security reasons, yet Canada allows its most-read provincial newspapers to be controlled by an American hedge fund whose principals are enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump.
Rebel News occupies a distinct category. Founded by Ezra Levant, it makes no claim to journalism in any traditional sense and operates openly as a partisan content machine. Levant’s network has served as free broadcast infrastructure for the separatist movement, streaming Alberta Prosperity Project town halls to audiences who might never encounter the APP through mainstream coverage. In February 2026, Levant published a piece dismissing concerns about the separatist movement, attacking prime minister Mark Carney as a “globalist,” and framing any criticism of Alberta independence as condescension by eastern elites. That is straight MAGA culture-war content, translated into Canadian idiom and optimized for social media outrage. Rebel News is not unknowingly serving the movement. It is knowingly and enthusiastically doing so.
Canada Proud operates differently still. It is primarily a meme factory and social media operation with opaque funding sources and no pretense of journalism. Its content is designed to go viral among people who do not think of themselves as news consumers. It represents the Canadian domestic version of the same dark-money political media ecosystem that has transformed American political communication, producing emotional content engineered for sharing rather than understanding. Groups like Canada Proud normalize separatist grievance among mass audiences, creating the cultural permission structure that the APP’s harder-edged operations depend on.
The digital amplification layer compounds all of this. Research has shown that the Alberta separatist movement’s online visibility has been artificially enhanced through automated networks, coordinated influencer accounts and algorithmic manipulation. Observers have identified high-engagement accounts exhibiting behaviour inconsistent with organic interaction, repetitive messaging aligned with disinformation models, and bot networks engineering an illusion of mass support.
This is not a new phenomenon in Alberta. When #Wexit was trending on social media in 2019, an analysis by Hill & Knowlton found that part of the push was driven by bots and disinformation. The same pattern is now operating at greater scale and with more sophisticated tools.…
What elevates this campaign beyond ordinary political meddling is the sophistication of its architecture. The Trump administration has built a layered influence operation in which each actor is technically independent, each statement is technically unofficial, yet every piece of messaging pushes in exactly the same direction at exactly the same time. It is the same decentralized structure MAGA used domestically to build pressure around the 2020 election, now deployed against a foreign country.
At the cabinet level, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent chose his words and venue with care. He did not make his most pointed statement about Alberta in a Senate hearing or a formal press briefing. Instead, he made it on a podcast hosted by Jack Posobiec, a hard-right influencer with documented ties to European far-right movements and a history of promoting disinformation. Bessent told Posobiec that Alberta has “a wealth of natural resources” that Canada is blocking and that the US should “let them come down into the US” because “Alberta is a natural partner.” The choice of messenger was not incidental. A cabinet official speaking through a partisan influencer reaches the MAGA base directly while keeping the formal record clean.
The congressional layer operates on the same principle. Representative Ogles of Tennessee, a loyal MAGA backbencher with no foreign policy portfolio, told the BBC that Albertans “would prefer not to be part of Canada and be part of the US because we are winning day in and day out.” He has no standing to make that claim. That is precisely the point. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, another figure without a current official role, added her endorsement to the separatist movement. Neither carries the weight of formal US policy, but both send a signal of White House approval to those watching.
Fox News has been the movement’s most powerful amplifier. Fox and Friends gave Alberta Prosperity Project lawyer Jeffrey Rath a national platform, inviting him to explain why Albertans are “fed up” and want to meet with the Trump administration to discuss joining the US. That single appearance lent a fringe, conspiracy-adjacent group the credibility of a mainstream news booking. Fox commentator Tomi Lahren recorded a segment enthusiastically promoting Alberta independence, describing it as offering “lower taxes, more freedom, unleashed energy potential” and saying she would “love to see” it happen. Sean Hannity’s name appeared on a list of figures who endorse the separatist movement, according to DeSmog’s reporting. Alberta separatism also wove directly into Fox’s coverage of prime minister Carney’s White House meeting with Trump, with commentators using the separatist narrative to undermine Carney’s standing before he even walked through the door.…
If Danielle Smith’s deliberate ambiguity has been damaging, the hesitant, sometimes almost indifferent response from the rest of Canada’s political leadership and its public broadcaster has compounded the problem in ways that are both harder to explain and equally hard to excuse.
The most forceful response came from BC premier David Eby, who used the word treason without apology and refused to retreat when analysts advised him to soften his language. That word was accurate. Seeking the active support of a foreign government to break up your country while that government is simultaneously threatening annexation and running an influence operation through your province’s media ecosystem is not a civic dispute about equalization formulas. It is, by any reasonable definition, a betrayal of the national interest. Eby’s clarity stood in sharp relief against almost everyone else around the table.…
The CBC’s coverage warrants particular examination because it illustrates a problem that extends beyond any single outlet. The public broadcaster has produced valuable investigative and analytical work on specific elements of the crisis, including the Donbas comparison, bot amplification and the US State Department meetings. But it has also consistently treated the separation argument as a legitimate position in a balanced debate, platforming APP spokespeople alongside security analysts and constitutional scholars as if they occupy equivalent intellectual ground.
When one CBC analyst cautioned against Eby’s treason language because it might “push people toward separatism,” the implicit editorial message was that Canada should moderate its response to a foreign-backed destabilization campaign to avoid upsetting those being destabilized. That is a real concern about referendum dynamics, and it is not entirely without merit. But it easily slides into a posture of institutional caution that treats a national security emergency as a story requiring careful balance rather than clear-eyed alarm. The habit of presenting “both sides” as if they carry equivalent evidentiary weight, without consistently noting that one side is documented to be in coordination with foreign officials hostile to Canadian sovereignty, obscures rather than illuminates what is actually happening.…
The Brexit lesson applies here, too. The Remain campaign assumed reasonableness would carry the day, that the economic absurdity of Leave’s promises would be self-evident, and that British voters would not burn down their trade relationships on the basis of demonstrable disinformation and a foreign-funded influence operation. All three assumptions were wrong. Canada is repeating each of those mistakes in sequence.…
The Brexit lesson applies here. The Remain campaign assumed reasonableness would carry the day. Canada is repeating its mistakes.
Precisely identifying the problem is necessary but not sufficient. Canada needs a response proportionate to what is actually happening. Here is what a serious response would look like.
First, Canada must close the foreign ownership loophole in print media. The irony that Canadian broadcasting regulations cap foreign ownership at 20 per cent, while the country’s largest newspaper chain is 66 per cent owned by an American hedge fund with documented Trump connections, should be politically embarrassing for every government that has let it stand. Postmedia should be brought under the same ownership rules that apply to broadcasters, or the Canadian government should use existing Competition Act and Investment Canada Act review powers to force divestiture into Canadian ownership. This is not a free speech question. It is a question of sovereignty, and the US would not tolerate the equivalent for a moment.
Second, the federal government should formally designate the Alberta Prosperity Project’s Washington engagement as foreign interference under existing law. The Communications Security Establishment and CSIS have legal authority to investigate and report on foreign interference in Canadian democratic processes. The APP’s meetings with State Department officials, its request for a $500-billion US line of credit, and the documented involvement of American media figures and political operatives in amplifying its cause all meet the threshold for a formal investigation. The Carney government has been careful and diplomatic. It should be formal and legal.
Third, Elections Canada and Elections Alberta need explicit authority to track and disclose foreign funding in referendum campaigns. Alberta’s Bill 54 provisions permitting corporate donations of up to $5,000 to referendum campaigns already creates a grey-money vulnerability. A referendum period will be a major target for dark-money operations that mirror what happened in Brexit. Canada needs campaign finance rules for referendums that match the scale of the threat, not the scale of a provincial by-election.
Fourth, the federalist case needs a spokesperson, a campaign and a budget. The pro-Canada counter-petition gathered over 400,000 signatures, more than double what the separatists were required to collect. That is a reservoir of political energy… A well-funded, professionally organized campaign that makes the affirmative case for Canada, explains clearly and consistently what an independent Alberta would actually be, answers disinformation in real time and engages the majority of Albertans who do not want to leave is the single most important thing that can happen before October 2026.…
Fifth, the premiers need to get off the sidelines. The First Ministers meeting in January 2026 was an opportunity for Canada’s political leaders to present a unified, unambiguous message that foreign interference in a Canadian referendum would be treated as what it is: a hostile act against a sovereign democracy. Instead, the country got David Eby standing largely alone, Wab Kinew cracking jokes and Mark Carney issuing a diplomatic plea for respect. That is not a response to an adversary. That is a plea from a supplicant.
Ray Williams is a former school superintendent, management consultant and vice-chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade.
Full version was published at raybwilliams.medium.com
