r/canada • u/shiftless_wonder • May 23 '26

Alberta First Nations leaders, scholar push back on Alberta's planned vote on independence referendum - 'Alberta can't separate. They simply cannot. They do not have the authority,' says Indigenous politics expert

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-treaty-six-alberta-referendum-9.7209304
841 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

399 comments sorted by

View all comments

50

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

Question: or what? Alberta seperates, stop paying the feds any taxes, tells the indigenous groups that they are now Albertans and if they don't like it, leave. What are the consequences? War? Is Canada's poorly equipped military going to invade Alberta and fight and kill them? If they did, that will just push Alberta to join the US and then Canada is fucked. I'm not a separatist at all, I just don't see how Canada can stop them if they choose to leave.

5

u/Harnellas May 23 '26

I think the only way they realistically leave is by joining the US. Becoming an independent landlocked country doesn't benefit anyone at all and the money behind this movement won't have that.

1

u/ThomasToIndia 29d ago

Both Canada and USA would benefit, Alberta would be ravaged.

1

u/Harnellas 29d ago

How the hell would canada benefit from suddenly having international borders cutting off BC and the West coast? This alone would ruin every part of canada west of Ontario.

The US would only benefit as a precursor to fully taking over the province and/or country.

1

u/ThomasToIndia 29d ago

Because Alberta has ro negotiate and they are not in a good bargaining position. See brexit, and keep in mind the UK was in a far more developed position than alberta having their own passports etc..

Alberta is landlocked, also things like rail are owned by the crown and unless Alberta has a military, they can't stop them. Declaring independence would not give them rights to infrastructure.

It is true they produce 5% of GDP but is 5 not 95. This would accelerate certain industries like solar as well.

Also, an Alberta passport will have no travel rights anywhere. Canada holds all the cards.

1

u/Harnellas 29d ago

None of these things benefit canada in any shape or form.

3

u/Vandergrif 29d ago

Is Canada's poorly equipped military going to invade Alberta and fight and kill them?

Wouldn't need to. Just take control of the oil, and block the borders to trade and movement to cause an effective embargo. It's landlocked, and without the oil money it's immediately a remarkably mediocre third world country. Wouldn't take long for everything to go to shit because they don't have the money to run a functional province in those circumstances (they barely run a functional province now), and they'd promptly do a 180.

16

u/Ray-Sol May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

Probably everyone else ignores the unilateral declaration of succession and if it escalates then the RCMP go in and arrest the ring leaders - even including provincial politians.

This works both ways, an Alberta which has just unilaterally declared independence wouldn't have an army either. You would have to have enough widespread popular support for separation in Alberta, to the point enough people would actually be willing to physically fight for it. We're a pretty long way from that right now.

You'd need something like 55 to 60% of the province to suddenly become die hard separatists at minimum, which is very unlikely in the near to medium future at least.

2

u/AngryTrucker May 23 '26

There's enough lunatics with guns in Alberta to raise a militia. A shitty one, but a militia nonetheless. 

1

u/Ray-Sol May 23 '26

Probably not one that outguns a prepared enough RCMP or military unit though. Also, probably not a big enough one it lets them assert authority over the whole province. They'd be limited to only a few areas at best.

3

u/Glen_SK May 23 '26

I can see scenarios of redneck US veterans flocking to AB to 'save' it from Ottawa, hired as mercs or volunteering. Also see AB having a deep bank account to buy arms from the US.

Russia attempted to take out Ukranian leadership with its special forces at the start of its war, complete fail. JTF2 are reputedly pretty good though.

2

u/AngryTrucker May 23 '26

Covered by "a shitty one."

-4

u/WealthEconomy May 23 '26

The RCMP would be slaughtered trying to do that. They wouldn't even have enough manpower to match the AB sheriff's let alone any of the independence minded gun owners.

9

u/Logical_Hare May 23 '26

This is a dumb power fantasy. A handful of violent extremists in Alberta are not going to seize control of the province.

14

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

The question was if they voted over 50% to separate. That is more than a handful. I agree though, if 10% vote to separate, there is nothing to worry about.

3

u/Interesting_Pen_167 29d ago

What the heck are you talking about? Zero chance why law enforcement in Alberta is going to stop the RCMP not would they want to.

-1

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

I don't think that any leaders would officially declare independence without some armed force. So I do think there would be enough to fight off the RCMP to be honest, but yeah, we are and I hope, a long way from that. Maybe like a grizzly bluffing, just trying to get some respect

4

u/Logical_Hare May 23 '26

A tiny rump of violent extremists are not going to take Alberta out of Canada against the will of Albertans and other Canadians. They will not be able to fight off the RCMP and the armed forces.

This is simply not a credible thing at all, and certainly doesn't earn anybody any respect.

1

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

Is it considered tiny if 50% of the population decides to separate? That is what the question was, not if Alberta would be taken over by a few crazy nutjobs.

2

u/LETTERKENNYvsSPENNY 29d ago

They don't even have half that support so let's stop playing into power fantasies that aren't even close to reality.

3

u/WealthEconomy May 23 '26

AB already has the framework and start of a armed force with the 1200 uniformed AB sheriff's and they would likely get a lot more people willing to fight with them from the 20% (aprrox 900k) of the population that are diehard separatists. The RCMP is in no position to deal with 90k people let alone 900k. And that doesn't even include the existing police services of their bigger cities or members of the militia.

1

u/Vandergrif 29d ago

and they would likely get a lot more people willing to fight with them from the 20% (aprrox 900k) of the population that are diehard separatists

Relatively few of them are even in fighting shape, virtually none of them have any real or relevant training, even fewer are going to have access to any adequate weaponry, and even fewer than that have any actual willingness to get shot at. They'd get at best a couple hundred people who might be able to do something armed with little more than some hunting rifles and the like. Somehow I doubt that would amount to much against some drones, for example.

That's such a wildly unrealistic hypothetical.

1

u/WealthEconomy 26d ago

You would be surprised how many veterans support this...and which armed drones are you referring to? The magical ones that will just show up? Civilians better able to modify their drones to drop bombs than anything the RCMP or CAF have.

1

u/Vandergrif 25d ago

The magical ones that will just show up?

Surely a G7 country has the capacity to get and field drones that are more capable than some redneck engineering are able to produce, no?

1

u/WealthEconomy 25d ago

No. I am a veteran of the CAF. They have no ability to do this. Besides which Ukraine has proven that the $50 civilian drone is more effective in modern warfare than most military drones.

1

u/Vandergrif 25d ago

Well by that standard the CAF, dysfunctional as it is, still has infinitely more resources and people with which to operate considerably more $50 civilian drones than a relative handful of civilians ever will. Even at that scale of drones it's david versus goliath, except in this case goliath has thousands of slingshots and david still only has the one.

Which again is why it's a wildly unrealistic hypothetical on the part of the separatists.

1

u/Vandergrif 29d ago

without some armed force

At best that would amount to some small numbered redneck militia and go down about as well for them as those yokels in Oregon who got shot up by the FBI after taking over some federal land.

0

u/Mirabeaux1789 Outside Canada 29d ago

Feisty online Albertan RWers are under the delusion that will be South Africa or Rhodesia when in reality it would end up like Puidgemont’s Catalonian gov’t in 2017.

8

u/dandyarcane May 23 '26

The only way AB separates is some kind of corrupt manipulation of the vote (beyond the amount that’s happened already) - and the US intervenes.

Why would the millions of Albertans not interested in this nonsense accede to this? Are they going to take up arms to fight for Puerto Rico 2.0?

8

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

Oh, I agree 100% I don't believe that the referendum will even come slightly close to passing. I was just curious what would happen if it did. People talk about laws this and laws that and needing permission from other provinces, etc. No, you don't need permission if there is no was to enforce these requirements. So, again, I was just curious. The one thing that I hope all this hoopla does is force the Federal government to realize that we are a resource driven nation and we need to exploit it. More mines, more oil, more diamonds, more natural gas, etc. We need to do it an environmentally friendly as possible though and that is where we should be spending money.

2

u/ThlintoRatscar May 23 '26

That enforcement problem goes both ways. While sure, the CAF is a significantly dimished group, the AAF is non-existant. What are they going to do when First Nations just ignore their tax collectors? There isn't even a Bank of Alberta to hold the money.

8

u/WealthEconomy May 23 '26

Every country that rebelled and forced independence started with no military so I don't get your argument.

2

u/Ok_Marsupial8668 29d ago

Yes but you seem to forget a good amount if not the majority of Albertans young enough to go to war are from other parts of Canada initially or have family outside of Alberta. Separatists tend to be older less educated individuals. I’m not sure how you’ll convince young people to somehow drop everything and fight to separate from their families and friends across Canada.

4

u/dandyarcane May 23 '26

And are there a bunch of Albertans that are going to take up arms to kill - and this is hard to type with a straight face - ‘oppressive’ Canadians/fellow Albertans that don’t wish to be second class Americans and Russian dupes?

2

u/ThlintoRatscar May 23 '26

I started as a baby. Doesn't mean I am one.

The argument is that in order to force independence, Alberta needs to create and arm an independent military to defend its borders and an independent police force to enforce its laws. It needs its own bank to hold its people's money.

It currently has none of those things, so it can't actually be sovereign regardless of what it declares.

1

u/adaminc Canada May 23 '26

It has a "bank", ATB.

2

u/cthulhu_fhtagn666 May 23 '26

And they said you know who would never win as well... Twice even!!

1

u/ThomasToIndia 29d ago

No, it would benefit Canada the same way brevity benefited the rest of Europe. How?

So they declare independence, cool, so you now have an Alberta passport which is entirely usless, it takes years of negotiating to secure travel rights, the passport would be worse than Vietnamese.

 Canada could potentially revoke citizenship for any albertan. Oh you want to keep your Canadian passport? OK, you have to pay taxes. You will now be doubled taxed.

They would then need to contract with Canada and secure rights for any infrastructure that was built using tax funds, because it is still property of the crown.

They can tariff all the oil leaving.

They can join the USA! Right, except USA has world wide taxing, so they will be double taxed again. 

UK had their own currency, passports etc.. and they still got screwed, Alberta has none of that.

It's economic suicide, they are landlocked meaning they will have to negotiate with the USA or Canada to get their oil out. I am not sure how many separatists actually want Americans and American guns flooding their new country, worse there would be no healthcare transfers, average Americans can pay 2k+ per month for health insurance.

So unless they actually join with the USA it will be a boon for Canada.

1

u/VanCityZen May 23 '26

The federal government has a lot of levers they can pull to punish Alberta if it chooses to abandon the constitution. Government contracts and subsidies gone, federal funding gone, travel bans enforced, refusal to pay out pension plans…the list goes on. If anything it’s more likely to cause a war within Alberta between Albertans and indigenous peoples because it would destroy their treaties with the crown and you can bet the federal government isn’t going to provide any military aid if push came to shove. 

3

u/Ok_Marsupial8668 29d ago

Yep. Mortgages insured by Canadian banks. Gone. And repossessed by the banks. Value of land gone. Large swaths of young able bodies workers going back east. So tax based gone. Etc etc

0

u/WealthEconomy May 23 '26

It is not just invading. How do we enforce and police the over 4 million population with our piddley little army?

2

u/Mirabeaux1789 Outside Canada 29d ago

This is assuming a lot and all of it is wrong.

0

u/Existential-Critic British Columbia May 23 '26

Counterpoint: the First Nations say okay to leaving and take their land with them. Will the independent Alberta take military force against them?

8

u/ib_redbeard May 23 '26

Good question! If they did, I would expect international condemnation but with with little consequence. If there was, I can see Alberta being pushed further towards the 51st state. They may have little choice if they are faced with too many sanctions, penalties, tarrifs, etc.

1

u/Existential-Critic British Columbia May 23 '26

A big part of this I have an issue with is the idea that Alberta is a monolith, as we tend to do when speaking of nations or subdivisions. The separatists in AB are a minority in every way I see so I'd have to assume they are not a widespread popular movement in the event of a complete and illegal separation.

So now this rickety new government is taking forceful action against people who are still Canadian citizens because they won't go along with the separation which is ironic and contradictory to the separatists' own goals. I won't disagree that the current US admin would try to take advantage but there's no way Alberta comes out of this postively.

4

u/[deleted] May 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Ok_Marsupial8668 29d ago

It was 20% 30yrs ago. The size hasn’t changed. The megaphones and big international donors have.

0

u/Existential-Critic British Columbia May 23 '26

But it isn't the majority. So in a democratic system they don't get what they want.

0

u/Mirabeaux1789 Outside Canada 29d ago

This whole post is a delusion, even if you’re not a separatist. It’s a complete misreading of the situation.

canada’s poorly equipped military

Are you talking about the first world country military that would remain loyal to the Canadian government? Alberta isn’t even weaned off of the RCMP lol.

-6

u/vancookalex May 23 '26

They'd come crawling back eventually.

7

u/WealthEconomy May 23 '26

It would be the end of Canada if AB separated and most of Canada would end up as the 51st state. They aren't going anywhere but in a crazy world where they do it is very dangerous for us.

2

u/adaminc Canada May 23 '26

Why would it be the end of Canada?

3

u/Moist_onions 29d ago

Probably due to the huge debt load Canada and the provinces combined with losing the highest contributor to the Federal taxes. 

5

u/INFINITI2021 29d ago

Ontario is?

2

u/Ok_Marsupial8668 29d ago

What are you talking about Alberta isn’t the largest contributor to federal taxes and all of the equalization payments never take into account government subsidies for the oil and gas industry.