Troy Nahumko
Canadians say sorry a lot. Sorry when someone bumps into us. Sorry when we bump into a chair. Sorry while squeezing past you in the supermarket. Sorry before disagreeing with you, after disagreeing with you and occasionally, one suspects, while being threatened.
It is one of those national stereotypes that contains an inconvenient amount of truth. But outsiders misunderstand what Canadian politeness actually means. A nation cannot suppress that much irritation indefinitely. Canada must surely be a leading candidate for the birthplace of modern passive aggression. Few people on earth can put as much spite into the words “Have a nice day.”
Perhaps this is why we claim to have invented ice hockey: sixty minutes during which Canadians are permitted to stop saying sorry and punch each other in the face.
The arrangement has worked surprisingly well.
Canadians are not a demonstrative people. Our patriotism has traditionally consisted of quietly believing we are not American and hoping nobody asks us to elaborate.
So perhaps Canada should apologise for not mentioning sooner that one of its richest provinces is holding a referendum on whether to begin the process of leaving the country.
Sorry.
On 19 October, Alberta goes to the polls. Strictly speaking, Albertans are not yet being asked whether they want independence. They are being asked whether Alberta should remain a Canadian province or whether its government should begin the constitutional process required to hold a binding referendum on separation.
A referendum about having a referendum.
Very Canadian.
We are, after all, a country that has taken the time to write the rules for its own dissolution like a condo-board bylaw. Spain’s constitution answers the question with a firm no. Canada’s Clarity Act answers it with a form and a quorum.
Spaniards, who know what happens when the words referendum, independence and constitution appear in the same sentence, might want to pay attention. So might anyone who remembers Quebec in 1995, when the federation survived by about a percentage point and the rest of the country spent a long weekend rediscovering its feelings for the province.
Because Alberta is not some distant frozen appendage populated by three elk and a curling team. More than five million people live there. It sits on top of one of the world’s great petroleum reserves. It shares a long border with the United States and supplies enormous quantities of energy to the American economy.
And something peculiar has been happening on the other side of that border.
Remember Greenland?
Of course you do. The Complainer in Chief made sure of it. Greenland was the unsubtle version of twenty-first-century American expansionism: the president of the United States announcing that he wanted somebody else’s territory, whimsically talking about buying it and, for a time, refusing to rule out force to obtain it.
Denmark and Europe reacted accordingly.
Alberta is different. Alberta is quieter. And that may make it more interesting.
No American president has announced plans to purchase Calgary. Nobody has threatened to send the Marines to Edmonton. There are no aircraft carriers parked in the wave pool of the West Edmonton Mall.
Instead there are meetings.
Alberta separatist leaders have met US State Department officials in Washington. American Republican political operatives have travelled north to meet separatist organisers and discuss voter-mobilisation technology. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly described Alberta as a “natural partner” for the United States, praising its resources and independent character. The State Department insists these were routine meetings with civil-society groups and that no commitments were made.
Routine meetings. In Washington, everything is routine until it isn’t.
Now imagine Russian officials holding repeated meetings with Catalan separatists, Russian political operatives arriving in Barcelona to discuss electoral technology, and a Kremlin minister going on television to admire Catalonia’s wealth, resources and splendidly independent character. Spaniards need not strain their imaginations. They remember the allegations of Russian-linked amplification around October 2017, and nobody in Madrid or Brussels was inclined to call that routine.
The comparison with Greenland is therefore not exact. It is almost the point that it isn’t. Greenland was geopolitics conducted with a megaphone. Alberta is geopolitics conducted through the algorithm. Greenland got the American threat. Alberta is getting the American “have a nice day.”
And hovering over the algorithm is Elon Musk. On 7 October, less than two weeks before Albertans vote, Musk used X, the platform he owns, to announce that Quebec would be better off independent. Then he added: “Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate too.” Spaniards, who have also been favoured with his opinions on their government, will recognise the genre.
There was a time when an immensely wealthy political actor wishing to influence the territorial integrity of a country needed newspapers, intelligence services, discreet intermediaries and men arriving at railway stations in large coats. Now he owns the printing press.
This matters because Alberta’s grievance is not invented.
Western alienation is older than most people reading this. For decades many Albertans have believed that Ottawa steals the province’s wealth, obstructs its petroleum industry and then lets eastern Canada enjoy the proceeds while lecturing the people who produced them. The National Energy Program, introduced by Pierre Trudeau in 1980, remains a regional trauma passed down through generations with approximately the same historical neutrality as the expulsion from Eden.
And grievance is political crude oil. It merely requires refining. Ottawa becomes the enemy. Environmentalists become the enemy. Immigrants can become the enemy. Universities, journalists, public-health officials and Indigenous leaders can be added according to taste.
Then somebody discovers God.
This is not metaphorical. Calgary pastor Tim Stephens recently hosted “A Christian Perspective on Alberta Independence”, explaining separatism through four biblical principles. Apparently Leviticus was unavailable for comment on equalisation payments.
In fact, across many parts of the Canadian prairie, the oil patch has increasingly encountered the pulpit: an American-style Christian nationalism in which hydrocarbons acquire biblical sanction, environmental regulation becomes an assault on liberty and political disagreement begins to resemble spiritual warfare.
The thing is, Albertans remain Canadian, even if some have spent decades dressing up as Texans for Halloween. There are cowboys, pickup trucks, oil wells, enormous steaks, evangelical churches and a magnificent annual rodeo called the Calgary Stampede. The problem begins when everybody forgets it was a costume.
This is where the Alberta story fits into something larger. Fellow Canadians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have recently described an emerging alliance of billionaire technological power, ethno-nationalism, religious fundamentalism and extractive capitalism as “end times fascism”: a politics that responds to ecological and social crisis not by imagining a common future, but by deciding who gets a place in the lifeboat.
Alberta already has the oil for the generator.
None of this means most Albertans want independence. They don’t. Premier Danielle Smith herself says recent polling puts support for separation at around 22%, and she says she will vote for Alberta to remain in Canada.
Which makes Smith’s position one of the stranger achievements of contemporary politics. She has bravely called a vote on whether to start a process she hopes to lose. The premier who says she does not want Alberta to leave Canada has asked Albertans whether her government should begin the process that could allow Alberta to leave Canada.
Readers may remember another leader who tried something similar.
David Cameron did not want Britain to leave the European Union either. He promised a referendum partly to settle an argument consuming his own side, campaigned confidently for the option he expected to win, and then discovered that referendums are rather less obedient than cabinet ministers.
That went well.
Ten years later, Spaniards can observe some of the consequences every summer at close quarters: British holidaymakers discovering that the sign saying EU PASSPORTS no longer includes them; the ninety-days-in-180 rule; and British residents carefully guarding their TIE cards as documentary proof that Brexit did not accidentally turn their retirement in Marbella into an immigration problem.
There is an especially exquisite species of post-Brexit Briton familiar to anyone on the Spanish coast: the expatriate who moved to Benidorm in search of sun, cheaper beer and a better life, only to explain from his terrace why immigration has ruined Britain. The irony does not so much write itself as order another pint.
Smith may therefore wish to study Cameron’s career rather carefully. He too opened a constitutional door while explaining that he hoped nobody would walk through it.
They did.
Then he resigned.
Alberta needn’t wonder what happens when a government calls a referendum it doesn’t actually want to win. There is a large island off the coast of France currently serving as the control group.
Political movements do not always need majority support at the beginning to transform a country. They need grievance. They need organisation. They need wealthy sympathisers. They need amplification. Above all, they need the majority to assume that the people talking about something preposterous cannot possibly be serious. Britain could provide references.
And then comes the most extraordinary part of the Alberta story.
Some of the people standing most firmly in the path of separatism are the very people Canada spent much of its history dispossessing.
First Nations leaders have challenged the separatist process on the grounds that Alberta cannot simply gather up its territory, hydrocarbons and borders and walk away. Much of that land is governed by treaties that predate Alberta itself.
An Alberta judge considering the issue found there could be “no doubt” that separation would affect Treaty 7 and Treaty 8 rights. This produces a historical irony almost too large to fit inside the country. For generations, Indigenous peoples were pushed from their lands, confined to reserves, subjected to residential schools and told that progress required their absorption into Canada.
Now their descendants may prove essential to preserving it. Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam put the reversal more powerfully. Indigenous peoples, he said, have been Canada’s “first and last line of defence against American annexation.”
Alberta became a province in 1905. Canada was created in 1867. The United States arrived somewhat earlier.
The Indigenous nations were there before all of them.
Before Alberta.
Before Canada.
Before somebody drew the 49th parallel across the continent and informed the people already living there which country they belonged to.
Canada has apologised to them fluently, ceremonially and often, and has listened to them rather less. Now it may find that the people it owes the most are the ones holding the door shut.
Perhaps, after all, there is one more Canadian apology due.
Only this time it isn't to the Americans.