Canada has chosen Canada. The unofficial result of the referendum on Alberta secession is an overwhelming defeat for separatists — and their supporters in Washington. Canadian sovereignty has survived the spreading flames from the populist dumpster fire next door.
With about 86 percent of the ballots counted on Tuesday, about 76 percent of voters favored remaining in Canada. This completely expected result — the lack of support for an independent Alberta has not meaningfully changed in recent years — has thrown up the question that has haunted the process from the beginning: Why were we doing this in the first place?
The answer seems to be the need of Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, to assuage the extremists within her party, the United Conservative Party of Alberta. (Somewhere around half the party supported the separatist cause.) Ms. Smith has claimed that she is “very pleased” with the outcome of the vote — she explicitly campaigned against separation — but the referendum was nevertheless a handy diversion from the corruption and incompetence scandals that have roiled her government since she took office in 2022. Albertans paid roughly 130 million Canadian dollars ($92 million) for the distraction.
Even as a sop to the populist, rage-baiting half of her party, Ms. Smith’s decision to hold the referendum has been a disaster. By trying to please everyone, she has enraged everyone. The question Albertans answered on the ballot in the referendum was not even whether or not to separate. It was about whether to have a second referendum on that question. She no doubt hoped that the delay of an actual decision would allow her grievance-politics base to vent their resentment without direct consequences.
By one estimate, only a third of voters who said yes on the referendum question favored the idea of an independent Alberta. Their reasons for choosing to support a vote on independence — but not independence itself — included to “get a better deal” on federal-provincial relations and “to send a message” to Ottawa.
In May, an Alberta court declared the referendum to be invalid, on the basis of its incompatibility with First Nations rights. That should have been an offramp for Ms. Smith if she were a true friend of Canadian unity, yet she refused to take it. But Ms. Smith’s politics have always been wishy-washy. Despite her protestations in favor of Canadian unity, it remains unclear which side she is on: The separatists despise her as an outspoken federalist, and the federalists regard her, at best, as a self-dealing fool and, at worst, an outright traitor.
Throughout it all, Ms. Smith has demonstrated clear loyalty to only one faction: the Trump administration. In June 2025, she lifted her province’s ban on American alcohol. As anti-Americanism buoyed the Liberal government in Ottawa, she cozied up to President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and made an appeal to his administration to suspend tariffs before the last federal election so that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a better shot at winning. Mr. Poilievre, she said in an interview, would be “very much in sync, I think, with the new direction in America.”
American officials have understood the Alberta referendum as a useful tool for their predations from the beginning. Alberta separatists met with Republican operatives associated with 10X Votes, a technology platform used by American right-wing organizers. It was reported that some separatist leaders have also met with officials at the State Department in Washington to discuss trading oil royalties and water rights in exchange for U.S. support for Alberta secession. (Other leaders of the movement have disputed this characterization of the meetings.) The U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has supported the separatist cause, calling Albertans “very independent people” who would make a “natural partner for the U.S.” He has also described Canada as a “little yipping dog.”
The question remains whether this referendum is the limit of the populist grievance politics that Alberta separatism represents. For decades they have run the same play: Paper over their own administrative failures by blaming their problems on the federal government in Ottawa. It’s a very convenient strategy. The deeper their incompetence, the more blame is spread on others.
That strategy may be reaching an end point, though: In 2021, the Conservatives led the Liberals in Alberta by 40 percent. Recent polls have shown the two parties running neck and neck in the province on a federal level.
And how much will national disgust over the referendum harm the Conservatives at the federal level? Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister for a decade, insisted that Canada should sustain “any sacrifice necessary” to resist American threats of annexation. Amid trade talks this summer, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and leader of its Progressive Conservative Party, told Mr. Trump to “kiss my ass,” adding that there was “plenty of real estate.” And yet despite the unquestionable patriotism of the vast majority of Canadian Conservatives, they, for the foreseeable future, will be answering the same question over and over: Are you loyal to this country?
Geopolitically, Alberta has been another, admittedly minor, front in the Trump administration’s predatory foreign policy. As its betrayal of Ukraine has shown, the United States has turned against freedom and democracy the world over. But Canadian democracy has held against the onslaught. The nearly 25 percent pro-separatist vote in Alberta is only about seven percentage points higher than the 18 percent of Americans who want their states to secede. It’s roughly the same percentage of Americans who want their states to join Canada, a number that rises to 30 percent for people under the age of 34.
Canada has never been more united than it is now. In the Quebec legislative election this month, the longtime separatist Parti Québécois, while able to form a minority government, failed to reach 30 percent of the vote — the lowest-ever percentage for a winning party in Quebec’s history. With the Alberta referendum behind us, the Canadian sovereignty agenda — and its concerted effort to turn away from the United States politically, economically, militarily, technologically and culturally — can move forward unopposed.
They came for us again. We said no again. Now we can get on with building the country.
Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War” and the host of the podcast “Gloves Off.”
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