Alberta separatist leaders expect to start canvassing in January to get their independence referendum question on the ballot, thanks to the provincial government’s latest legislation to make it easier for them to succeed.
Were it not for the United Conservatives’ speedy passage of Bill 14 this week, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s citizens initiative would have been in peril, thanks to a judge’s ruling that the existing initiative law didn’t permit a referendum on independence.
That new bill revives the separatists’ project by removing the ability for Elections Alberta — or anyone — to vet a proposed question’s constitutional validity.
But more than that, Bill 14 forced Elections Alberta to consider that the existing question proposal was never actually made, leaving the court ruling against it moot — and let the independence group reapply immediately to have their petition drive considered again, without the hurdles that dogged it the first time.
With that, APP head Mitch Sylvestre and a supportive lawyer visited Elections Alberta on Thursday and submitted their new application for processing. And their group hailed the government’s helpful legislation which made that possible.
“Bill 14 receives royal assent — Alberta’s sovereignty era begins!” a post on APP’s website declared triumphantly.
To a leading opponent of the separatist movement, it’s a sign of Premier Danielle Smith kowtowing to the extremists in her party base.
“Premier is bending over backwards to facilitate this separation referendum,” said former Tory deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk. He led the successful Alberta Forever Canada petition drive, which proposed a referendum asking Albertans to say yes to staying in Canada — the reverse of the separation question.
(Alberta Prosperity Project)
While the United Conservatives and their leader remain officially and vocally in favour of a united Canada, they have now passed two pieces of legislation that make it easier for fans of a fractured Canada to give Alberta a separation referendum.
Eight months before Bill 14, the UCP government passed legislation that lowered the threshold for petitioners to force a constitutional referendum, from about 600,000 signatures to roughly two-thirds fewer.
“I think the original big gift was the Citizen’s Initiative Act [amendments] in the first place, taking the number of signatures down to 177,000,” Sylvestre told CBC News in an interview Friday.
Assuming that the new APP application passes the now-reduced number of criteria, Elections Alberta will approve its question by early January, starting the four-month petition drive to gather enough signatures soon thereafter, Sylvestre said.
It means canvassing in the frigid Alberta winter, but the APP executive said they don’t have to search too hard for supporters. That’s because his group had about 250,000 people registered on its website by this spring, all saying they were committed to signing the in-person petitions.
On top of that, APP has recruited 1,900 canvassers, and trained half of them, said Sylvestre, who has spent much of the year hosting dozens of pro-independence gatherings in cities and rural communities throughout the province.
By contrast. Lukaszuk’s Forever Canada petition had 6,500 registered petition-gatherers, he told CBC News.
His pro-Canada initiative garnered far more signatures than the 293,000 it required under the old rules. More than 438,000 Albertans signed it, Elections Alberta reported this month, amounting to nearly one in seven of all eligible Alberta voters.
Under the Smith government’s lowered threshold, the separatist group only needs fewer than one in 16 eligible Albertans to sign its petitions.
The province’s legislative reprieve for APP also enabled the group to slightly reword its proposed referendum question. When Sylvestre applied earlier this year, his question was: “Do you agree that Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province in Canada?”
Now, it’s “Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?” APP tweaked it, Sylvestre said, to now follow the exact wording in the Clarity Act, the federal law passed after Quebec’s narrowly unsuccessful 1995 separation vote, to clarify law around a province leaving Canada.
While Alberta government officials were reluctant to say their legislation this spring was tailor-made for the separatist movement that’s active within UCP’s membership, that shyness wasn’t apparent with the more recent Bill 14.
“If those seeking independence believe that they have the support for it, this is their chance to prove it,” Justice Minister Mickey Amery told reporters when he tabled the bill on Dec. 4. Six days later, the UCP-dominated legislature passed it on the assembly’s last sitting day of 2025, and the lieutenant-governor signed the bill into law the next day.
Sylvestre was appreciative of Amery’s second legislation to assist his cause.
“What they’re supposed to do is they’re supposed to give citizens the ability to ask questions of government without any encumbrances of any kind,” he said.
(While Bill 14’s provisions appeared targeted at the separatist petition, its blast-zone radius also affected musician Corb Lund’s recently green-lighted bid to force a referendum on banning new coal mining on the Rockies’ eastern slopes. Lund called reversing approval of his petition “disappointing and fundamentally unfair,” but he vowed to reapply.)
While separatists are confident that Albertans will be asking if they wish to vote “Yes” to independence next fall, it isn’t clear how the Smith government will first deal with the Forever Canada petition that seeks a “Yes” to stay.
It’s currently before an MLA committee. While Lukaszuk’s petition called for a non-constitutional referendum, he has since said his goal is for the question to face a vote in the legislature, rather than among the general public — to make United Conservative MLAs say where they stand on the divisive question.
APP’s praise comes less than two weeks after Jeffrey Rath, the group’s legal counsel, garnered a standing ovation in a hall full of Smith’s party activists for his short pro-independence message at the UCP convention.
Many in that same crowd booed Smith a couple times — when she said her recent pipeline deal with Ottawa proved Canada works, and when she boosted the idea of a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.
Top party officials and polls alike have suggested that most UCP supporters back Alberta separatism, even though it remains a largely unpopular idea among the general public.
Some UCP insiders who spoke to CBC News — and don’t support separatism — privately reason that they should just let the pro-independence crowd try their luck with the general public and then badly lose a referendum. That would weaken and fracture the separatist movement, their rationale goes.
Former British prime minister David Cameron had similar thinking around a Brexit vote, and his gamble proved fatal for both his own career and United Kingdom’s time in the European Union. Also, the 1980 Quebec sovereignty-association referendum may have fallen well short, with 60 per cent voting against and 40 per cent for — but it certainly didn’t make that separatist movement go away.
But in one respect, Alberta’s exit referendum may be unlike either of those precedents. Cameron campaigned against Brexit, while then-premier René Lévesque of the Parti Québécois was leader of the 1980 “Oui” campaign.
Smith has largely resisted saying whether she’d actively campaign for one side or the other of that existential referendum question in Alberta.
While she has repeatedly stated that she supports a strong Alberta within a united Canada and that she wants to make Canada work, she has appeared reluctant to overtly campaign against a sizable chunk of her party membership.
Sylvestre, for his part, said he expects her to stay neutral during APP’s petition drive and potential referendum. And he’s fine with that.
“Let the people fight it out, so to speak,” he said.
“We do not need government weighing in on everything.”
But because the UCP has twice weighed in with legislation reducing the requirements for APP to get its independence question on the ballot, some in the movement might feel Smith’s team has already done enough.
