Wrapping up the week: rallies to get out the Alberta vote, plus the story behind the story of Alberta separatism

We had our Covid and flu shots today, so I'm feeling a little punk tonight. This won't be lengthy but I hope it will be interesting.

The Alberta referundum is coming up on Monday so I thought I would focus on it in this post. And I found some interesting posts and comments about Carney's events in Alberta on Thursday and Friday, plus some analysis of how this Alberta separatism movement echoes far-right rabble rousing across the world.
On Thursday PM Carney spoke to a big rally in Calgary and on Friday to Edmonton

Alberta's separatist ballot is dangerous for Canada & Canadian sovereignty. Many questions are designed to weaken Canada, move AB to extreme right & give US full access to H2O, power, oil, etc in exchange for $$$. In fact, many want to become a state. This is serious! www.youtube.com/shorts/RAmur...

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— Dan 🇨🇦 (@bc-coastal.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 11:29 PM

As well as asking Alberta to vote Remain, Carney also said No to the Nine

Prime Minister Mark Carney says “no to the nine” ❤️🍁🇨🇦TEAM CANADA FOREVER🇨🇦🍁❤️ ❤️🍁🇨🇦VIVE LE CANADA 🇨🇦🍁❤️

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— 🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social) October 15, 2026 at 11:10 AM

Those nine referendum questions are just performance art - they're outside of provincial control anyway - but they provide convenient scapegoats for Danielle's budget problems. In his Routine Proceedings column today, Dale Smith writes:

...What was most notable was that Carney did tell the attendees of one of his events to “Vote no to the nine,” as a reference to the noxious nine other referendum questions, which include attempting to manufacture consent for further racist scapegoating of immigrants, and to try and get a faux “mandate” to pursue constitutional changes, even though the question on trying to insist on provincial paramountcy of laws under the constitution would actually make it harder to build interprovincial pipelines.
...Danielle Smith got pissy about Carney’s “No to the nine” statement, and insisted that Carney just doesn’t understand the horrors of the supposed “open-border policy” of Justin Trudeau, which is one hundred percent abject horseshit. There were never open borders, and premiers like Smith decided it was suddenly acceptable to scapegoat immigrants for their failures to properly fund healthcare and education or build housing, or in the case of Ontario especially, to crack down on their scam strip mall colleges, so that’s what they did. Never mind that Smith just two years before was writing to Trudeau to demand more immigrants for their economic growth—the tides turned (thanks in part to a poisoned information ecosystem and far-right actors), so suddenly it was “immigrants bad.” It’s frankly disgusting that this narrative goes unchallenged (and no, both-sidesing is not challenging scapegoating).
...And I cannot stress this enough—Alberta separatism is a white nationalist and Christian nationalist project. There is nothing to be cute about, or to try and downplay—it’s explicitly the roots of the movement, and the animating discourse throughout it (including why Smith is going hard on her scapegoating). Legacy media shouldn’t soft-pedal this because it needs to be called out for what it is....

Next, I think our Canadian cartoonists are some of our most insightful political commentators too:

Putting lead to Unity… Every province has its struggles, from B.C.’s lumber sector to Ontario’s steel and auto industries and Atlantic Canada’s fisheries. Alberta’s anger over federal handling of its oil resources is real, especially after years of delays getting resources to market. But Ottawa and Alberta have recently been working together more closely. That makes next week’s separation referendum feel less like a solution and more like a needless political stunt. Danielle Smith says she supports a united Canada, yet she has put separation on the ballot while courting the most aggrieved hard-right voices in her party. The referendum risks lending a megaphone to anti-Canadian, anti-science and racist politics, while doing little to resolve Alberta’s real concerns. At a time when Canada is facing a trade fight with Donald Trump, Mark Carney should not have to divert attention to this manufactured crisis. After a decisive rejection of separation, Alberta’s grievances still deserve serious answers. But Smith should be held accountable for putting the country through this exercise to protect her hold on power, and the UCP should lose the influence of the extremists who helped drive it. My sketch for the October 17 Hamilton Spectator:

- The Graeme Gallery

Read on Substack

Next, I found two terrific substack articles about the story behind the story of Alberta separatism.
On his Alberta Politics substack, David Climenhaga provides a review of a new book titled On Treason: Alberta Separatism, Foreign Interference, and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age, by international relations expert and former RCMP intelligence manager Patrick Lennox.
In addition, I also found that Lennox himself has published a substack article today based on the lecture he is delivering today about his book to the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.
Both articles are worth reading to explain how the Alberta separatism movement is influenced by international far-right fascist activism. 
First, from Climenhaga

... Thanks to the exertions of Ms. Smith and the UCP, we are likely going to be stuck with this damned secessionist subversion for a long time, no matter the outcome of Monday’s perverse referendum on a referendum. This is true even if Alberta’s voters decisively reject breaking up one of the most successful experiments in democracy in the history of the earth, our Canada.
Dr. Lennox’s lucid little book – a sort of Canadian J’Accuse! – will, I strongly suspect, prove its value in the months ahead and help illuminate the way for Canada to grapple with similar disruptions, many more of which we Canadians are likely to face in the coming months and years.
In the best and most accurate sense, On Treason is a jeremiad – that is, a sustained lament combined with righteous prophecy of destruction if the unrighteous will not change their ways. This is a term, I admit, that is usually used with sarcasm in these pages. But not always.
Like all the best jeremiads – including the ones supposedly written by Jeremiah – On Treason hits precisely the right note of what we Canadians risk if we do not face up to the dangers illustrated so clearly by the machinations of the Freedom Convoy culture-war chuds who have come to dominate the United Conservative Party and its leader....

Moving on to the Lennox lecture, he first covers the history of Alberta separatism and how the referendum has become "an invitation to the global far right to meddle, to influence, to interfere with a concocted domestic political process using techniques honed over the course of the last dozen years or so."
Lennox continues:

...Democracy is different in the disinformation age, especially direct democracy. Binary votes are much easier to manipulate than general elections. Our elections laws and practices are not particularly well designed for this new era. And nor are our intelligence systems and practices, which have a very difficult time in my experience with operating at the pace of a campaign and finding mechanisms to meaningfully insulate it from disinformation and other forms of foreign influence and interference.
And while we were certainly starting to wise up to this reality ten years ago, in a country that has had two secession votes in the past, it might have been prudent to have a look at the Clarity Act which was passed in 2000, or to consider some new legislation around the necessary safeguards and precautions required if any one province or territory took it upon themselves to hold a secession vote. But we didn’t do that.
Nor did we mount significant efforts furnish the security and intelligence community with tools and mandates to sufficiently insulate these processes from external interference vectors.
Instead, we watched as Russia involved itself in secession referendums in Catalonia, Spain the next year with large scale propaganda campaigns designed to destabilize Spain. In Crimea a secession vote was the pretext to Russian annexation. Similar votes were held in the Donbas region and led to Russian expansion into Ukraine. It was becoming clear that the kinds of votes we held in Quebec in 1980 and 1995 were not immune from the darker forces of the global far right. They would be targeted by actors and agents that wanted to see the end of the liberal international order.
Sure enough; in the long run up to the referendum Alberta became the focal point of foreign backed mass influence campaigns. Russia’s Storm-1516, the Kremlin’s most potent weapon in the disinformation war has been discovered to have created a number of pro-separatist websites designed to look like organic Alberta content. They have created corresponding TikToc and YouTube channels to further the reach of these websites that primarily housed fake news and opinion pieces designed to implant narratives like “Canada is broken”, like “Ottawa is run by the Communist Chinese”. The propaganda is designed to be shared and laundered by actual Albertans.
The referendum’s information space has also been targeted by what we are now referring to as “slopaganda”, which is AI-generated scripts read by human actors mascaraing as genuine aggrieved Albertans.
More overtly, American far right influencers like Tucker Carleson and Steve Bannon have mused to their enormous audiences about the need to liberate Canada, and to see the country as Russia sees Ukraine—i.e. as a natural extension of its rightful territory and not actually a real country. By this logic Alberta is the Donbas of the Prairies.
From the Kremlin side, it would appear that the tactics and strategy is more or less the same as it has been for the last 12 years. Exploit this exercise in direct democracy. Use it as a way to sow doubt and division with weapons grade disinformation generated by professional propagandists, enhanced by AI, and throttled hard into the Alberta information space by social media algorithms skewed in favour of exactly all of the above objectives.
From the American side, the influence technique is both blunt and overt. More like a mule kick than a stabbing. Much of it is actually run out of the White House and by members of the Trump Cabinet like Scott Bessent the Secretary of the Treasury. The messages from the President about Canada have gone from us being better off as the 51st state, a suggestion; to Canada “will become” the 51st State as he said on Wednesday in Arizona, a declaration. He’s repeatedly discussed the border along the 49th parallel being arbitrary, he’s renamed Lake Ontario by executive order, he’s called Canadians nasty people, and on and on. All of this is then picked up, tweaked, enhanced, amplified and recycled in the MAGA-Sphere....

Well worth your time to read both pieces.

Finally, on a side note, the World Series is shaping up. The Dodgers are gone (Yay!)

When the grind turns into glory 🍾 #NoTimeLikeOctober

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— MLB (@mlbbot.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 8:53 AM

No matter the World Series outcome, baseball history will be made! ⚾📖

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— TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 7:30 AM