The Republic of Alberta, An Idea That Won’t Go Away: author on Alberta’s ongoing separation debate

Author Tyler Dawson joins Alberta Primetime's Michael Higgins to discuss the ongoing separation debate in Alberta.

As Albertans begin to organize and take sides ahead of an anticipated vote on separation in the October referendum, a new book The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away is now set to hit store shelves. Author and journalist with the Globe and Mail Tyler Dawson joins Alberta Primetime’s Michael Higgins to discuss the ongoing separation debate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: We’re speaking just days away from the separatist petition meeting its deadline for collecting signatures. How important was it to land the book at this juncture?

Tyler Dawson: The timing couldn’t have worked out better. It was not entirely intentional that it arrived at this time, but certainly worked out that way. We had planned on a Spring release and it just so happened that it was coming out right around the time of the May 2 deadline. Of course, there’s a little bit of an open question of what happens after that deadline point. I’m hopeful that the book remains relevant for a few more months leading up to the October referendum.

MH: A good chunk of the book is a deep dive into the roots of a secession undercurrent in Alberta. It’s actually extending beyond the momentum that we see now and even the uproar over the National Energy Program, for those of us who are old enough to remember from the 1980s.

TD: I covered this idea of Alberta being upset at Ottawa and angry at Ottawa for the eight years I was at the National Post, so I was quite familiar with what has happened in the last decade. I’m not quite old enough to remember the National Energy Program, but certainly my parents and grandparents are. I was really struck the more I looked into it, just at how old these roots are. You can go back to the 1880s before Alberta was even a province and you see people expressing very similar sentiments to what you see people expressing in 2026.

There’s this remarkable continuity over the decades. There’s this robust history and intellectual underpinning, if you want to put it that way, that does exist for this movement and the grievances that separatists, and those who aren’t separatists, feel quite strongly about Alberta’s place within Confederation and its relationship with Ottawa. They’re all sort of part and parcel of the same ideas that have existed for a really long time.

MH: You write that separatism has come closer than ever to the mainstream. What makes this current drive different?

TD: The answer is unfortunately a horrible cliche, I think it has to do a lot with social media. In the 1980s when you had the western Canada concept, the West Fed Association, organizing people looked very, very different. How did you reach these people?

If you were going to write an op-ed, maybe you’d try and get it published in the Edmonton Journal or the Calgary Herald or the Red Deer Advocate. Maybe you’d write a letter to the editor in one of those papers and maybe that editor would say, “No, this is crazy nonsense and we’re not having it in our paper.” Things were gate-kept very differently. If you phoned into a radio call-in show, you might not get through to get on-air if you were expressing your views on the state of Confederation or Alberta’s place within it.

That dynamic, that gate-keeping, has totally changed and now it is very easy for people who think the same things, who love the same things, who hate the same things, who have the same political beliefs, to find each other. We’ve seen the outcome of that quite clearly a handful of times in the last decade. An early-ish example is the Farm Safety Bill protests when Rachel Notley first became premier. Or the 2019 Convoy to Ottawa that was over the tanker ban and Bill C-69 and the Freedom Convoy in 2022. These are all major instances of sort of right wing grievances and uprising that occurred because of the way that social media is linking people together now. That’s just something that did not exist in the 1980s, so I think that has been a very significant factor in why this movement is so powerful at this particular moment.

MH: What do you make of there not being a charismatic leader? In the book, you reference René Lévesque in Quebec and the place that he had in driving that forward.

TD: It’s funny because I did a video years ago for the National Post saying the big problem with the separatist movement is that they don’t have a leader. But they still don’t have a leader, and ironically, are rather powerful without having a leader. I do think that poses a problem for them in the medium term. If this goes towards a referendum in October, that gives us a handful of months in which there’ll be a public debate over the state of Alberta and Alberta’s place within Confederation. Who is going to be that person for the separatists? Is it going to be a number of different people?

At the moment, it seems to be Jeffrey Rath, a lawyer with the Alberta Prosperity Project, Mitch Sylvestre, the CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project and David Parker with Take Back Alberta, who is certainly playing a role in this dynamic. But is it just those three guys? There do seem to be other influencers on social media that are talking about this. There were people that gathered signatures, for example, on the Stay Free Alberta citizen initiated petition. Are they going to be leaders?

This is not like a political party. That’s another big difference. A political party has to have a leader. You can’t not have a leader as a political party. But this isn’t a political party. It’s a movement of some sort. It doesn’t seem to have a leader, but it does seem they probably need to find one at some point in the next few months.

MH: What’s your read on the role that Danielle Smith as premier plays in all of this and even the impact of the UCP and what’s happening within that dynamic?

TD: Danielle Smith has played a really interesting role in this over the past year. The thing that she can’t quite avoid is that she has given, on at least two occasions, a leg up to the separatists. The first was last spring, when the threshold was lowered for citizen initiated petitions. The second time was in December, when some of the rules were changed basically to allow the separatists to try again after they lost in court the first time.

For better or worse, despite her own personal politics and she’s not a separatist, she has helped them. I think there’s a running debate on why that is the case. But she did come out just last week with her strongest Pro-Canada statement yet, I would say. She was asked by a reporter why the Alberta government doesn’t just do a referendum itself. There’s this court battle going on, there’s this petition signature gathering, so why doesn’t Alberta just do it? And she said, “Well, I don’t believe in that. I think that Alberta should remain within Canada.” She staked her position rather clearly but at the same time, has helped the separatists get to where they are.

She’s in a bit of a sticky situation with her own party. There’s no doubt about that. Last November, she was booed on at least three occasions when she had pro-Canada statements at the UCP convention. It was a remarkable scene and one that I can’t remember in the time I’ve been covering politics. The polling certainly suggests that within the United Conservative Party, within Alberta voters who vote for the United Conservative Party, not a large majority but a majority of them are trending towards voting to leave Canada. I think she is in a very sticky situation in terms of the internal party dynamics. And let’s not forget, we’re going into an election next year and goodness knows what happens there after all of this sort of shakes out.