When the fascist general Emilio Mola closed on Madrid in 1936, he made a haunting claim aimed at the city’s republican resistance. He would arrive with four columns of soldiers to besiege the city, and they would soon find help from a fifth column of sympathizers within. Well, if President Donald Trump were ever to march on Canada—a possibility roughly half of Canadians now fear—it is becoming abundantly clear that a fifth column would await him here too. Recent months have seen the escalation of a brazen campaign by separatists in the oil-rich province of Alberta to dismember the country and lease its resources to an expansionist American regime, with direct support from officials in the U.S. government.
“There’s a real national security threat there,” Patrick Lennox, a former intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and security expert in the Albertan capital of Edmonton, told me. “This is the perfect scenario for foreign interference.”
Alberta, often erroneously dubbed the “Texas of Canada” by U.S. media on account of its pro-oil, anti-government politics, has long been home to grievance movements lamenting perceived federal overreach. “Since the moment Alberta became a province [in 1905], there’s been a movement to separate,” said Duane Bratt, an expert in separatism at Alberta’s Mount Royal University.
But a recent push for a referendum on independence has achieved unprecedented success, in no small part due to tacit support from the Trump-aligned provincial government.
The province’s current premier, Danielle Smith, was one of the first Canadian officials to kiss the ring of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has long tested the limits of her powers to pursue his crusades and causes at home. “There is an ideological alignment with Trump,” Bratt said. “On gun rights, climate change, trans rights, renewable energy, wokeness … it’s all consistent with American right-wing movements.”
On Thursday, she went as far as announcing a series of referenda, timed to coincide with a likely fall vote on independence, that would pack the ballot with proposals to seize control of the courts, withdraw from federal programs, and withhold public services from some immigrants, which she accused the federal government of deploying to “flood [Alberta’s] borders.”
Though Smith has been ambiguous about her support for Albertan independence itself, she has worked for a referendum on the issue in virtually every other way. Her government massively lowered the threshold of signatures required to put the question to a vote, and overrode a court decision deeming a referendum unconstitutional. She has repeatedly refused to denounce those who would break up the country and reportedly said she’d stay on as prime minister of an independent Alberta.
In the past, she’s been explicit that she views independence as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the federal government, under rival Liberal leadership since 2015. And she’s had some success—Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, struck a “grand bargain” this year to put environmental progress on hold for the sake of the Albertan oil patch.
But Smith is now increasingly herself under threat from separatists, whose power within her United Conservative Party, or UCP, has grown massively since reforms that have made it easier for fringe groups to challenge the party leadership. “The core people driving this are perennially aggrieved. They are always angry about something,” said Jason Kenney, Smith’s predecessor as premier and founder of the UCP. “And separatism is a perfect vessel for a wide range of grievances.”
Kenney says it was this faction, radicalized by the pandemic and a drip-feed of alt-media outrage, that toppled his premiership and installed Smith in 2022. Now, he says, they’ve “apparently taken over most of the governing positions within the party”—and are using it to bring down the Canadian federation.
Smith’s games have taken on new significance in light of Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex the country, and mounting evidence of an explicit U.S. strategy to exploit the Albertan independence movement to destabilize Canada.
The referendum initiative is being spearheaded by a fringe group known as the Alberta Prosperity Project, or APP, headed by a trio of figures steeped in the conspiracy-addled world of the extremely online right.
Jeffrey Rath, legal counsel for the group, is a typical figure. A cowboy-hatted lawyer who accused Covid-era health officials of “war crimes,” Rath maintains there is a global Communist conspiracy to kneecap Alberta’s economy—a belief he says U.S. officials now share.
At the same time Smith was paving the way for a referendum, Rath made waves by announcing he had been secretly meeting with U.S. officials since April “to explore … the benefits to the United States” of Albertan separatism.
The most recent of these meetings, in December, allegedly took place in a secure compartmented information facility, or SCIF, normally used for highly confidential meetings vulnerable to electronic surveillance. Rath said he discussed “communication plans” for several hours with U.S. officials who “go directly from our meetings to the Oval Office.”
Rath emerged from that meeting claiming that the U.S. was “very enthusiastic” about Albertan independence, which would “free … the third-largest oil field in the world from control by the Communist Chinese.” He claimed the U.S. Treasury would grant a $500 billion line of credit to the new country, underwritten by access to Alberta’s natural resources.
“When I listened to that interview … I just thought, ‘This is it,’” said Lennox. “This has become an act of conspiracy here.”
Though Rath claims he wants independence, not statehood, he has suggested Alberta could switch to the U.S. dollar, and deploy American border enforcement to carry out mass deportations in the province. In March of last year, he even talked up the benefits of a status less than statehood, saying U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam at least do not pay federal tax.
Though U.S. officials have since tried to downplay their support for Rath’s cause, it makes a certain amount of sense. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy states explicitly that the government will “reward and encourage … movements broadly aligned” with its strategy to dominate the Western hemisphere and secure control over its natural resources.
The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Lennox says, was a “warning shot” for resource-rich countries like Canada that could see their governments destabilized if they challenge the U.S. regime. In this respect, the APP is a useful tool.
But the Trump administration’s crusade against Canada may have deeper causes. Figures like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who has explicitly compared Canada to Ukraine, see Canada as a bastion of decadent liberalism in the West that must be broken and subdued, one way or another.
“What we’re looking at here is a radical conservative attempt to reshape American foreign relations,” Michael Williams, an expert on the radical right at the University of Ottawa, told me. “The West is a cultural and political entity, and its greatness … is being undermined by liberalism. So you need to find ways to attack liberalism in any way that you can.”
Rath’s comments—and his commitment to the wildest ideas of the online far right—suggest he is pleased to play the role of the useful co-conspirator. And many fellow Albertan separatists appear willing to follow him.
“There’s an old fashioned word for that,” David Eby, premier of the neighboring province of British Columbia, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “That word is ‘treason’.”
Fortunately, for now, support for independence in Alberta is extremely soft. In the most recent poll, separation receives less than 30 percent support, with fewer than 10 percent fully committed. Nearly three-quarters of Albertans say they’d move elsewhere if the province became independent.
That includes Kenney, the former premier. “I am a proud Albertan, but I’m a Canadian first,” he told me. “And I don’t think I’d feel at home in a place like that.”
Kenney maintains a substantial amount of separatist support comes from “frustrated federalists” who, like Smith, are trying to leverage independence to win concessions from the federal government.
But if that faction is large enough, it might not matter what they want. Lennox sees troubling parallels between America’s engagements with the APP and Russia’s tactics in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which laid the groundwork for a more forceful annexation.
If a “no” vote is narrow enough, Rath and his American backers could claim the result is “rigged,” necessitating the “liberation” of an oppressed minority—and its valuable strategic resources.
That makes the stakes very high for Canada. Its committed federalists must find a way to shore up support in a famously unpatriotic country, all while facing a likely tidal wave of foreign influence operations that Canada is ill equipped to counter.
“You have really got to care about this stuff to win these political fights,” said Williams. “Because the people on the other side are characterized more than anything by the fact that they really do care. They really do believe.”
