Alberta separation threats date back to decades and have reached new heights since the April election of Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Alberta’s separatist project of Prosperity is shooting for 600,000 signatures in a request that would force a provincial referendum on the subject, while the Alberta Republican Party, led by the former conservative operation Cameron Davies, is increasing its separation impulse.
“What we are seeing is the broken and dysfunctional system that has been in force since Alberta joined the Confederation,” said Davies, who recently renounced membership in the United Governing Conservative Party, CBC News.
He says that the system was designed to consolidate energy in the east, and the West was “seen as nothing more than a resource colony” for Ottawa.
Alberta Prime Minister Danielle Smith has also focused much of his recent public messages on sovereignty and opposition to Ottawa, making winks to the separatist movement but not a separation of direct support.
So why do some somages feel that they are being treated so unfairly?
Here is breakdown of some key problems.
Equalization payments
Equalization payments are a long -standing complaint for some lodges.
The federal program sees a part of federal tax dollars distributed to the poorest or “not having” provinces, so that everyone can maintain reasonably similar public services.
While Alberta was once not having, it has been a province to “have” since the mid -1960s, which means that it contributes to those payments, but does not receive any.
Some argue that this is unfair, and money should remain in Alberta.
Davies says that the federal government only worries that taxes are still from Alberta “so that they can redistribute it to Quebec and the maritime.”
When Alberta Jason Kenney, Jason Kenney, celebrated a referendum on equalization in 2021, around 62 percent of voters said they would choose to eliminate the main one of the equalization payments of the Constitution.
The current equalization formula was created by the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in which Kenney served as a cabinet minister.
Andrew Leach, an environmental and energy economist at Alberta University in Edmonton, says that due to Alberta’s “enviable” fiscal position, “there is no equalization system that would lead to the province that receives payments.
Quebec received the highest equalization payment in fiscal year 2025-26 ($ 13.6 billion), followed by Manitoba ($ 4.7 billion).
Duane Bratt, a Mount Royal Unversity political scientist in Calgary, says that part of the anger around equalization comes from a misunderstanding among many lodges of how the system works.
“They think that Alberta’s treasurer writes a Quebec check for $ 12 billion every year,” he said.
Bratt feels that the problem has been deliberately misrepresented to enliven anger, and says it is not clear if Alberta would be better without equalization payments.
“If Alberta separated … they would save all those fiscal income, but then they would have to pay all the things that the federal government currently pays, and that would become very complicated about whether they would benefit or not,” he said.
Subresentation in Ottawa
Davies and others argue that Alberta is underrepresented in the House of Commons and the Senate.
Alberta won three seats in the Federal Electoral Redistribution of 2022 and now has 37 of the 343 seats in the house, or around 10.8 percent, while representing about 11 percent of the country’s population.
If justice is judged by percentages, that is slightly higher than the per capita representation of Ontario.
The numbers are a little more biased to the smaller Atlantic provinces. For example, New Brunswick has 10 seats, just under three percent, and less than two percent of the country’s population.
When asked if he would denounce the separatist movement of Alberta, the leader of the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre said that Albertans have “legitimate complaints” about the industry, but he is “against separation.”
However, in the Senate, Alberta is clearly underrepresented, with six of the 105 senators, or less than six percent. BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba also have six senators each, while New Scotland and New Brunswick each have 10.
“Maybe it would be good to have a Senate the same, but at this time the Senate does not have much power,” Bratt said.
Dennis Pilon, professor of political science at the University of York in Toronto, says that the formulas that led to these numbers are part of a long process of constitutional and judicial review.
He says that one could argue that there should be a constitutional convention in which such problems can be addressed.
However, he says that if changes were going to be made, other problems should also be considered, such as overrepresentation of rural heads.
“There are many other problems that really talk about a much higher level of injustice, of those who do not listen to Alberta separatists speaking,” Pilon said.
Federal regulations
Davies has a list of complaints about federal regulations, from the registration of long weapons to the recently curfado carbon tax, the policies that, according to those that are well fit well with Toronto and the public of Montreal, but are “deaf” to the Albertans.
“Alberta us usually just want to stay alone,” he said.
These complaints are generally reduced to the oil and gas industry, and the perceived damage caused by liberal environmental policies.
Alberta leaders in all games often put oil and gas in the center of their campaigns, since the industry contributes to billions to the provincial coffers every year.
But Leach, in the U of A, says it is not so clear that Ottawa has been detrimental to industry ambitions.
Yes, the federal government has several environmental rules, he says. But also, for example, it has the jurisdiction to force the construction of pipes to the coast through BC
“The Alberta oil and gas industry, left to its own devices, would probably find extremely expensive pipes of building without federal government legislation. Because it means that any owner can maintain that pipe therefore money as they want to try to extract.”
In recent years, the fights for the pipes led the federal government to reject the Northern Linking Pipe in 2016, Trans Canada retired from Energy East in 2017 and Keystone XL to the United States that was killed in 2021.
But Trudeau’s liberals also pushed for Trans Mountain pipes, despite regulatory and legal obstacles, buying it in 2018.
Meanwhile, the industry has continued to grow, increasing in record gains and reaching maximum record of oil production in the last three years.
Leach finds curious that liberal governments in particular have been painted by some as strictly evil for oil and gas, and says that most liquid natural gas projects, and many oil sand projects, which had permits in hand during Harper’s age, never advanced.
“There is a kind of this mythology that conservatives have created about themselves, or that they expect from themselves, that they were fighting against teeth and nails to build all these projects,” he said.
