Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi launched the For Alberta For Canada campaign (source: Naheed Nenshi / YouTube)
“Our country is not perfect, but it’s the best place in the world, and Albertans are ready to fight for Canada,” Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi said as he launched his party’s For Alberta For Canada campaign in anticipation of an expected referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada.
“Every day, Albertans ask me one simple question about separatism: ‘what can I do?’ This new campaign is an answer to that—giving everyday people the tools and the power they need to stand up for our country.
They know that if Alberta separates, we’ll lose so much. Even the threat of a referendum is already damaging our economy and creating chaos and uncertainty. Today we are giving Albertans the tools to take action and be ready for this fall.”
The NDP campaign will kick off with a province-wide door-knocking day of action on April 25, which Nenshi says aims to attract pro-Canadian Albertans beyond NDP voters.
“We’re not repeating the mistake of the people who thought Brexit would never pass. We’re getting out there now,” Nenshi told reporters. “We’re not sleepwalking into this.”
Support for Alberta separatism has reached what is being described as a 5-year high at 27 per cent in favour, with 69 per cent opposed. But Pollara Strategic Insights’ Dan Arnold warns against complacency:
Even though the “winning conditions” are seemingly not there today, support for separatism in Alberta is meaningfully higher now than it was pre-Trump, higher than it was when “F Trudeau” bumper stickers represented 8% of Alberta’s GDP. As Albertans talk about separatism more seriously, support is rising. That’s a concern.
Meanwhile, leader of the Stay Free Alberta group collecting signatures to trigger a referendum on Alberta separation says more than 177,000 signatures have already been collected ahead of the May 1 deadline.
“We [have] more than the buffer that’s required if [Elections Alberta] refuse signatures as well,” Mitch Sylvestre told CBC.
Sylvestre is also the President of the United Conservative Party constituency association in Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul and was presented with the party’s best fundraiser award in 2025.
Polling has shown that UCP supporters are deeply divided on separation, with 55 per cent in favour of leaving Canada and 45 per cent supporting remaining in the country. This is a huge contrast from Alberta NDP supporters who, at 97 per cent, are close to unanimous in their support for staying in Canada.
The current version of Alberta separatism has deep roots in the opposition to COVID-19 public health restrictions and the online political environment that grew around it. Alberta separatist movement is strongly influenced by the politics of American President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and separatist leaders have made numerous trips to Washington DC to seek financial support for an independent Alberta Republic.
Documents like the Free Alberta Strategy, which was co-authored by Premier Danielle Smith’s Chief of Staff, Rob Anderson, have further legitimized the idea within the governing UCP.
🎙️Podcast: Alberta’s Separation Referendum — Who’s Going to Stand Up for Canada?
The separatist wing of the UCP’s activist base was on full display at the UCP’s annual general meeting last November when a slate of candidates endorsed by prominent separatist groups swept the board of directors elections.
More recently, Red Deer-South MLA Jason Stephan, who serves as Premier Smith’s Parliamentary Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, penned a column in a local newspaper supporting the separation petition. Stephan coming out in support of Alberta separatism wasn’t a surprise to many people, as he’s toyed with the idea since he was first elected in 2019 and last year issued statements in support of ending official bilingualism and abolishing the Canadian monarchy.
Smith has continued to successfully hold together her party’s voter coalition with this risky balancing act of appealing to both people who outright want to leave Alberta and people who want to remain in Canada but are unhappy with Alberta’s relationship with Ottawa. For the moment, she seems to have those two groups firmly in her corner.
Previous Conservative party premiers like Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein succeeded in marginalizing separatists on the political fringes in smaller right-wing parties. But today’s separatists count themselves among the UCP’s most enthusiastic activists and were part of the populist wave that swept Smith into the Premier’s Office in 2022.
It’s highly unlikely they are just going to abandon their support of separatism if and when the referendum to separate from Canada fails. They are now an entrenched force that could have a lot more legitimacy and political capital after a referendum.
I asked a few months ago who might step up to lead the pro-Canada efforts, and it looks like it will be a choir rather than a solo act. Nenshi’s campaign is the first of what is expected to be a handful of pro-Canada efforts that will launch ahead of the referendum.
Former Progressive Conservative MLA Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian group is active, and former UCP Premier Jason Kenney is leading a one-man campaign that includes a series of public debates with Alberta separatist supporters.
Kenney’s first debate is against separatist lawyer Keith Wilson at the Civitas Canada conference at the Royal Glenora Club on May 1. Postmedia columnist Lorne Gunter is moderating.
Premier Danielle Smith and Justice Minister Mickey Amery have gone out of their way numerous times to amend the Citizen Initiative Act to clear the way for a referendum on Alberta separation, but First Nations leaders argue that a separation referendum would violate the Treaties signed between First Nations and the Crown.
Alberta government lawyers argue it wouldn’t, but Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation Chief Sheldon Sunshine and Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro raised questions about government lawyers collaborating with separatist lawyers.
Court of King’s Bench Justice Shaina Leonard issued a limited ruling yesterday on a stay application from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy.
This means that Chief Elections Officer Gordon McClure will temporarily halt certifying signatures from the Stay Free Alberta citizen initiative petition until the final court ruling. The stay application does not prevent the separatist group from continuing to collect signatures.
If the court rules against the separatist referendum, it’s likely Smith’s UCP will come under intense pressure from party activists to hold a separation referendum anyway.
If you think this is a lot to follow, I assure you that Alberta politics is going to get a lot noisier and probably more confusing during the months ahead.
A recent Leger poll showed that around 56 per cent of Albertans say the province is on the wrong track but 53 per cent of decided voters would still vote for Smith’s UCP if a provincial election were held today. Nenshi’s NDP sits at 36 per cent support, down 8 points from where the Rachel Notley-led party landed on election day in 2023.
And to make things more interesting are a hand full of polls showing the federal Liberals doing historically well in Alberta and that support for Prime Minister Mark Carney is surprisingly high. A poll released by Abacus Data last month showed the Liberals at 36 per cent support in Alberta and leading in Edmonton:
In Edmonton, the Liberals lead with 47% compared with 40% for the Conservatives. In Calgary, the Conservatives hold a 10-point advantage, 49% to 39%. Outside the two major cities, the Conservative advantage widens considerably. Outside of Calgary and Edmonton, the Conservatives lead 61% to 26%. In rural Alberta, the Conservative vote rises to 65%, while the Liberals fall to 21%.
🚲🌆 Upcoming event: City Councillor Michael Janz is hosting Mikael Colville-Andersen in Edmonton on May 1. Colville-Andersen will share his urbanist observations about pandemic response and from living and volunteering in Ukraine during the Russian invasion to explore what cities reveal about themselves when systems fail.
Fifty days ago Edmonton Riverbend MP Matt Jeneroux crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Jeneroux’s defection wasn’t unexpected, it had been rumoured for months, but a late 2025 statement that he planned to resign in 2026 led many people to believe there would be a by-election in Edmonton Riverbend.
Edmontonians won’t get the chance to vote in a federal by-election this spring, but had Jeneroux resigned we would have had an opportunity to test the long list of recent polls that show support for Carney’s Liberals increasing in Alberta. It wouldn’t have been much a test in most Alberta ridings, as Pierre Polievre’s Battle River-Crowfoot by-election win demonstrated, but Riverbend is a different matter.