Near the end of an election that was not going well for him, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet delivered a disdainful assessment of his country: “Like it or not, we are part of an artificial country, which has very little meaning, called Canada.”

When Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston fired off a letter saying, somewhat histrionically, that Blanchet had insulted “all Canadians and our great nation,” Blanchet repeated his assertion. He was stating a fact, he said, not trying to insult anyone.

“I am not the one to have said that Canada is a post-national nation,” he said. “Quebec is anything but a post-national nation. It’s a proud nation.”

Soon thereafter, Journal de Montreal columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté pointed out online that he had made the same point in a recent column, which had perhaps inspired Blanchet. 

That column — headlined Le Canada n’existe pas — Canada does not exist — argued, like many of Bock-Côté’s columns, that Quebec is real, unlike Canada. 

All of this is revealing: Canada is an artificial country, founded from the outset on a refusal to be American. It has never moved beyond this. Its identity is fundamentally negative. It must regularly update it to fill its inner void.

In other words, Canada does not exist beyond a formal political structure, an invasive federal technocracy, and an official ideology.

Fortunately, Quebec does not have this problem.

His column made me think of philosopher George Grant’s Lament For a Nation, which was published in 1965, after Liberal Lester Pearson beat John Diefenbaker. For Grant, Diefenbaker’s fall was the end of a distinctly British Canada. He thought the Liberals were making Canada a “a branch-plant society” of the United States, giving up “independence in defense and foreign affairs.

Canada has ceased to be a nation, but its formal political existence will not end quickly. Our social and economic blending into the empire will continue apace, but political union will probably be delayed. Some international catastrophe or great shift of power might speed up this process. Its slowness does not depend only on the fact that large numbers of Canadians do not want it, but also on sheer lethargy.

Of course, both Grant and Bock-Côté are wrong. Canada exists. The recent election demonstrates that Canadians, including an overwhelming majority in French and English Canada, want it to continue to exist — and do not wish to be annexed by the United States. It is not the first time that Canadians have made that clear.

In the 19th century, Indigenous Peoples, French Canadians and Loyalists formed an alliance to build this country because they knew that if they didn’t co-operate, they would be meat for the voracious American eagle. The alliance is often frayed, but whenever the Americans threaten Canada, everyone is reminded why we entered into it in the first place.

Mark Carney won the recent election because he presented himself successfully as the best person to prevent Canada’s annexation. During the campaign, Pierre Poilievre belatedly adopted Carney’s defiance to Donald Trump, and Blanchet had to promise voters he would work with Carney to hold on to part of his base.

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Carney appears to be a disciplined, strategic leader, and there is reason to hope he has decent plans to protect Canadian sovereignty, but the country remains vulnerable. You can tell because he has made “Canada Strong” his slogan, a tacit acknowledgement of its weakness. This week’s surrender on the Digital Services Tax shows that we are so reliant on the United States that we are negotiating from a position of weakness, but the greatest threat is internal.   

Voters have signed on to protect Canadian sovereignty, but politically significant groups of voters in Quebec and the Prairies are not convinced. During the recent election, I went to Quebec and Alberta to report on the state of the secessionist movements for Ricochet. In both provinces, almost a third of voters believe they would be better off outside Canada, not enough to win a referendum under current political circumstances, but circumstances can change, and my reporting in the federation’s weak spots left me uneasy.

Aren’t all countries artificial?

The dim-witted belligerence of Donald Trump has weakened the movement in Quebec, but it has deep roots, a profound raison d’être based on a deep sense of historical grievance and a distinct culture that Quebecers can be expected to defend if it is threatened. 

That said, I don’t find Bock-Côté’s critique of Canada very compelling. Canada is artificial, but so are all countries. Canada is not a unitarian state, like France, Italy or Japan, with a dominant language, culture and a common national culture. But that is not the only kind of country.

Canada is a loose federation, with a loose social contract. It allows for hyphenation. You don’t even have to believe in it deeply, because it is just an architecture for living in such a way that people don’t bother each other very much, guided by a powerful Charter of Rights and Freedoms that defines the relationship between citizens and their governments.

Bock-Côté complains of “invasive federal technocracy,” and there is tension between provincial and federal governments that looks invasive to those who would wish that Quebec or Alberta were not part of Canada, but how invasive is it really? Bock-Côté lives in France, where the government did its best to wipe out regional languages — Basque, Breton and Catalan, for example — which were once strong and are now confined to rural areas, like French in Louisiana. In the 1880s, while French enjoyed protection under Canadian law, French Prime Minister Jules Ferry brought in laws that outlawed other languages, and students who spoke Breton or Catalan in school were punished. 

Canada does not have a muscular central state, like France, that imposes a national language, culture and school curriculum on all its citizens. We could not. It is 9,262 kilometres from L’Anse aux Meadows to Tuktoyatuk.

Bock-Côté, an opponent of mass immigration and an apologist for Marine LePen’s far right Rassemblement National, wants a state for the Quebec nation, and disdains Canadian multiculturalism, warning that immigration will lead to the disappearance of the French Canadian identity.

Bock-Côté may now be the most important intellectual leader for Quebec nationalists, which would confuse the progressives who built the movement in the 1960s and ’70s. They saw Quebecers as a colonized people engaged in a struggle of national liberation, like the Algerians or Irish. Now the movement is morphing into a right-wing populist party, influenced by “great replacement” ideology and focused on keeping formerly colonized people out.

If the Parti Québécois wins the election in 2026 — which is no sure thing, although they currently lead in polls — and PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon keeps his promise to hold a third referendum, it will be on the basis that it is the chance ultime — the last chance for Quebec, before it is electorally overwhelmed by immigrants. He may be right in a way. Although sovereignist parties often nominate candidates from immigrant backgrounds, their electoral appeal seems limited in those communities.

Quebec’s strong language laws guarantee that French remains dominant. Although francophones complain about increased use of English in touristic parts of downtown Montreal, the census shows 94 per cent of Quebecers can conduct a conversation in French in 2016, unchanged since 2011. The number of Quebecers for whom French is their first language is declining as immigrants settle, but because of Bill 101, they must send their children to French school. Those kids grow up to be French-speaking Quebecers, but they do not end up sharing in the increasingly nostalgic national drama of the Québécois de souche — la survivance — a beautiful, affirming story of shared struggle leading to greater prosperity and autonomy, although not — yet — a final, ecstatic transformation to full sovereignty, with a UN seat and a national hockey team. 

During the referendum campaign of 1980, Jean Chretien mocked that ambition, saying the Péquistes wanted “un ambassador du Québec à Gabon, dans un Cadillac avec un flag sur le hood.” 

But for many francophones, giving up on that dream — the national state, the hockey team and the cadillac avec un flag sur le hood — would mean giving up on their conception of themselves. Over beers, sovereignist boomers will tell you they don’t think much of the prospects, whatever the position of the Parti Québécois in the polls, for sovereignty. It is starting to look like a boomer project, and the boomers have passed the phase of life where they take on great adventures. 

Given the success of Quebec since the Quiet Revolution, and the dangerous world in which we find ourselves, for the moment Quebecers seem to have recalled the ancestral reason for the marriage of convenience to English Canada — a refusal to be American — and seem resigned to put off their date with national destiny. The winning conditions remain elusive, but the movement is dying very slowly, and the threat has not disappeared.

From slow burn to prairie fire 

Canadians’ long experience with Quebec sovereignist movements has not necessarily prepared us for what is happening in Alberta, which has the characteristics of a Prairie populist movement more than a carefully organized long-term project. For generations, francophone Quebecers could only easily enter the professions through the priesthood or law school, so Quebec society has a tradition of elegant argument and political cunning honed in the Laurentian corridors of power.

Alberta, on the other hand, produces brash oilmen — the blue-eyed sheiks — who are not inclined to take no for an answer. They are applying the same optimistic, can-do attitude to the prospect of seceding from Canada, rapidly, without ever having elected a separatist government, like wildcat drillers, trying their luck.

The American belligerence that has sapped the will of Quebec secessionists has emboldened their Prairie counterparts, largely because many Westerners have family roots in the Western United States and libertarian inclinations, especially as regards the oil industry. 

Western populist movements are often compared to Prairie fires — they spread quickly but burn out. And grass fires do not normally pose a threat to cities. In a recent poll, 23 per cent of rural Albertans told Pollara they would vote to separate, compared with 15 per cent in Calgary and 15 per cent in Edmonton. 

What research exists shows that support for separation is higher among native-born, white Albertans living in rural areas, with a Venn diagram that overlaps with previous populist movements — the Yellow Vest and Convoy movements, for example. Some of the standard bearers for the movement wrapped themselves in the Maple Leaf not that long ago, when they were backing the “trucker” protest on Parliament Hill. 

It may be possible to make too much of the correlation with anti-vax nutjobs. The movement existed before the 21st century populist wave. It even elected a member of the Alberta legislature in a byelection in 1982, although he lost in the general election that followed. That victory was possible because of anger with the National Energy Program, a Liberal industrial policy that Albertans saw as an attack. Separatist sentiment in Alberta and Saskatchewan tends to correlate with feeling disrespected by the government in Ottawa.

Their complaints about equalization and regulations around fossil fuel extraction are real, but the policies are not plainly oppressive. The current equalization system was established by Albertan Stephen Harper, and it is similar to wealth redistribution systems in many other countries. The most passionate arguments about restrictions on the oil industry are made by people who don’t think there should be any limits on greenhouse gasses, who look south of the border and see wealth being fracked out of the ground without limits on emissions.

Alberta is plainly prospering in Canada — it is one of the richest places in the world, and federal pollution rules have not prevented production from steadily rising — but federal restrictions are galling to many in the oil industry, particularly smaller players in oil-field services businesses that only make money when big projects are getting built.  

The separatists’ complaints do not seem like good enough reasons to secede from a functioning nation state, which is normally such a calamitous event that it is only undertaken by a cultural group that feel themselves oppressed by another people, like the Irish or Algerians.

The Prairie separatist movement is likely best understood as a symptom of intensifying polarization, a show of temper rather than a sustainable political movement. During the recent election, Preston Manning warned that if easterners stubbornly elected another Liberal government, Western Canada might have to secede. 

This is a new message from him. The first principle of the Reform Party, which he founded in 1987, was that Canada was “one nation, indivisible,” and during the referendum campaign of 1995, he repeatedly warned Quebecers that they would lose their passports and much of their territory if they voted to separate.

His message to Westerners now contains no warnings about the difficulties they would face in a post-Canadian future, just a list of Western grievances. Manning started complaining bitterly after it became clear that Mark Carney was likely to defeat Poilievre, a protégé since the 1990s. 

Manning’s pique seems not that different from American Democrats promising they will move to Canada if the Republicans win an election, a sign of partisan misery, not a legitimate justification for a constitutional adventure. 

The most worrying possibility is that there are people in Alberta, including powerful people, who want to engineer the annexation of the province by Donald Trump. If Alberta does not resemble Ireland in 1916, perhaps it resembles Donetsk in 2014 — when “little green men” provoked unrest, giving the Russians an excuse to invade.

The idea seems fantastical given our long, peaceful relationship with the United States, but terrible things always seem fantastical before they happen. Alberta has 165 billion barrels of oil in the ground, the fourth largest reserve in the world. When Justin Trudeau met Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in January, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum joked that the United States might like to annex Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The advocates for secession are not explicitly discussing annexation, but lawyer Jeffrey Rath, who is organizing the petition that will likely lead to a referendum next year, has been to Washington for talks with unnamed American officials about joining the U.S. Cameron Davies, leader of the Alberta Republican Party, served in the U.S. Marines, and the name and logo of his party make it seem annexation is on his mind as well. 

Albertans would not have easier access to oil markets as a land-locked republic, after all, but as part of the United States.

Smith says that she wants a sovereign Alberta within a United Canada, but as Stephen Harper said, don’t listen to what politicians say, watch what they do.

At the end of April, Smith tabled the Election Statutes Amendment Act, which lowered the threshold for a secession referendum petition to 177,000 signatures, down from 600,000, which means there will almost certainly be a referendum next year.

The bill also does a number of other things that may make it easier for foreigners to put money into campaigns. The bill allows corporate and union donations, which is a reversal of a long-term trend across jurisdictions in Canada, bringing Alberta more in line with the Wild West financing rules in the United States.

What is to stop Americans who want to influence a referendum from funnelling money through a friendly Alberta corporation? Elections Alberta, theoretically, could investigate and prosecute anyone who does such a thing, but in the same act, Smith put new limits on the investigators, including a new two-year statute of limitations. 

Lorne Gibson, the former election commissioner, suspects mischief. 

“The change made me wonder what may have happened a year ago that the UCP may want to be kept buried!” he wrote in an email. “The subjects of an investigation will quite often dodge investigators for months and their legal representatives frequently do their best to delay proceedings.”

Gibson was fired by Jason Kenney after he uncovered campaign finance violations related to Kenney’s successful 2017 UCP leadership race. He says the changes to the law are “anti-democratic and intended to return election law enforcement to the ‘Wild West’ as they were before the Office of the Alberta Election Commissioner was initially established.”

One of the people that Gibson fined before Kenney fired him was Davies, now the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta. Alberta elections law limits how much investigators can say about an offence, but we know Davies was fined $15,000 in 2019 for “obstruction of an investigation.”

According to Elections Alberta’s web site, those fines were “referred to Crown Debit Collection,” and then paid off on April 8, just as Davies was preparing to run candidates in provincial byelections.

This year, Elections Alberta fined another key separatist organizer — David Parker — more than $120,000 for political financing violations, including accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada, and knowingly making false statements in a financial report.

Rath, who is spearheading the referendum, is facing three separate disciplinary actions at the Alberta Bar Society.

The separatist leaders can be expected to show disdain for the rules, and Smith has changed the rules to allow more money and hamstrung the election cops. There are rumours in Calgary — there is no way to know if they are true — that rich Americans want to help Alberta spring itself from its Laurentian prison. 

But there is no reason to think American oil interests want Alberta in the USA, says Heather Exner-Pirot, director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. 

“You have to appreciate, American shale is on their back right now. They’re fighting for their lives. Canada is a competitor, and we are cheaper than them, and that’s a problem. So I don’t think American oil and Texas wants more Canadian cheap oil.”

Still, it is disquieting that Smith has opened the door to corporate money and weakened the election police in advance of a referendum in which the Americans might want to interfere.  

Smith looks like British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016, when he called a referendum on Brexit, which he opposed, as a sop to anti-Europe trouble makers in his party. 

Like Cameron, Smith is under pressure. After all, she became premier because the grassroots separatist-leaning base of her party took out Kenney. If she had not given them a referendum, they might have rebelled. But they are rebelling anyway. Davies ran unsuccessfully in a recent byelection, winning 19 per cent, not enough to tip that riding, but enough to threaten others in a general election. 

The whole thing looks like a cul-de-sac, a waste of time and energy, which may scare away investment and tear apart Smith’s party, but has little chance of tearing apart the country. 

Under the Clarity Act, which was brought in after the 1995 referendum, if a province votes in favour of a clear referendum question on secession, the federal government would be obliged to negotiate, although it would first require the House of Commons to consider the question, and then undertake constitutional negotiations involving all the provinces — an unbelievably cumbersome process to imagine, which would no doubt be accompanied by terrible economic suffering.

In 1995, Jacques Parizeau, who thought like a revolutionary, planned to make a unilateral declaration of independence after talks with Ottawa failed, and he was hoping for international recognition from France — hoping that would somehow lead to de facto independence after a period of uncertainty.  

At that time, the Americans were firmly on the Non side. That may not be the case if Alberta votes to go while Trump is in the White House. And if Canada lost Alberta, if it suddenly had a big rectangular gap in the middle of the country, how much longer could a poorer and weaker Canada survive? The feuding provinces would finally be meat for the American eagle.

Is that what Smith wants? Is she a loyal Canadian fighting for her province in the tradition of Peter Lougheed and Danny Williams, or René Lévesque, a federalist politician who eventually decides to raise a rebel flag? 

Complicating her calculations is the fact that she is facing a corruption scandal that looks dangerous to her government. 

In the months ahead, she will be matching wits with another Albertan — Carney — who will seek to weaken support for Alberta’s secession not by debating her but by building things, demonstrating that the federation can work in a practical way.

Jean-François Lisée, who was Parizeau’s strategist during the 1995 referendum, told me recently that in the next Quebec referendum, the sovereignists would benefit from the widespread sense that the federal government is not competent.

“Quebecers felt in 1980 and 1995 that you can have grievances against the federal government, but at least this was a very competent outfit. Now, this has been shattered in the last 10 years. Quebecers do not feel that the Quebec government is a competent outfit, but before they felt that the federal government was. So now, if you have to choose between two incompetent outfits, well, maybe you can choose yours and not theirs, you know?”

Albertan secessionism is a real and growing threat, but the best response, as in Quebec, is not meeting the demands of the secessionists, but a sustained demonstration of competence, which is what Carney has promised. It is disturbing to think how much depends on whether he can deliver.

Ricochet’s coverage of the 2025 federal election, during which the author travelled to Quebec and Alberta to report on separatist movements in those provinces, was supported in part by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund, an initiative of the Michener Awards Foundation, the Rideau Hall Foundation and the Public Policy Forum. You can help us do more award-winning journalism by signing up for our free newsletter, and becoming a monthly donor.