Nobody even thinks about booing when Miss Rodeo Taber, Shaylynn Amen, rides out on horseback, holding the Stars and Stripes aloft as she gallops around the arena while Bill Lawson sings the American anthem, a capella, in a gravelly but tuneful cowboy baritone.

This is not a hockey game in eastern Canada, where the Star-Spangled Banner has regularly been booed. 

The fans waiting in the stands to watch the bucking-horse riders risk life and limb in the Taber Agri-Plex don’t have their elbows up. They like the United States. They clap and cheer when the U.S. anthem is done.

In Taber, a corn-growing town of almost 10,000, many would just as soon drop the song Lawson sings next, O Canada.

Taber sits along a Canadian Pacific Railway line, an hour north of the Coutts border crossing. Many people have family roots south of the border, and share the libertarian values, cowboy culture and healthy appreciation for the value of petroleum money of their American cousins. 

In the dry prairie just north of the 49th parallel, where oil derricks and grain elevators interrupt the undulating yellow grass and the snowy tips of the distant Rockies are visible on a clear day, many people are tired of Canadian politicians impeding their industry. Many of them like the idea of Alberta leaving Canada and joining the United States.

“From what I’ve heard, there’s quite a lot of people interested in it,” says Jake Fehr, who stops on his way into the rodeo to share his opinion. 

Fehr, like many Albertans, has had it with being governed by Liberals in far-off Ottawa. “They’re pushing a lot of their agenda over here that we don’t agree with. They’re taking advantage of a lot of our population here.”

“We grew up on cows and oil, right?” says Wayne Powell, a former saddle bronc rider from Turner Valley who is visiting Taber so his son can compete in the rodeo. “It’s directly threatened by Canadian politics.”

Freedom-loving Albertans share values with their American neighbours, says Justice Grigor, 25, a construction worker who has come down from Calgary. He would like to join the United States.“I think we’d all benefit more as part of the U.S.”

The feeling is widespread but not universal. Separatism is in the air, although everyone assumes Alberta would end up as part of the United States. 

Brian Waldie, 81, a retired feed salesman who drove over from the nearby university town of  Lethbridge, might agree with complaints about politics, but he isn’t interested in separating. 

“I think we’re getting rough handling,” he says. “I hope our premier changes that, but I’m a Canadian, and I like Quebec. I’m glad they have that language and their law. We’re Canada.”

The maple leaf hangs in storefronts in Lethbridge, and nobody I meet there shopping on a sunny Friday afternoon is thinking about separating. Many of them are surprised by the idea.

“That seems like that would never happen,” says a young man having a beer on the patio in front of the Telegraph Taphouse. 

“Although the Liberals do suck,” his friend says. “We would appreciate it if you would publish that.”

Separatist sentiment is regularly amplified by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, by journalists like Rick Bell, a Calgary Herald columnist who predicts Albertans will “raise a little hell” if the country elects the Liberals again, and by former Reform Party Leader Preston Manning, who has been repeatedly predicting that another Liberal government could lead to Western separatism. 

“Voters, particularly in central and Atlantic Canada, need to recognize that a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession – a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it,” he wrote in the Globe.

A poll this month shows that 30 per cent of Albertans and 33 per cent of Saskatchewanians would vote to separate if the Liberals are re-elected, about the same level of support for secession as in Quebec.

The message from Bell, Smith and Manning is that Prairie voters are full of righteous anger over federal environmental policies that frustrate the petroleum industry and an equalization program that takes money from the West to subsidize Quebec, where people are hostile to oil and gas.

Resentment is concentrated in rural areas. In rural Alberta, 67 per cent believe their province is treated unfairly by the federal government. In rural Saskatchewan, it’s 71 per cent, according to Pollara Strategic Insights.

In a February 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.

There is no regional breakdown within rural Alberta, but a study done by Jared Wesley, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, found that separatists are likely to be older white men who were born in Alberta and were involved with or sympathetic to the “freedom convoy” against COVID health restrictions. 

That could be why support is higher in Taber, where COVID vaccination rates were low, than in Lethbridge.

Wesley says many of the people drawn to right wing populist movements feel a perceived loss of success or social status: “We are starting to hear a lot of that narrative come out, first in the convoy and now in the Alberta separatist movement, saying that folks here are just tired of losing and need to see some major kind of change.”

But it is not a new sentiment.

Gordon Kesler won a provincial byelection for the separatist Western Canada Concept party in 1982, when anger at Ottawa was at a high point because of the National Energy Program, an industrial policy brought in by Pierre Trudeau that Albertans blamed for a huge economic setback when oil prices fell.

Duane Bratt, a political science professor at Mount Royal University, thinks that moment was more dangerous.

“As much as Danielle Smith and Preston Manning want to talk about it rising, it’s actually lowering in Alberta,” he says. “But it’s being driven at the top. They want it to be an issue, and they’re desperately trying to make it an issue.”

From a distance, Smith appears to be acting like a separatist, issuing demands and portraying Alberta as a victim at every turn. 

Bratt thinks she likes a lot of Trump’s agenda, but it’s also clear that she is facing pressure from the grassroots of her party to take on Ottawa. She took over the leadership of the United Conservative Party after a rebellion linked to the anti-mandate movement brought down former premier Jason Kenney. Her party’s base is angry at the prospect of another Liberal government in Ottawa, so she is channeling that anger.

Smith has warned that if Canadians elect a Liberal government, she will set up a panel to consider Alberta’s options, and she has spoken about the possibility of a citizen-initiated referendum. 

But the current process allows for a referendum on a constitutional question only after citizens collect signatures from 20 per cent of registered voters (almost 600,000),  which seems like an impossible threshold. Smith is now facing pressure to make it easier. 

Cameron Davies, a longtime political organizer in the province, thinks there will be a referendum one way or another.

He is trying to make the Republican Party of Alberta the vehicle for Alberta’s exit from confederation. He favours separation over joining the United States, although the group’s name and logo reflect a heavy American influence, and he spent five years in the U.S. Marine Corps.

There is something in the air, he says. “I am shocked, actually, by the number of people that I’ve had conversations with — at town halls, coffee meetings, dinner parties — that have said, ‘I’ve never thought myself a separatist, but I think that might be our only choice left.’”

Davies, like a lot of Albertans, has roots in the United States. They are mostly not Loyalists (people who fled the American Revolution), as in Eastern Canada, but people who came north to ranch and to work in the oil industry. Since they weren’t driven out, they are naturally more pro-American, more libertarian and more individualistic than easterners, and the long political dominance of Easterners chafes like a badly fitted saddle.

Many families recall old injustices having to do with the creation of the province, the Crow rate, long-forgotten tariff regimes. They believe they were treated for decades like a regional hinterland, set up to be exploited by bigger communities far away. A popular cartoon from 1915 shows Canada as a cow eating in the prairies and being milked in the eastern cities.

Davies says current conflicts over equalization and environmental limits on the oil industry fit into a long-standing pattern, and people have just had enough. “In the last couple dozen events that we’ve conducted — low-key organizing, having interesting meetings with diverse groups across the province — the party’s membership has exploded by an additional 8,000 in the last three and a half weeks. And that’s without a lot of effort.”

Davies, who recently resigned from Smith’s United Conservative Party in protest of her handling of a health scandal, says his RPA has lots of money and is ready to run candidates in Alberta’s next provincial election. 

Davies is the real deal, says independent journalist Rachel Parker, who has been covering the separatist movement closely. “His plan is 100 per cent serious. I know he’s been working on this for some time.”

Parker has been covering the Alberta Prosperity Project, whose spokesperson, lawyer Jeff Rath, has gone to Washington, D.C., to talk to American officials about how to get Alberta to join the United States. 

But Kenney has described Rath as a “treasonous kook,” and the two former Conservative MPs involved in the project do not look like potential leaders: Rob Anders, who was widely seen as eccentric, and LaVar Payne, a low-profile backbencher. 

Parker is married to former UCP organizer David Parker, who played a key role in ousting Kenney and is now pushing for Alberta to separate. She says opinion is divided on whether separation is the real goal: “Some people say we should start putting pressure for independence because that will force the federal government, Conservative or Liberal, to take us seriously, and we can pass some of our objectives and get a better deal at confederation. They basically still want to fix confederation. Other people want an Albertan state, and other people want Alberta independence.”

She thinks the movement needs a clear plan, and she thinks Davies is the guy to provide that. 

But so far the math doesn’t look good. Separating from Canada does not appeal to Albertans with parents in Cape Breton, Vancouver or New Delhi. 

Many Albertans will be angry if the Liberals are elected again, but there would have to be a decisive shift in public sentiment for the separatist movement to be electorally significant.

Monte Solberg, a former MP for Medicine Hat and a former minister in Stephen Harper’s government, says most Albertans can’t be convinced. 

“They can enumerate all the wrongs that have been done to Alberta in their mind, but they also look south and say, ‘But you think in my wildest dreams I would ever consider joining America with that crazy man at the helm?’” he told me in a recent interview. 

Polling suggests that Mark Carney may pick up seats in the Prairies, which would make the situation more complicated. 

“They won’t be pleased at the prospect of a Carney win, but if he wins with some seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan, he’s got an opportunity to be a uniter and do some things,” says Solberg.

But it is not clear what a Carney government can do to take the steam out of Smith’s complaints. The equalization system was set up when Harper, an Albertan, was prime minister, and Pollara’s polling shows that about 40 per cent of people in Saskatchewan and Alberta wrongly believe it redistributes tax dollars from rich provinces to poor provinces. It is actually funded by all federal taxpayers. 

On resource development and pipelines, Carney may have more leeway to act than the previous Liberal government, since polls show voters may be more open to development than they were in the past.

Wesley doesn’t think the movement will even work as a way to seek leverage, because Alberta is by far the richest province.

“A lot of Albertans that we’ve interviewed in focus groups see that tension,” he says. 

On the one hand, they are saying: “Oh no, we’re very downtrodden. We’re held back. We’re falling behind.” On the other, they are saying: “Move to Alberta! It’s the best place in the world.”

Around the world, most secessionist movements have been based on cultural and linguistic communities, not political and economic disagreement.

Jean-François Lisée, who made a thorough study of secessionist movements while he was a senior adviser to Parti Québécois Premier Jacques Parizeau during the 1995 referendum, is not aware of any successful movements based on economic arguments.

“It would be quite singular,” he says, “to have a nationalist movement based on the fact that our economic development is shackled by federal policies on the environment and energy, and so we must be free to be richer — although we’re already very rich — but we want to be richer, and that’s a national impetus.”

On the other hand, Lisée would be pleased if it happens, since it could show a way for Quebec.

“Probably nothing will happen, but if Carney wins and Smith heats up the base, they get to 50 per cent, they leave Canada,” he says. “If they fail leaving Canada, then it’s very bad for the PQ. But if they succeed and then Saskatchewan succeeds, OK, it can be done.”

Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, thinks the lack of a national culture in Alberta holds the movement back. “It’s true that Alberta doesn’t have the kind of conditions for what we call sub-state nationalism,” he says. “To me, it’s a form of regionalism more than nationalism. You can say First Nations, it’s parallel to nationalism in a way. They have their own specific language and culture.”

And Alberta First Nations are said to be unenthusiastic about the idea of Alberta separating.

“They can’t,” said Ninastako Oka, a young man from the Blood tribe, part of the Blackfoot confederacy, on Saturday. Oka spoke with absolute certainty, sitting with his family outside Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where there is a museum of Blackfoot culture. He spoke knowledgeably about Blackfoot history, which he said he learned from his grandfather. He pointed out that the treaties were signed before Alberta was created and mentioned the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized Indigenous title. In his view, Alberta cannot separate from Canada.

“Alberta’s on treaty land,” he said. “This is still treaty territory. No matter what part of Alberta. None of it is fully Alberta, which we negotiated. It’s not theirs. We’re sharing the land. The treaty protects this land. The treaty protects the soil, the people, the animals, everything on it.”

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