Alberta

Voters in Alberta have chosen to remain part of Canada in a first-ever independence referendum.

Canadian state broadcaster CBC News called the results of Monday’s vote late on the same day after 48 percent of the ballots counted showed overwhelming support for the “remain” side, with 76 percent opting to stay with Canada.

The result marks a major win for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is facing a trade and political war with the United States amid US President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs and repeated suggestions of annexing the country.

On his way into a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning, Carney called it a “great day.”

“I’m thrilled that Albertans have chosen unity. They’ve chosen to build together. They’ve chosen to continue to take care of each other, to move forward together with purpose,” he said.

But the result also comes as a disappointment for those Albertans seeking independence for the resource-rich region following years of grievances laid at Ottawa’s door. Here’s what we know:

What was the referendum about?

The nonbinding referendum was first announced in May following a campaign and petition by a group of Albertans who want to be an independent country.

While only about one-third of Albertans were found to be pro-independence in polls, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith argued in her announcement that a referendum was necessary to respect the 300,000 Albertans who had petitioned officials for it.

In the referendum, voters answered 10 questions, including whether the government should begin a binding process to seek independence from Canada. They also answered questions on immigration, access to provincial services like education, social care and healthcare, and voter identification requirements.

Prime Minister Carney had campaigned for Albertans to vote “remain”, saying last week at a rally in Calgary that separation would be “ a dangerous bluff that will lead to years of deep division”.

“There are some outside our borders who are working to break us so they can own us,” he said.

Researchers have pointed to possible online influence campaigns by both Russian and US entities that helped amplify the call for separation and allegedly shared misleading information. Alberta PM Smith told media in August that the online activity was under observation.

What have the reactions been?

Prime Minister Carney, who grew up in the region, said “Albertans made a clear choice” in a statement he made early on Tuesday.

“They chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other,” he said, adding that “Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose and high ambition.”

Alberta’s Premier Smith said she was pleased to see the results and that “Albertans have voted for a stronger Alberta in a united Canada.”

Separatist leaders from the groups Let Alberta Decide, the Alberta Prosperity Project and the Pathway to Independence said they will wait for all votes to be counted before conceding.

First Nations groups turned out in strong numbers to vote to remain with Canada, with one southern Alberta polling station in an area home to the Siksika Nation temporarily running out of ballots, local media reported.

Why is Alberta important, and why are there calls for independence?

Many Albertans have long complained that their critical natural resources are funding the government in Ottawa and the commercial hubs of Toronto and Montreal, but that the province does not receive proportionate benefits.

The province, with a population of 5.1 million, holds massive oil deposits. It also holds reserves of critical and rare-earth metals including lithium, titanium and zircon, which are essential for manufacturing many tech items, from smartphones to fighter jets.

Separatist movements, some of which even support Alberta joining the US, go back to the 1940s, following the discovery of oil reserves. Some of Alberta’s premiers have had spats with Ottawa over wealth distribution.

US President Trump has made remarks about Canada becoming a US state in recent months.

Last week, he told a political rally in the US state of Arizona that Canada will “end up being the 51st state, because it’s the only way it works”.

The two countries have been embroiled in a trade war since talks fell apart in August this year and they slapped each other with tit-for-tat tariffs.

Earlier this month, tech billionaire Elon Musk called for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec to separate from Canada, saying “they’d be better off”.

But the matter of Alberta’s independence gained intense scrutiny last year after pro-separatists launched a petition to pressure the government.

Alberta, alongside other western provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have all complained about “western alienation” by the government in the centre.

Is it over for Alberta’s independence bid?

With separatism agitations running so far back, experts say the referendum will likely not end the movement altogether.

Ahead of the vote, some separatist leaders said they would pursue another referendum if necessary, arguing that the referendum shows that independence is legally possible.

“Regardless of what happens on Monday, we’ve already won,” Keith Wilson, co-leader of Let Alberta Decide, said at a rally last week.

With more than one million votes counted, about 76 percent supported remaining in Canada.

Alberta residents have voted to remain ⁠part of Canada in the province’s first-ever referendum on separation, in a much-needed win for Prime Minister Mark Carney as he ‌attempts to unify the country amid an ongoing trade war with the United States.

With more than one million votes counted, about 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, compared with 23 percent who backed beginning a process that could lead to separation, early results showed on Tuesday.

The vote was not a direct referendum on independence but would have set oil-rich Alberta on a path towards a future vote on separation from Canada.

Carney welcomed the result and said Albertans had made a “clear choice” in favour of unity.

“They chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other,” he said in a statement on X.

Jeffrey Rath, a top leader of the secessionist Alberta Prosperity Project, told reporters his push for an independent Alberta will “absolutely” continue, despite the result from Monday’s vote.

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons from this fight,” he said.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a conservative, said she voted against independence but called the referendum to settle an issue that has divided the province.

She has said a win for the federalists would close the secession question.

Alberta has the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves, and much of the secessionist momentum has been driven by anger over oil industry management.

Smith has blamed Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau for igniting the secessionist fire, accusing him of trying to crush oil production to advance his pro-climate agenda.

Alberta’s independence push has also drawn sustained interest from the allies of US President Donald Trump, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called Alberta Washington’s “natural partner”. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and eminent Trump supporter, also posted on X that Alberta “should separate”.

Carney, who grew up in Alberta, has worked to improve relations between the province and Ottawa since taking office last year. He has partnered with Smith on advancing a new pipeline to export more Alberta bitumen overseas, a project considered a nonstarter during Trudeau’s tenure.

Cory Morgan has spent more than 25 years fighting for Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta to become an independent country. On Monday, Albertans will head to the polls to vote on the issue for the very first time. But even if the answer is no, Morgan said he’s in it for the long haul.

“I would respect the will of the voters,” he told Al Jazeera. “If they’ve decided it’s not time to go that route yet, then so be it. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop.”

Morgan, the founder of the advocacy organisation Pathway to Independence, is among a group of longtime separatists who have managed to push what was once a fringe idea onto the ballot.

Monday’s provincial referendum asks Alberta residents to weigh whether they would like to pursue a binding resolution in the future on the question of independence.

Polls indicate the pro-independence side has little chance of succeeding, with four of five people in the province saying they want Alberta to remain a part of Canada. But Morgan’s focus is on the one in five who don’t.

“That’s not a movement that’s leaving,” he said.

What the referendum will mean for the separatist movement and for Canada as a whole, however, is a more complicated question.

What exactly are Albertans voting on?

Monday’s ballot gives Albertans two options: to remain part of Canada or begin the legal process for holding a future referendum on separation.

A vote in favour of the second option doesn’t mean Alberta immediately becomes an independent country.

Any province that tries to secede would first have to go through complex negotiations with the federal government in Ottawa, other provinces and Indigenous peoples who live in and around Alberta.

Some separatist organisers have been using that distinction to encourage people to vote for the referendum — even if they don’t necessarily want independence.

“Strategic separatists and their leaders have been using that ambiguity, that lower-bar threshold, to entice folks to vote not to leave, but rather to send Ottawa a message that Albertans need to be heard,” said Jared Wesley, a political science professor at the University of Alberta.

He told Al Jazeera that the message may be resonating with some voters.

Data collected by Viewpoint Alberta, a University of Alberta-based research initiative, suggests that two-thirds of voters who support the referendum say they’re doing so for strategic reasons, to send a message to Ottawa.

These are people Morgan calls “reluctant separatists”, people who are “at the end of their rope” and simply want Ottawa to pay attention.

But Prime Minister Mark Carney has warned Albertans against this strategy.

“Don’t be fooled by the idea you can ‘send a message’ with your vote,” he told a pro-Canada rally in Calgary on Thursday. “This is not poker. A vote against Canada is a dangerous bluff that will lead to years of deep division and great uncertainty.”

What’s driving Alberta’s separatist movement?

Monday’s referendum has been decades in the making. Separatists have long felt that Alberta, home to the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves, sends too much money to Ottawa, subsidising the rest of the country while receiving little in return.

They also take issue with federal energy policies that they feel limit the potential of the province’s oil industry.

For Morgan, the resentment stretches back to the 1980s when the National Energy Program was introduced by the government of Pierre Trudeau, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father.

The policy used price controls, taxes and ownership rules to keep Canadian energy affordable while directing more of Alberta’s revenues to Ottawa.

It has since become a central symbol of “Western alienation”, a term used to describe the sense of disenfranchisement felt among Canada’s westernmost provinces.

Those tensions resurfaced decades later under Justin Trudeau, whose term began in 2015. His climate policies, including a national carbon tax and a limit on emissions, angered Alberta’s oil sector.

“We’ve been fighting about the same things for 50 years,” said Morgan.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say demonstrations against health restrictions mobilised a new generation of conservative activists, breathing new life into Alberta’s separatist movement.

Trudeau ultimately resigned as Liberal Party leader and prime minister in 2025, amid sinking poll numbers. Carney was elected his replacement.

Last year, under growing pressure from separatist groups, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government made it easier to start referendums, helping bring the question of Alberta’s independence onto the political agenda.

For Wesley, the moment is less about growing public support for independence and more about pressure from within Smith’s governing United Conservative Party, whose members show higher support for separation than Albertans generally.

“We’re having a referendum because Danielle Smith wants us to have a referendum,” Wesley said. “She is looking to solve internal party matters by throwing a question to the broader public.”

Though she called Monday’s referendum, Smith has said she opposes the independence effort, and on October 14, she announced she had voted against seceding.

“In my view, now is not the time to give up hope in our country, not when we have fought so long and come so far,” Smith said in a social media video, explaining her vote.

Could defeat make the movement stronger?

Smith’s political gamble has drawn comparisons with the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, including from Carney.

At the time, then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron called a vote over whether the country should leave the European Union, in hopes of settling a debate dividing his own Conservative Party.

Voters ultimately chose to leave the bloc, triggering years of political unrest.

But Ian Cooper, a political scientist who grew up in Alberta and now lives in Ireland, says a more useful comparison might be a different UK referendum in 1975, when British voters chose overwhelmingly to stay in what was then known as the European Economic Community.

That vote, he said, did little to deter those who wanted the country out.

“The activists who were in favour of Brexit — this is before anybody called it Brexit — they really played the long game,” he said. “It took them 25 years, but they finally achieved it.”

Cooper suspects that, even if Alberta separation is roundly defeated, separatists could take a similar approach, pursuing the issue over the long term to gain prominence and support.

“My impression is that they really are true believers, and it’s really ideologically driven,” he said.

If Monday’s separatist vote fails, Morgan said separatists would need to take a hard look at why they had fallen short and work towards making a stronger case for independence in the future.

He does not believe the underlying grievances can be resolved by working within the Canadian system or by electing a more sympathetic federal government.

Carney, who grew up in Alberta, acknowledged at Thursday’s rally that “the frustrations that many Albertans have felt are real”. He added that Ottawa had made people in the province feel “like our resources weren’t our own”.

The prime minister has tried, amid an ongoing trade war with the United States, to improve relations with Alberta, including through commitments to building a new pipeline to Canada’s west coast and major infrastructure projects.

Morgan admits that, for those whose goal is simply to get more leverage in Ottawa, “it’s pretty clear the movement has been effective”.

“We’ve seen more love from a federal prime minister in the last year than we’ve seen in the last 10,” Morgan said. “The problem though, when it comes to stubborn independence folks like me, is nothing has changed in the system.”

Prime ministers come and go, he added. “We’re just one election away from another hostile one.”

Why the other referendum questions matter

But the referendum could also offer an opportunity to challenge the premise that Alberta’s grievances cannot be addressed within Canada.

The independence question is just one of 10 on Monday’s ballot. Other proposals include restricting temporary residents’ access to healthcare and education, as well as allowing Alberta to choose its own judges.

Smith has encouraged Albertans to vote in favour of the nine other proposals, arguing that they will give her more negotiating power in Ottawa.

“Many Albertans I speak with tell me they want to send Ottawa a message, and I would suggest the best way to do that is to give us a strong mandate on the other nine questions,” she said on social media.

If Albertans back those proposals but Ottawa refuses to make concessions, Cooper, the political scientist, said the movement would have fresh ammunition to argue that meaningful change within the current system is impossible.

“Buried in the nine other questions are the seeds for a future referendum,” Cooper added.

What could keep the movement alive?

Not everyone agrees, however, on whether the separatists can emerge from the vote as a united force.

Wesley explained that people have been drawn to the separatist cause for a variety of reasons.

If there’s a sense that independence is not a realistic prospect, there may be little to keep that group of activists together, he said. They could turn their attention to other conservative issues, such as immigration.

Other experts question whether Alberta’s separatist movement, which is united more by economic grievances than by a shared cultural identity, can endure the way Quebec’s has.

Just two weeks ago, the largely French-speaking province elected the separatist Party Quebecois, which has promised a third referendum on independence after Trump leaves office.

Morgan, however, argues that Alberta does have a distinct culture, shaped by generations of people who have moved to the province in search of prosperity.

“The type of person drawn to do that is often an individualistic type of person,” he said. “They want the opportunity to go out and succeed or fail on their own.”

“And that builds a kind of a distinct culture on its own, even if it’s not a long-built one, as you would see in a distinct area like Quebec with a linguistic difference or in another country.”

Even if Albertans reject separation, he believes the movement has succeeded in forcing Ottawa to take the province’s frustrations more seriously.

“Hopefully some people understand that eventually something has to give,” he said. “So whatever the results are … I do hope, at the very least, they’ve served as a wake-up call to a lot of people.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Thanksgiving message comes a week ahead of Alberta’s vote on a separatism referendum.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has used his Thanksgiving message to Canadians to call for national unity, a week before the oil-rich province of Alberta is set to vote on a proposal to secede from Canada.

“We can’t build big things on fault lines,” Carney said in his video message on Monday, warning that Canada faces threats to its economy, security and way of life.

“We have to be strong, and we are stronger together.”

His comments come as Albertans head to the polls on October 19 to decide whether to begin the process of seeking independence. The initial referendum is non-binding, but it proposes to hold a binding vote in the future to decide whether Alberta should secede.

The question facing voters is: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

The vote follows a growing push by a vocal group of separatists, fuelled by longstanding grievances over federal energy and environmental policies.

The secessionist movement has accused the Canadian government of unfairly targeting Alberta’s oil and gas industry, the cornerstone of the province’s economy.

The movement is also being watched south of the border, as Canada’s relationship with the United States under President Donald Trump has become strained.

An investigation by The Globe and Mail earlier this month revealed that US Republican operatives met with secession organisers in Alberta to talk about campaign strategies. Separatist leaders had reportedly offered access to the province’s water and oil royalties in exchange for US support for independence. Separatist leaders have disputed those claims.

Carney’s comments also come after another secessionist movement, the Parti Quebecois, won the most seats in a provincial election in Quebec last week, allowing it to return to power after more than a decade.

The Parti Quebecois, however, only won 59 seats out of a total of 129 in Quebec’s National Assembly, leaving it short of a majority government.

Still, following that victory, US tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, considered the richest man on the planet, applauded the results. He has been known to use his wealth and influence to support political causes, particularly on the far right.

“Good. Quebec should separate,” Musk wrote on social media. “They would be better off. Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate too.”

Carney, who grew up in Alberta, said he was filming the message from a classroom at his former school, St Francis Xavier High School in Edmonton.

“I’m back home a lot these days because we are building big things again in Alberta: thousands of new homes, high-speed rail, a new pipeline to the West Coast that will create lasting opportunity and prosperity for hundreds of thousands of people in this province and across the country,” he said.

Despite the secessionist movement’s growing visibility, polls suggest most Albertans oppose independence.