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It's like having to belong to a higher imposed authority (either the original country or the seceded territory) is bad for the individual that doesn't want any of that. If only there was a solution to that problem...

Eh, it ain't ever happening anyways, this is just the UCP and other assorted wack-jobs playing games with Ottawa again.

All the Oil Sands land is treaty land, so First Nations get it if we leave.

> Let's say you let a province (or US state) secede over political/cultural issues. What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride?

Well, thats politics? The people proposing this are supposed to be considering that. And the people in that position are supposed to be considering that.

Every day there are votes with outcomes people dont want to go along with the ride for. But they do, or they resist, or otherwise.

>>What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride?

All of Scotland voted against leaving the EU. Every single county has voted no. And yet it still got dragged out.

So I guess the answer is - people get told to shut up and deal with it.

Because the procedure for changing the constitution is in the constitution. That would have to be followed at least once.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

Yes, and here "Canadians want" is used to say "the people within 100km of the St. Lawrence want". (That's actually part of the problem.)

Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.

AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.

Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.

What about the right of not being determined by others? Say, the 10% who vote no.

Courts have determined that in these processes consultation must occur even at early times as this.

I think you'll need to look at the constitution of Canada (section 35) and the legally-binding treaties that have been signed with indigenous Canadians. There's no "tribal" territory. It's all treaty territory.

> They are already separate first nations not joined to Canada or Alberta

They are part of Canada.

Treaties 6, 7, and 8 clearly ceded indigenous lands to the Crown, and the Indian Act spells out the relationship between First Nations and Canada. Further, the Constitution Act, 1982, contains Section 25 of the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms articulating ''Aboriginal And Treaty Rights''

In a parallel universe - UK never left EU as Scotland, Northern Ireland, and City of London kicked out England and Wales out of UK, and saved everyone years of turmoil.

/sarcasm

With strong justification, as one of the reasons their earlier bid for secession from the UK was squashed was the argument that secession from the UK would also automatically kick them out of the EU.

That is still in play as the failure of Brexit solidifies. They can follow the lead of Ireland and the arrangements for the land crossing with N.I.

un-elected government officials and activist judges

Does "activist judge" mean the same thing in Canada that it does in the United States: "Any judge who rules against my position?"

Also:

dismalaf

Name checks out.

> In Canada there's layers of un-elected government officials and activist judges who seem more concerned with getting federal funding (aka. kickbacks aka. bribes) than any sort of democratic notions.

Citation needed. Good luck

> So what happens if a majority of First Nations people want to separate but the chiefs in charge of a particular band don't?

It seems you're implying something here that is comically ridiculous. Like some sort of crocodile-tear for natives who are unheard, but thankfully you've got their back.

Natives overwhelmingly reject both Quebec and Alberta separatism. Quebec is old news so I'll ignore that, so instead lets stick to Alberta.

The Alberta separatism movement (~30%, which is about the same as the MAGA base in the US, and they are largely interchangeable and driven by the same racism and stupidity, and the MAGA base is hugely the reason this is all happening, grotesquely interfering in Canada) is overwhelmingly filled with right-wing, racist, backwards hicks. The idea of being dragged along with the goals of those people is utterly orthogonal to the best interest of natives, for blatantly obvious reasons.

>Bands and their elected officials voted to allow pipelines, then some "hereditary chiefs" associated with environmentalist groups convinced courts that their opinion carries the same weight as elected chiefs and the court blocked pipeline projects

You mean the pipeline that is currently fully built and operating at triple capacity? THAT pipeline? Or the many other pipelines that have been built, where resource extraction is higher than it has been in history?

Or maybe you're talking about the coast to coast pipeline that would have been built under the national energy program that Alberta not only rejected, but they use as the basis of their rage to this day (while simultaneously bashing their fists about not having a coast to coast pipeline).

Exploit the West? Thats rich and definitely a western centric short sighted viewpoint.

That's what they said about Brexit. 52% of the population voted yes in a single election, and the rest got dragged along for a multi-year ride. Current polls put support for the decision at 31%, but it's too late.

Unless you make sure that most, if not all adults can vote, it won't show it.

If you only have 45% of your population votes, regardless of reason, you aren't actually getting the public opinion.

maybe in the same way that we have to keep voting on awful privacy legislation

> As an outsider I like this idea of being able to vote yourself out

"Voting with your feet" is an option available to almost everyone except North Koreans.

You realize that this is the perfect way for foreign influence to destabilize western society, right?

Democracy hasn't been hardened against social media and I'd prefer not to be another failed experiment like Brexit where we allow for foreign money to intentionally damage society.

Apparently more than one are in hiding, TIL. Seems appropriate for the kind of folk that do this.

By glossing over all the details as “surmountable” you are illustrating how easy it is to ignore critical complexity. Debt includes concepts like “what does independent Alberta actually own or have to go into debt to purchase if major assets within its borders are literally Canadian federal property or connected to existing treaty rights?” This answer makes or breaks the entire proposal and does not have an easy or obvious solution.

I'll give you that currency isn't a huge issue. From what I recall, Quebec wanted to continue using the Canadian dollar if they separated.

If they opted to go with the USD, they'd have to trade all their CAD - which will undoubtedly take a huge hit if they separated.

I still think that separatists would say that Alberta doesn't have to deal with a share of the debt and that would be a sticking point.

Federal income taxes are the same in all Canadian provinces except for Quebec (as part of the abatement settlement), but Alberta and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan are large net contributors, since the higher-earning median Albertan is more affected by Canadian federal marginal tax rates. It's an exact analogue of Californian tax revenue paying for Mississippi. (If you'd like some keywords for searching, the popular term is Alberta equalization)

Under the current equalization system, Alberta last received a single Canadian dollar of direct spending in the 1964/65 fiscal year, whilst four other provinces have received over $1B annually since 2014 (Quebec, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia).

It sounds like I'm selling Albertan independence, but the fact that Ottawa aims for progressive internal redistribution is the exact same thing the US already has, as you point out. Similar figures of only receiving indirect federal returns can be stated for American net contributor states, too. It's the price of being in a large country, where in exchange you have a pooled currency and military that reduce vulnerabilities to external attackers.

They're called "Equalisation payments". Certain provinces pay them, like BC, Alberta, and Ontario, and then other provinces receive them.

In 2023, the federal government spent $24.0 billion including an estimated $3.3 billion from Alberta, which has not received equalization payments since 1964/65. From 2007 to 2022, Albertans’ net contribution to federal finances was $244.6 billion, more than five times the net contribution from British Columbia or Ontario, the only other two net contributors.

Albertans’ also disproportionately contribute to the CPP. From 1981 to 2022, the amount Albertans paid into the program, over and above what retirees in Alberta received in CPP payments, was $53.6 billion, approximately six times greater than the net contribution of B.C., the only other net contributing province.

As long as Minnesota would have me I'd happily move there instead of staying in Alberta if this were to happen

Are incomes in Alberta lower than Minnesota?

Albertans are Canadians, and no, we're not going to condemn them to becoming americans or face dislocation over the actions of some loud idiots.

That would be very interesting. I would love to see how that would play out (particularly with California and DC), but it would kill the political balance in both countries. I think having to consider opposing viewpoints is probably paramount to how we have both flourished historically.

The Brexit referendum was non-binding for important constitutional reasons.

Legally, leaving required an Act of Parliament. To hold a binding referendum, they would have had to pass an Act that says "here are the exact details of how we'll leave the EU, coming into force if the referendum passes".

But that would have required them to figure out all the exact details of what it means to leave the EU, and they didn't bother - they just held the referendum and assumed they could figure out the details later if Leave won, which they didn't expect would happen.

We all saw how well that worked out.

> there was sufficient political capital to push it through without a follow up vote.

This seriously overstates how smoothly things went between 23/6/2016 and 31/1/2020

> This seems extremely surprising - I've never heard of this sort of thing before with any other country.

It's a little surprising - even as a Canadian - if you're unfamiliar with Canadian politics/history/civics, but Canada is more loosely held together than most other countries, including the US. And a comparison with the US is instructive, because Canada's founders were unifying the country the wake of the US Civil War and were working very much in response to it: there was a fear that the US would turn imperial in an exercise of national unity and begin trying to snatch up the rest of the continent from the British and a belief that the British wouldn't care to defend them, which was arguably the primary motivation for Confederation: to form a unified front against American expansionism. And the Fathers of Confederation had seen how horrible the Civil War was and wanted to prevent that sort of thing from occurring, so the provinces - like in the US, formerly independent colonies - were given more power than the States, with the separation of powers clearly and rigidly defined.

The Clarity Act itself wasn't part of Confederation, but that's the cultural legacy that informs it: a civilized process allowing provinces to separate without bloodshed is just about as fundamentally Canadian as anything.

It's a result of the second Quebec referendum. The Clarity Act may appear like it facilitates leaving the federation, but many critics (among them federalist and sovereigntists) believe that the law is too vague as it give the House of Commons the responsibility to determine "whether a clear majority had expressed itself". What that means in numerical terms? Nobody knows. Further the House of Commons has the right to override the referendum if they deem it to contradict any of the under-specified tenets of the Clarity act. Finally, you need to amend the Canadian constitution to finally separate, which according to my understanding, requires the approval of all the (remaining) provinces.

So it can be argued that the Clarity Act is a way to legislate friction to defederation.

Of course Quebec (and like Albertan) separatists hold that all this is moot and that they can self-govern as they wish following a referendum. Others look at the "no-deal" Brexit as a template.

It was put into place after Quebec held a referendum that was close in 1995. Canada remedied the situation by making clear what it would take to leave.

EU famously has one. Of course you might not consider it a country.

It's a thing because Quebec has tried to separate before.

Discussing separation is okay when QC threatens it - hence the clarity act. But when AB wants to do it, they are just a bunch of redneck traitors according to the rest of Canada.

(Cue the "AB is nothing", "AB has no culture", folks that don't have a clue what they are talking about).

It should be the least surprising thing about Canada - it has been dealing with separatist referendums for decades.

> Is there actually even a legal process for leaving Canada?

Does there need to be a legal process? If Albertans are willing to fight a war over it then all they need to do is declare that they don't recognize Ottawa's authority anymore and then go about trying to get other countries to recognize their independence.

It's a very complicated situation in Alberta. There were basically two competing petitions. A "Forever Canada" petition which supported Alberta staying in Canada, however it was built to force the provincial government to hold a vote in parliament about separation, therefore forcing all representatives to show their true feelings on separation.

A second petition by "Stay Free Alberta" asked the government to hold a referendum on separating. However, it was blocked by a judge because a previously ruling basically said that separating would violate treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in Alberta. It's also fraught with controversy as the individuals running the petition were able to (likely illegally) obtain the voter rolls for every Albertan. They used it to build an online tool to track their progress. There is speculation (without evidence since the signatures on the petition is not public) that they simply used it to fill out the petition for people they knew. There are pieces of evidence that point to this being a possibility, for example, a Stay Free Alberta leader claimed that in some communities, nearly 98% of residents signed the petition. These are generally right leaning communities, however, getting 98% of people in a community to do a single thing would be incredibly hard.

Interestingly, my state (Wisconsin) has a two step process for constitutional amendments. An amendment has to pass a referendum in two consecutive legislative sessions. It still doesn't prevent us from doing stupid things, but it seems to be programmed as a check on hasty voting, or on people assuming that nobody's going to vote.

> I don't get it. They're having a referendum on whether or not to have a referendum?

Exactly. Albertans are scratching their heads, wondering what on earth Premier Smith is trying to accomplish. Utterly ridiculous ''solution'' to some internal problems within her party, I'm guessing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarity_Act

Bill C-20 passed in 2000. It's not so much effort to type "canadian clarity act" into a search engine or wikipedia.

I want to agree, and I do in part, but I don’t believe Smith is a particularly democratic actor and there’s more happening here that shouldn’t occur in a democracy.

Not like this it isn't.

Smith and the UCP have not been acting democratically whatsoever. Trying to paint it that way is either ignorant or deliberately malicious.

She was openly going around all standard democratic and diplomatic protocols and holding private meetings with the American executive in Florida.

That is not part of democracy, unless you are simply calling it the corrupted part.

> This is part of Democracy

It doesn’t need to be. 10% of the population being able to put major policies to a referendum is a bit silly.

> There is no legal precedent.

Legal precedent doesn't really matter here. If Alberta wants to leave and they're willing to fight a war over it, then that's up to them. USA already went through this once.

Canada is a confederation/confederacy. Ie your central government is weak and your provinces are strong. They can leave just like Quebec. Quebec has to be bribed to stay.

Incorrect. If you've ever been through Alberta you'd already know that though.

Oil & gas fields, and wells, are distributed over much of Alberta.

https://static.aer.ca/prd/documents/catalog/Map90_Oil_Gas_Fi...

From this article it sounds like it's the people of Alberta that want to vote on succession. Including the ones that don't literally live on an oil field.

Few Albertans. The Forever Canada petition got over 10% of the entire population to sign it. Considering that it was a grassroots effort and that you had to sign in person, meaning you had to go out of your way to sign an entirely optional petition, really shows how much support there is in Alberta to remain.

Mini Brexit in the sense that a foreign entity is working to destabilize another.

Russia and its proxies ran an active measures campaign in the UK. If the US government isn’t doing something similar, the toxic soup of the maga-sphere definitely is.

> A province seceding from Canada is way bigger than the UK leaving the EU

Genuinely debatable. The total economic destruction of Brexit has been far higher than anything Alberta would suffer. And geopolitically, Alberta wouldn’t take itself off the table the way the English have basically rendered the UK irrelevant.

It might take years. Once it's solved, Smith, Trump and the americans financing this BS might be gone.

As far as I know, First Nations lands in Alberta are indeed ''ceded'' under Treaties 6, 7, and 8 with the Crown. British Columbia is a province with a huge proportion of unceded land, but not Alberta.

So because Quebec ancestors killed all the people who opposed the conquest of that land, it's okay for Quebec to secede? But because another set of Canadians didn't kill off all the natives that still claimed Alberta's land, they can't secede legally? Is that the logic?

Pretty sure Quebec would have to break apart in order to separate too

Mainly UK and her former colonies.

Disagree. For decades, Alberta has been subsidizing Quebec and other no productive provinces. They’re sick of it. It also doesn’t help that Canada is a confederacy where the provincial governors have more power than your PM.

Unique culture and a sense of nationhood are two entirely separate things.

This was a good Globe piece a month ago: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-alberta-has-...

Some choice quotes.

> The Wild Rose province isn’t like Scotland, Quebec, or Catalonia. Everyone can more or less agree these are “stateless nations.” Maybe you think those nations should have their own state, maybe you don’t, but they follow a well-worn political pattern. Albertan separatists, on the other hand, are trying to create a state with no nation. That does not follow a well-worn political pattern. Nobody has ever done this.

> The idea that Quebec is a nation is not divisive in Quebec, not an idea that separatists think is super and federalists think is dumb. It is basically a matter of consensus among political actors there. What they disagree on is whether the Quebec nation is better off inside or outside of the Canadian confederation.

> Who sees that in Alberta? When has any elected deputy of Alberta’s legislature, let alone literally every single one of them, loudly and publicly affirmed that on behalf of their constituents they perceive Alberta as a nation? Are there any historical instances whatsoever of outside observers seeing Albertans as a nation that would compare to such seminal documents as the Durham Report?

> Even separatist leaders use the word “nation” sparingly. The Alberta Prosperity Project’s manifesto, The Value of Freedom: A Draft Fully Costed Fiscal Plan for an Independent Alberta, lives up to its title by speaking in exclusively financial terms; even then it can only refer to Alberta as a nation using somewhat sideways language. When it states that “a sovereign Alberta could become one of the lowest taxed and regulated nations in the world, rivalling jurisdictions similar to Dubai and Monaco,” it could just as easily substitute “state” for “nation.”

> It’s clear that Alberta (the place where I have lived longest in my life) is not like Ontario, any more than the Maritimes are (I also lived eight years in Dartmouth). These places are all homes to distinct cultures. But in none of those three places do we find sustained instances of diverse groups of both insiders and outsiders clearly referring to them as repositories of a national identity other than “Canadian.”

Former Albertan here. Alberta even griped about unfair treatment when their conservative party had a majority in Ottawa for almost a decade. It’s just what people have learned to say.

Alberta was created out of several divisions of the NWT barely over 100 years ago, formed by the federal government of Canada.

It's not a thing.

Hatred or criticism of Toronto and Ontario at large is a thing. But that's a thing everywhere. It's a fundamental part of the Canadian identity.

At least Quebec actually does have a distinct nation/culture/ethnicity/language.

You got the sides wrong unfortunately, one of the states you are mentioning was literally created in the last century and is now doing the same thing that prompted its creation. But it must be nice living in ignorance and buying the propaganda.

But why gloat? What are you winning? Even if there were prizes here (spoiler: all the loot boxes are empty in this game), do you perceive yourself better off because of this?

>now Canadians will get a taste of their own medicine courtesy of the Trump admin.

Ah so no, you're just in the higher end of the sinking canoe laughing at the people who are drowning.

There's a minor difference.

Whether Palestinians have a national identity or not, driving them out of their homes at gunpoint and settling in is a war crime.

Albertans, while obviously the most disadvantaged and persecuted Canadians in recorded history, have not yet had anyone commiting genocide or war crimes against them.

> This is truly trolling escaping the Internet

The referendum? Or calling for imprisoning people for wrongthink?

Allegedly they have taken money from americans or maybe russians. It is generally a crime to take foreign money as part of a political campaign.

Treason

> it is a thing

Anyone can claim refugee status. That doesn’t make them refugees.

Being a refugee requires showing persecution that one can’t find relief for within the country’s own system [1]. Given Canada has a functioning court system, the second part of the definition is failed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...

> But it is a thing.

On a per capita basis, 50x more Canadians move to the US than the other way round.

It's more than just a thing.

Would you be kind and recalculate this per person in each province? Thank you!

The part about immigration and Quebec is right though, doesn't mean the immigrants are to blame.

Fwiw my only familial connection to Canada is my Levantine immigrant cousins in Quebec