With the Liberals in for another term, separatist rumblings in Alberta can be expected to deepen. We expected this, but we shouldn’t indulge it. There’s still plenty good to be had here, and even the federal government isn’t a lost cause.
In some cases, the rumblings are coming from the fringes: a Republican Party of Alberta, formerly the Buffalo Party of Alberta, started
free memberships in the lead-up to what I assume will be an independence campaign.
The Republican Party of Alberta, FYI, is about as serious as the People’s Party of Canada. It has a following online, much less so in reality. It has attempted to demonstrate popularity by claiming to have the support of some MLAs — at least one of which was
to learn that his name had been slapped onto a project he’d never engaged with.
But the rumblings are also coming, albeit much more softly, from the government. Premier Danielle Smith, on Tuesday,
an election reform
that increased the odds of success in a “citizen’s initiative” petition, which could theoretically make a separation referendum more likely.
In 2022, Alberta opened the door to citizen petitions that, if successful, would get the petitioned issue into committee for review and possibly bill-crafting, or to the provincial elections officer for a referendum. On constitutional matters, a successful petition must be signed by 20 per cent of the total electors in the province within 60 days — just about impossible. Smith’s bill would lower the threshold to 10 per cent, with the timeframe extended to 120 days — highly unlikely, but less impossible than it was before.
Smith’s legislative adjustments aren’t necessarily a signal of support for separation, but at very least they’re the equivalent of hoisting a middle finger at Prime Minister Mark Carney on Day One. It’s not as direct as, say, pulling the feds back into court over yet another interjurisdictional dispute. But hey, there’s plenty of time for more of that.
From the perspective of those hostile to the Liberals, Alberta, at least, has the makings of a good news story coming out of the 2025 federal election. No prominent, longtime Conservative MPs lost their seats, while both the Liberals and NDP sustained losses. Disaster candidates were averted. Try as he did, Mark Carney didn’t make any real inroads into the province.
The overall differences in result are small: both the NDP and the Liberals went from holding two seats to one. In Edmonton, Blake Desjarlais returned Edmonton-Griesbach to Conservative Kerry Diotte, the riding’s previous Conservative MP (before entering federal politics, Diotte was an Edmonton city councillor and before that, a Sun columnist).
This perhaps signals a change in the zeitgeist. Diotte was ousted from the riding in 2021, back when certain progressive cultural grievances were at their height. The MP had stumbled into a series of minor controversies, such as taking a photo — gasp — with right-wing commentator Faith Goldy, and making a Liberal buzzword question period
with — gasp — words like “infrastructure,” “middle class,” “Syrians” and “first nations.” Cringey humour, sure, but these were favoured topics of the Liberals indeed.
Desjarlais was a perfect foil at the time: he was a Métis two-spirit man at the height of identity obsession; this was also around that time that the Canadian news cycle was focusing hard on the acquittal by an all-white jury of Saskatchewan’s Gerald Stanley, a white farmer who had been charged for killing Colton Boushie, an Indigenous man who drove onto Stanley’s farm with friends, and whom Stanley suspected was there to steal. Stanley blamed the death on a gun malfunction, and the jury agreed. The Globe and Mail, in a roundabout way,
between the campaign in Griesbach and the case of Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in the United States in 2020.
Well, Diotte’s back. It turned out that in 2025, no one cared about or remembered the controversies — which weren’t even controversies in the eyes of normal people. Political winds had blown away the atmosphere that made Desjarlais an attractive alternative to an older white male Conservative. Desjarlais,
and his endless pro-Hamas pandering, are gone.
Elsewhere in Edmonton, the city’s mayor — a former Liberal MP in search of his old seat —
to make it to Parliament. Amarjeet Sohi has championed
initiatives,
with the provincial government on homelessness, and has supported tax property tax hikes as high as 8.9 per cent in
and six per cent in
(roughly twice what was
back in 2022). A pro-spending, pro-Liberal social agenda kind of candidate. He at least won’t be in Parliament, though he will be returning to the mayor’s office.
In Calgary McKnight, Liberal George Chahal was ousted, leaving his celebratory “First Ever Re-Elected Calgary Liberal MP!” cake to go uneaten. He was a former city councillor and parliamentary transplant from Calgary Skyview. You may recognize him from the Liberal interregnum: it was Chahal who introduced Mark Carney at his leadership campaign announcement several weeks ago.
You may recognize him from his more shady dealings: Chahal literally tampered with election materials in 2021, removing a flyer of his Conservative opponent from a mailbox on camera — and then
stuffing that mailbox with incorrect information
about polling locations. He paid a $500 fine for his actions. So that’s at least one man of questionable ethics gone. He was replaced in spirit in the Calgary riding with
Corey Hogan, who, at very least, was never reported to have gone prospecting in mailboxes.
Albertans were, for the most part, united against the left this election. Now, we just need to refrain from tearing ourselves apart in a quest for/against sovereignty.
National Post
