Ben Woodfinden, the 31-year-old former director of communications for Pierre Poilievre, understands the challenges faced by younger Canadians. Ten years of a Liberal-led, no-growth government, Ben laments, “means they live in a country that doesn’t work for them anymore.” They want change.

And there’s a flip side, he cynically suggests: Some Canadians are content with the status quo, because it benefits them. They bought houses decades ago that are worth 20 times what they paid for them. It’s in their interest, he argues, to encourage unsustainable levels of immigrants to support existing social programs and to constrain investment in the infrastructure needed to re-energize the Canadian economy.

“A lot of people have had it pretty good, and the status quo in this country works for them,” Ben asserts. “But what that means in reality is managed decline.”

These are the sort of people, he says, who lean into the nostalgic “elbows up” nationalism (

the Mike Myers commercial

being the most emblematic, he notes), reminding them of a Canada that no longer exists. “That kind of vision of Canada,” he frowns, “does not speak to me at all.”

In 2022, Ben was tapped to be Poilievre’s comms director, responsible for crafting the Conservative leader’s public image and the party’s populist, anti-elite messaging, targeting the gatekeepers — bureaucrats, regulators and corporate elites — who stand in the way of opportunity for ordinary Canadians. During the 2025 federal election, Ben became a point man in Poilievre’s media strategy, often by-passing mainstream media in favour of more direct messaging.

Ben’s in Toronto when we connect for a conversation. Now resigned from his partisan role, and scheduled to return to McGill in the fall to finish his political science PhD, he’s exhausted.

“I had two and a half years working for Pierre,” he says, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. “He is the hardest-working guy I’ve ever met in my life,” he chuckles. “…The biggest challenge for me is just keeping up with him. So I’m a bit burnt out.”

There’s a lot of soul-searching going on in conservative circles, he admits, and points to Poilievre’s recent statement affirming the CPC’s need to add roughly one million people to the conservative coalition to get the party over the finish line in a two-party system.

“New Canadians, younger Canadians, working-class Canadians — these are the kinds of people for whom the deal of this country has been fundamentally broken,” he asserts. “So if you want to make that coalition cohesive, you need to add people to it that fit that mould.” And, he explains, “If you add a bunch of disparate groups together that have different interests and values, different norms, that coalition will just fall apart at some point.

“I do think this is going to be a challenge for Carney and the Carney coalition,” he adds, and I concur. The Liberals siphoned off voters from the left and the right in the election, and beyond the “protect us from Trump” mandate, the priorities of Carney’s supporters won’t necessarily align.

Talk of the new kind of conservative coalition that’s emerging animates Ben; his faint British accent (he moved to Canada as a teenager) becomes noticeably more pronounced as his enthusiasm builds.

“What group do you suggest could be added to this coalition?” I ask. “Female voters” is Ben’s unequivocal answer. “We did very well with younger men,” he explains, “and I think there are a lot of women, younger women … who face the same problems as young men … making it harder for them to achieve the things they want to achieve in life.”

While I agree wholeheartedly with Ben’s aspiration to engage women, it’s no secret the Conservative messaging didn’t land well with female voters in the federal campaign. We both wince recalling the backlash to Poilievre’s observations about biological clocks early in the campaign.

“So I think it’s going to be about figuring out a way to speak to women … on issues that affect them,” Ben reflects, in ways that don’t alienate other people. But, he admits, it’s a challenge to thread that needle.

There are many divides bubbling up in Canada’s political landscape — generational, regional, rural versus urban, education levels. And now gender. “The parties of the right are increasingly male-dominated,” Ben notes, and the “parties of the left are increasingly female-dominated.” It’s an unhealthy social divide, he adds, “a trend that’s happening independent of any specific leader or any specific party, and I think that’s part of why we didn’t do as well with younger female voters.”

These trends, Ben explains, are happening all over the Western world, all over advanced democracies. “So you can accelerate them and you can minimize them, but you can’t necessarily avoid them.”

In an effort to turn the conversation in a more positive direction, I ask Ben about Poilievre’s decision to run for election in Alberta. “There’s a touch of destiny about this,” Ben answers thoughtfully, “I think he’s going to be an important voice in the next few years, simultaneously speaking to those (western) frustrations and what needs to change, but also articulating a slightly different but more expansive vision, a more inclusive vision, of what it means to be Canadian.

“I think the centre of political gravity is slowing shifting west in Canada,” Ben continues, “just following population trends and demographics.” And our vision of what it means to be Canadian needs to be updated, which he acknowledges is a big project and “not something you can impose from the top down.”

The ubiquitous symbol of Canada is the maple leaf, Ben explains, “but you don’t get maple trees west of Manitoba.” (He means sugar maples, as seen on the flag.) There are shared values across the country — he’s lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary, since immigrating to Canada — but, he observes, “it’s very much an eastern-centric Laurentian vision of what this country means, and I still think the future of Canada is very much out west … If people move within Canada, people go east to west, not west to east.”

The resurgent wave of patriotism, triggered by Donald Trump’s threats, is an opportunity to create a slightly different vision of what it means to be Canadian, Ben suggests, one that speaks to a Canada of 2025 and not a Canada of 1991.

The last election was about change, Ben concludes, and that desire for change is not going to go anywhere. “Some people think it will just bubble down, and I think it will just bubble up even more.”

• For Alberta, the ‘existential threat, it’s from Ottawa,’ Danielle Smith says
• ‘Time to put emotions aside’: Alberta’s case against retaliatory tariffs

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Transit projects are becoming more and more troublesome in Canada. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In Canada, infrastructure plans often go wildly over budget and there can be problems with the final product not functioning properly. Getting multiple levels of government involved hasn’t solved the problem and many Canadians are wondering how we can make our transit systems work again. But it’s not like this all over the world. Other countries are able to build more for less money.

National Post spoke with Marco Chitti, one of the co-authors of a

report that discussed the outlandish

construction costs in Canada, to discover how the country might get its transit spending back on track to build systems that work.

The research, Understanding the Drivers of Transit Construction Costs in Canada: A Comparative Study, published by the University of Toronto at the end of last year, found that a lot can be learned from other countries’ transit policies.

“Developed nations such as Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Spain and South Korea deliver transit projects comparable to those in Canada at as low as one-tenth the price per kilometre,” the research states. “Our study contends that high transit construction costs are not an inevitability; rather, they are the result of a project delivery regime antithetical to global best practices.”  This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

What are some of the problems with Canada’s transit infrastructure or the way we’re building at this point?

Well, I mean, there are many problems. There are three layers of problems. One is that we pay much more for the same thing, so it means that our unit costs are much higher. It means that for building the exact same object that would be built in another country with lower costs, let’s say France, Italy, Spain, or whatever, we have higher costs. Some of it is input costs, like labour is bit more expensive, materials are a bit more expensive.

But another part is just that, the way we have regulation, like from unions, the way unions work, the way standards are applied, or the fact that our market is not really a market.

The second layer of problems is that, not only do we pay more for the same thing, we overbuild. So, for the same scope, to achieve the same goal, we just overbuild everything. Our technical standards tend to be very cumbersome, many times unnecessarily, from fire safety regulations to design standards applied by engineers. They tend to have a very defensive design. So they over-design things, so nobody can blame them if something goes wrong.

So, essentially, we always go for a Ferrari when the thing we would need would be like a Honda, just to make an example.

And the third thing is the way we manage projects, and the way we manage risk, and the way we have started to obsess over cost overruns instead of absolute cost. We are over-padding and over-inflating budgets from day one. So the budgets that you are doing now, the tendency of the last, let’s say, 10, 15, years in Canada, has been, “Oh, since we are not very good and we get very bad press coverage for going over budget, a budget is something that you self-impose on yourself, so why not just inflate the budget from day one?”

So budgets now have a lot of like contingencies, allocated contingencies, unallocated contingencies, risk provisions, and any sort of padding, like cash room that you put in the budget so you can protect yourself from cost overrun. In theory, it’s a good practice that is done almost everywhere. But everywhere else, it’s like 10, 15, five per cent of the budget, depending on the complexity of the project. In Canada, we have reached levels where this is, sometimes at the very early stages of the project, it could be 50 per cent of the budget.

The only way we manage the risks that arise in case of complex projects is just by throwing money at them. The only way we do it is like, “Oh, we cannot really manage them. You cannot really reduce them through policies, through better management, through a lot of things we can do at different levels of government. We can just, like, put more money to just solve the problem afterward.”

The overlap of these three layers of things is what is driving our cost levels that are absolutely unsustainable.

What are some of the things we could do relatively quickly or easily and maybe change some of that?

I would answer this a bit tangentially, but it’s absolutely fundamental. And the first thing is, do more transparency. One of the big problems we face, as a researcher, but everybody in the industry, is that all the information about cost — like the article you have seen, I’ve seen the cost. I’m bound by the NDA. We couldn’t use the actual cost in the article, because we’re prevented from doing it by the agency.

 

These costs are mostly public in other countries, you can go and ask, and they are published online. Just knowing this thing and knowing a lot of information across multiple projects would make everybody in the industry much less dumb, or much less, you know, not knowing what’s going on. And transparencies are fundamental things to make a lot of brains working around this and starting to understand, from different perspectives, what are the drivers of cost?

So that’s something that really a government — like the federal government — for example, can say, “Oh, dear provinces, you want money from me to build these infrastructure projects? Sure, I’ll give it to you, but you give me back, and you share detailed information about cost and cost assumptions, so I, the federal government, can start to dig into this and start to understand what will be a standard cost, what will be a benchmark cost for some stuff.” Because nowadays the industry is completely blind, totally.

The report you co-authored discusses the negative impact of local interests on transit projects, as well as the fact that the public service doesn’t tend to have in-house transit experts. How do you solve those two problems?

There is this idea of cutting the public service, or just, like, firing people, and it’s way cheaper to go to private sector and just buy things out of the shelves. Might be true for some stuff, but it’s not really necessarily true for infrastructure projects, because the reality is that a lot of the decision that needs to be taken for this process, you need to consult the public, you need to get permitting.

The private sector is not the best position to do this kind of stuff. The policy of voiding the public sector of all the competency, the capacity of doing stuff, that is something that started in the ’80s and ’90s in Canada, and it’s now completed.

It really made the public sector, let’s say, a dumb buyer. Because you need to be an informed buyer. You buy a house, you buy a car, you buy whatever, you know, you just become your own expert. And when it’s on the small scale of individual choices that’s good.

(On) the scale of the government to have someone that, when the consultant comes with different solutions for the tunnel ventilation for a subway, or very specific stuff that are big drivers of cost, and they cannot really choose, and they cannot really say if the private sector is pushing too far, because they don’t want to take responsibility or act in bad faith, or maybe not necessarily in bad faith, but being very defensive about their design, they can’t really push back.

Each agency has their own design guidelines. Everyone does their own thing in their own little corner. Very little meaningful sharing of experience and capacity.

And there is this habit of not deciding, and this is a pretty much in the culture of the public sector nowadays. And I don’t know how you change this. I mean, I know you need politicians that empower the public service and do not just use them as — when something goes wrong, they blame them — because that’s how the political side has been behaving lately.

I think it’s important to build state capacity, a very different levels, agency levels and the federal level.

And what about local concerns that can change a project?

That’s, again, a problem of politics. Changing the status quo will make some people upset. That’s sort of a fact of life. Politicians need to take the responsibility.

I mean, at the end of the day, it is always the taxpayers’ money. But, you know, the principle is, it’s not from my budget, the city budget, it’s not from the provincial budget. So they tend to be generous. If someone, the mayor, the premier of a province, take the responsibility of saying, “We are going with this solution, even if it has more impact, because it’s the only one we can afford.” There are some cases of doing this, you know, like for the Canada Line in Vancouver. At a certain point, they need to be within this $2-billion budget. They need to do it absolutely before the Olympics of 2010, they did have a lot of disruption in the city, but they were probably one of the last reasonably priced infrastructure projects we had in Canada.

What are other countries doing that we should consider copying?

A lot really, in the weeds of like, at the way you you handle procurement, the way you handle benchmark prices and so on.

For example, Italy, is absolutely transparent about costs. Transparency really helps a lot for all the actors to benchmark themselves against others and to put the collective brain out to better solve the problems. And this is something that culturally in Canada, it would be very hard to have. There is a lot of resistance in the industry and the public sector.

The French are extremely good at project management. So let’s copy the French for project management. Like, there are lots of little stuff here and there. There’s nothing like a silver bullet solution, that you can just, “OK, let’s copy those people.”

They will need a collective effort from the industry to be less insular and look less at the United States, which is the curse of Canada, because the Americans are absolutely terrible at handling large projects. So we really should forget about the Americans and look at everybody else, whether it’s Europe, Asia or any other place. There’s not a single thing, but it’s really being curious about what the others do.

Are you optimistic Canada can solve these problems?

Let’s say I’m optimistic in the sense that I see that there is a conversation starting now. I think we have reached the point where the cost is so absolutely insane that most politicians at every level are getting scared. They think they are allocating ludicrously high budgets, but they are not going to pay for much at the end of the day. And this is really hindering Canada, and especially in the economic situation that we will face in the future with a hostile United States, you know, trade war and stuff like this. I think there is sort of, rethinking a lot of stuff. And this is the good thing, because really, we are in the phase of, we need to acknowledge that we have a problem.

Until four or five years ago, it was me and a bunch of other weirdos talking about this kind of stuff, and now it’s a more generalized discussion that they see emerging at every levels.

The thing that makes me a bit less optimistic is that we are still at the “Oh, there is this problem. What should we do?”

And even if the research is much more advanced, like for us, research of the portrait of the problem and the thing we can act upon is getting more clear, the more we research, the industry and the political side is still pretty much, “We don’t really understand what’s the problem,” and trying to look for a silver bullet, a single solution that will fix this without a lot of pain.

There would be a lot of pain. There will be a lot of changes in the industry, in the political way of doing, if you want, prices to, I don’t say to go down to European levels, because this will never happen, I don’t think so, but at least levels that we can afford with the current resources we have.

This is the latest in a National Post series on How Canada Wins. Read earlier instalments here.

• How to change Canada’s baby bust into a baby boom
• How this northern Alberta First Nation used ‘community capitalism’ to raise living standards

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

After the Conservatives’ federal election loss, some Albertans frustrated with Liberal government policies are rallying for separation from Canada. Recently, hundreds of separatists held a rally at the Alberta legislature, angered at the province’s place within confederation.

It’s not the first time Albertans have pushed for sovereignty. There were upswings in separatist sentiment during the National Energy Program in the 1980s. More recently, separatist agitators gained steam in the dying years of the 2010s, angered over Liberal legislation that targeted the energy sector and a general downturn in the petro-province’s economic fortunes. This culminated with the now-defunct Wexit movement.

Now, separatist sentiment is back. And Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government has made it easier for separatists to get a referendum on the ballot by reducing the threshold necessary to do so. She said if Albertans want it, her government will hold a referendum on separation. Here’s what you need to know about the likelihood of that and the strength of the Alberta separatist movement.

Have separatists ever had any success in Alberta?

Not much. At least not electorally.

Just once was a separatist elected to the Alberta legislature. Gordon Kesler, an

oil scout and rodeo rider

, won a byelection in 1982. He was elected by voters in Olds, Alta., who didn’t like bilingualism, the metric system, gun control and then prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program. Kesler won, but he sat only for two-and-a-half months, before running in the general election and losing solidly.

But it turns out Kesler wasn’t a true believer: By 1983, he was vowing to leave the Western Canada Concept party unless it dropped separatism from its platform.

When did the Alberta separatism movement begin?

Despite the deep admiration that conservative Albertans tend to express for Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister can also be identified as the first prime minister to put the needs of central Canada over the needs of the west. His 1878 National Policy was crafted specifically to force east-west rather than north-south trade, to the outrage of those in what was then the North-West Territories.

“The people of the North-West are allowed but a degree more control of their affairs than the serfs of Siberia,” wrote Frank Oliver, the publisher of Edmonton’s first newspaper, in August 1885. Ottawa’s rule, he wrote, is “despotism as absolute, or more so, than that which curses Russia.”

This sentiment has ebbed and flowed over the years (and also existed beyond Alberta’s borders, in other parts of the Prairies). There was anger in some parts of the west over the 1885 execution of Louis Riel, a Métis leader who is now recognized by many as the founder of Manitoba. Preston Manning, the founder of the federal Reform Party, traces the origins of alienation back to that event, as well as land surveys of the west done in 1869 with insufficient regard for the local populations. Freight rates on the national railways were also a source of grievance.

In Alberta, specifically, William Aberhart’s Social Credit Party, which was founded in 1935, briefly flirted with separatism. But it wasn’t until the energy crises of the 1970s, the election of Trudeau Sr. and the National Energy Program that Alberta separation emerged in its more modern form.

Throughout all of this, only the fringes of Alberta’s political spectrum have actually wanted the province to leave Canada. But far more Albertans have shared some sense of alienation or anger with Ottawa.

What’s the history of the Alberta separatism movement?

In 1975, the Calgary Herald surveyed 221 Calgarians for their views on Alberta separation and alienation.

Only eight people expressed support for separation. That’s 3.6 per cent of respondents. However, by other metrics, Albertans were alienated, with more than 70 per cent saying Alberta politicians weren’t taken seriously in Ottawa.

By 1980, things had shifted: Mel Hurtig, the late pro-Canada publisher, commissioned a poll that found 14 per cent of Albertans supported separation. “God forbid if the separatist movement would be able to find a charismatic leader,” Hurtig told the audience at an Edmonton hotel.

It wasn’t considered front-page news. It appeared on page D22 of the Herald, above a story about a robot running amok in Florida and the TV listings. Still, the chatter remained, and by 1980, Reform party MPs were telling the media that they were hearing about the issue from constituents.

Later that year, Doug Christie, the head of Western Canada Concept, held a fundraiser in Edmonton. It was a flop: He raised so little money that it “wouldn’t keep anyone in cheap cigars,” the Herald reported.

Still, separation kept coming up again, though it wasn’t always taken seriously.

“Alberta, alas, is over-generously supplied with chronic complainers whose lung capacity dangerously exceeds their IQs,” wrote Herald columnist William Gold in 1995. Separatists, Gold wrote, were a “miniscule dishwasher copycat” of Jacques Parizeau’s Quebec aspirations “with no such claim on the respect of decent people.”

In 1997, two years after Quebec’s last, failed attempt to separate, Social Credit leader Randy Thorsteinson said he thought it was inevitable that Alberta would separate.

By 2002, when Jean Chrétien’s government was signing the Kyoto Accords on climate change, then Alberta premier Ralph Klein warned that it could lead to separation. Naomi Lakritz, a Calgary Herald columnist, shellacked Klein.

“If the rest of Canada sees Alberta as greedy, uncaring, money-grubbing and self-centred in its negative reaction to the Kyoto accord, then Ralph Klein’s use of the word ‘separatism’ and his petulant warning not to ‘push us too hard,’ has just reinforced that view,” Lakritz wrote.

Even in 2018-20, when the Wexit movement — which advocated for the separation of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba — was ascendant and aggrieved westerners formed the Maverick Party, the movement never got that far. The Maverick Party never managed to win any seats and none of the provincial separatist parties had a meaningful showing in the 2019 or 2023 elections.

How much support is there for Alberta separatism?

In 2019, the Angus Reid Institute found that 60 per cent of Albertans were

open to the idea of the province

joining a western separatist movement. This, however, is a bit of a vague question.

ThinkHQ did polling that year

, and found that when presented with a clear question — would you vote to stay or go? — only 23 per cent of Albertans said they’d opt to go it alone.

More recent polling, conducted by the Angus Reid Institute prior to the 2025 federal election, pegged separatist support at 25 per cent, and that jumped to 30 per cent when Albertans were asked if they would vote to leave if the Liberals formed government again.

The Association for Canadian Studies found in recent polling that

52 per cent of Canadians

believe the threat of Alberta separating should be taken seriously. In Alberta itself, that’s a view held by 63 per cent of those polled.

A Postmedia-Leger poll

, found that 35 per cent of Albertans would support an independent western bloc, comprised of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Support for Alberta and Saskatchewan forming an independent state lies at 30 per cent, while 29 per cent of Albertans think the province should go it alone.

But, put another way, the most attractive option to Albertans, at least according to Leger’s polling, is still rejected by 65 per cent of Albertans.

This is, however, uncharted territory. It could be a different situation altogether if a question actually makes it to the referendum stage.

Who are the separatists and alienated Albertans?

There have been a handful of separatist parties in Alberta, such as the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta and the Independence Party of Alberta.

Ideologically speaking, separatists are largely conservatives and the parties are, too. For example, while separatism flowered in the 1970s and ’80s, the defeat of the Trudeau Liberals by Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives stanched the enthusiasm at the time.

And in 2001, when the Alberta Independence Party was founded in Red Deer, the inspiration for it, National Post reported, was the rejection of Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance party by voters in central and eastern Canada.

The latest iteration of a separatist party in Alberta is the Republican Party of Alberta, and it’s another conservative party. The current leader is Cameron Davies, a long-time Alberta conservative. The vice-president of policy is former conservative parliamentarian Art Hanger. Other conservatives are involved, too.

The polling also bears this out. In 2023,

Environics research found that

83 per cent of United Conservative Party voters felt like Alberta didn’t get the respect it deserves. In contrast, just 37 per cent of New Democrats felt that way. That same survey found that 67 per cent of UCP supporters agreed that Alberta got so few benefits from being a part of Canada, it may as well go it alone, compared to 24 per cent of NDP supporters.

Could Alberta really separate?

The first step would be to get to a referendum. This could happen if the provincial government chooses to hold one, or under the Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act, which allows any Albertan to put their concerns to a provincial referendum if they garner enough support.

Smith has said that the government would hold such a referendum, if it had enough support. In order for citizens to force a referendum on the issue, they must gather the signatures of 10 per cent of all Albertans who voted in the last provincial election. Just shy of 1.8 million Albertans voted in the 2023 general election, so those wanting a separation referendum must gather around 180,000 signatures.

Then, everything would follow per the federal Clarity Act. This legislation sets out that a province — whether Quebec, Alberta or anywhere else — may not unilaterally secede from Canada. They must negotiate secession with the federal government and the rest of the provinces, settling on some sort of constitutional amendment and agreement.

The preamble also sets out a few guideposts on what happens. First, the outcome of a referendum would need to demonstrate a “

clear majority in favour of secession,” which would then “create an obligation to negotiate secession.” The Clarity Act does not set a specific percentage that counts as a “clear majority,” although 51 per cent is often cited as a clear majority. (The House of Commons could determine that that wasn’t clear enough, and that means that secession could not go ahead.) 

Second, the question asked on the referendum itself must be “free of ambiguity.”

Third, for any province to legally leave would require negotiations between all the provinces and opening up and amending the Constitution. 

If all that was satisfied — plus any other aspects of the Clarity Act — and if an agreement was reached, then Alberta could separate. Eric Adams, a University of Alberta law professor, has said it “seems next to impossible.”

“If you look to the Supreme Court of Canada’s statement on separation, it looks exceptionally difficult but may be feasible, if … those negotiations produce some workable separation arrangement,”

Adams said in 2019

.

What role could Indigenous people play?

All of Alberta is covered by treaties, the majority of it by Treaties 6, 7 and 8. And there are 813,000 hectares of specific reserve land. After Smith said she would be willing to hold a referendum, a coalition of First Nation chiefs met for an emergency meeting and denounced the talk of separation.

“We’re not going anywhere and if you feel that you have problems with First Nations you could leave,”

said Chief Troy Knowlton of Piikani Nation

.

While the Alberta government is making it easier for citizens to push for a referendum, in the face of concern from Indigenous people in Alberta, the government

introduced 11th-hour amendments

to the legislation changing up the referendum process. The amendments were in the legislation passed as the spring session of the Alberta legislature drew to a close.

“In response to feedback from First Nations and Indigenous partners and to reassert our commitment to protecting Treaty rights, the bill now includes a clause stating that nothing in a referendum under the Act is to deviate from existing Treaty rights,” said Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery in a statement. “Alberta’s government will always recognize, protect, and honour Treaty rights as recognized by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.”

It remains to be seen whether this would affect the ability of Albertans to even get a separation referendum on the ballot in the first place.

An analysis of First Nations rights vis-à-vis separation, written by University of Calgary law professors Robert Hamilton and David Wright, says that Indigenous people in the province would likely have a significant role to play in any future negotiations over separation.

“It is reasonable to think that Indigenous peoples would expect to be full negotiating partners in any movement toward Albertan or Western secession,” wrote Hamilton and Wright.

They also said that it would be more complicated for both Ottawa and Edmonton than to simply hand over treaty obligations to a hypothetical future independent state government.

“The only way Canada would be able to legally agree to secession, then, would be if there were guarantees in place ensuring that Alberta would respect the rights of Indigenous peoples to the same extent as they are at Canadian law (we set aside for the moment critiques on the adequacy of such) and if Indigenous peoples agreed to this modification in the relationship,” they wrote. “The Crown cannot unilaterally decide to divest itself of its obligations or transfer them to another government.”

Still, this perhaps would not amount to an Indigenous veto.

“It would seem plausible that there could be a state succession to a treaty…. People generally haven’t suggested that Quebec would be incapable of separating due to treaties,” said University of Saskatchewan law professor Dwight Newman. “At a broad level, Alberta could likely take on the obligations associated with the treaties to ensure that they continue on. I do see it as appropriate that Indigenous peoples are part of the conversations.”

Bruce Pardy, a Queen’s University law professor, wrote in an email that there would be no Indigenous veto in the case of a separation vote, but that opponents of separation might use Indigenous rights to “discredit the process.”

“Canadian constitutional rights will not automatically be carried over to a newly independent Alberta. At the outset, everything will be an open question. That includes the status of Aboriginal people,” wrote Pardy.

• More than half of Canadians say Alberta separation should be taken seriously: poll
• Doug Ford says Carney should extend an olive branch to the West. Liberal strategists agree

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is expected to 

continue living at Stornoway

with his family while he seeks a seat to return to the House of Commons.

Poilievre lost his Ottawa-area Carleton seat in the federal election last month and is no longer recognized as the official leader of the Opposition in the House. It was

initially unclear if Poilievre would remain

at the taxpayer-funded residence, which has been

reserved for the leader of the Opposition since 1950

.

Former Conservative leader and MP Andrew Scheer has been selected to take Poilievre’s place temporarily until Poilievre runs in a byelection.

To regain his seat in Parliament, Poilievre has said he will run in a byelection in the Alberta riding of Battle River—Crowfoot, after re-elected Conservative MP Damien Kurek said he was stepping aside to make that seat available for the leader. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he will call the byelection as quickly as possible to allow Poilievre to return to the House as Opposition leader.

“Given that Mr. Poilievre hopes to be re-elected as a Member of Parliament in a few months and Prime Minister Carney promised to hold the byelection quickly, it would be more costly to taxpayers to move the family out and then right back into the residence,” Scheer said in a statement to CBC News.

“I have no intention to move into the residence and so we expect the family will just remain there through this short transition phase.”

It is with humility and appreciation that I have accepted Damien Kurek’s offer to resign his seat in Battle River-Crowfoot so that I can work to earn the support of citizens there to serve them in Parliament.

Damien’s selfless act to step aside temporarily as a Member of…

— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) May 2, 2025

However, Kurek will have to wait until he can resign.

According to the Parliament of Canada Act, a Member of Parliament cannot resign until after the expiration of the period during which their election may be contested. Section 527(a) of the Canada Elections Act provides that the contestation period of an election is 30 days following the publication of their election result in the Canada Gazette, the Office of the Speaker of the House said.

On May 15, Kurek’s election result was published in the 

Canada Gazette, Part I, Volume 159, Number 10: Extra edition

.

After recording a notice of resignation, the House speaker must report it to the chief electoral officer in order to hold a byelection to fill the vacancy, 

per the House of Commons

.

The date of that byelection must be called between 11 and 180 days after the chief electoral officer receives the warrant from the Speaker, 

Elections Canada says

. “The Governor in Council also fixes the date for election day, which cannot be earlier than 36 days, or later than 50 days,” after the formal order for the byelection has been given. That would mean the earliest Poilievre could be elected would be in August.

Meanwhile, Poilievre has moved out of his Parliament Hill office as well as his constituency office. His 

webpage

 on the House of Commons website indicates that he is “no longer a Member of Parliament.”

The results of the federal election are expected to be officially finalized by May 19, according to the federal government. Parliament will return on May 26 and King Charles will deliver the throne speech on May 27.

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