Alberta Has Real Work to Do. Separatist Dreams Just Distract

What feeds the growing mood in Alberta that the province would be better off cutting loose from Canada?

Wounded pride, a deep defensiveness against how the wider public thinks about oil and gas and the extractive ethos that built the province, says Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.

“The West is coming to terms with new boundaries being placed on it,” he said, pointing at the increased environmental regulations, as well as Indigenous reconciliation, that have come to be seen as an attack on all Albertans. This has produced a sense of relative deprivation or lost status among Albertans, as jobs in the oil and gas industry lose their sheen as a symbol of pride.

“At our core, we want to feel that what we do is honourable,” Wesley told The Tyee. “We want to feel like what we spend eight to 12 hours a day doing is rewarded and appreciated by the rest of society. But a group of folks in Alberta do not feel that way anymore, and that’s a sudden change within the period of a generation.”

Wesley, who researches how Albertans define their values and identities, cites a 2020 Viewpoint Alberta survey that asked respondents how much they agree with the following statement: “People like me are falling behind in Alberta society.”

“More than half of respondents (58 per cent) agree, with 26 per cent answering that they strongly agree. Only 15 per cent disagree, with less than five per cent strongly disagreeing. More than a quarter of respondents were more neutral or undecided, with 27 per cent answering that they neither agree nor disagree.”

Wesley concludes that feeling of the ground slipping away makes rural Albertans especially vulnerable to far-right ideologies that verge on white Christian nationalism.

“When people are faced with complex change that they might not understand,” Wesley said, “they’re attracted to simple solutions that populists provide them.”

The appeal was on full display at a recent so-called educational town hall hosted by the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist organization launched in 2021.

The event opened with a prayer that invoked God’s power to relieve hard-working Albertans from the indignities they endure at the hands of Ottawa. After an equally religious song that pleaded for Albertans to be released from the tyranny of socialism, a trio of the organization's leaders took the stage.

One of the founders, Dennis Modry, riled up the small crowd by stressing the hurdles “freedom-loving” Albertans endure. “When you’re over-taxed, over-regulated, and over-governed, you’re giving up your sovereignty.”

Modry also peddled conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum’s plan to obliterate the way of life of hard-working Albertans.

Listing myriad municipal, provincial and federal taxes, many of which only high-income Albertans pay, Alberta Prosperity Project CEO Mitch Sylvestre posed a question that spoke to the audience’s resentment.

“Do you think that’s fair?” he said. “They’re killing our industry, shutting us down, taxing the hell out of us and then taking and transferring it to people all over the world.”

But if such frustration abounds, so does a basic misunderstanding of how Albertans arrived here and how they could chart a better path instead of focusing on separatism.

Record oilpatch profits as jobs decline

Start with the fact that Sylvestre failed to mention last year’s oil and gas production bonanza, or the profits raked in by industry as companies shed thousands of jobs.

Buffeted by world markets and climate change, the fossil fuel industry has been in volatile transition for decades. And yet during boom years Alberta’s government has failed to squirrel away funds and develop strategies for the inevitable changes facing the province’s citizenry.

While Norway’s oil fund is worth more than US$1 trillion, the value of Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund, created in 1976 to collect a portion of the province’s resource revenue, reached just $25 billion in December, or about as much as the 2025 provincial budget allocates for capital expenses over the next three years.

And if Albertans think they pay too many taxes, they might look to the revenue-rich oilpatch to help with the load. Last year, the contribution of Alberta taxpayers to the provincial coffers was $3 billion higher than bitumen royalties.

This suggests the cause of this chasm isn’t the red tape imposed by a contemptuous federal government, as Sylvestre’s presentation suggested, but a royalty formula designed by the oil industry itself.

Yet instead of focusing their frustration on fossil fuel corporations, Albertans have been told making them happy is best for the province. Even though, increasingly, stagnant wages, unstable work and automation undermine the ability of workers in the oil and gas sector to reap the fruits of their labour.

Across the province, particularly in rural areas, many Albertans are falling through the cracks, as the mirage created by the Alberta Advantage dissipates. A similar pattern emerged in regions where blue-collar jobs were lost, such as the Rust Belt in the United States and the industrial heartland in Britain.

In Red Deer County, the oil and gas sector is slowly collapsing and workers in the region are struggling — but the provincial government isn’t investing in initiatives to support them, said Kyle Johnston, president of the Red Deer and District Labour Council, an organization that represents 7,000 unionized workers.

Red Deer’s 7.7 per cent unemployment rate, the highest in the province, is exacerbated by the rise of precarious work. Increasingly, employers hire workers on a contract basis that offers “low wages, no pension and no benefits,” Johnston said.

In 2024, the Red Deer Food Bank, which serves 17 rural food banks in the region, distributed more than 1,000 food hampers each month, or twice as many as in 2020. This year shows similar numbers, said Mitch Thomson, the organization’s executive director, pointing at stark inequalities that exist in the area.

“In Red Deer there are people that live very well and have good paying jobs,” Thomson said. “But there are people that aren’t making a living wage.”

Last year, the Alberta Living Wage Network estimated Red Deer’s living wage at $18.90, or almost $4 more than Alberta’s minimum wage. Despite the rising cost of food, housing and transportation, the provincial government has not raised the minimum wage since 2018.

Facing a future beyond oilsands reliance

If Alberta’s economic disparities already drive populist resentment, Alberta’s economy faces an existential risk far beyond the whims of Ottawa about carbon taxes or new pipelines.

Although the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries forecasts global demand for oil will grow by 24 per cent in the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency’s outlook is less rosy. The IEA’s latest oil market report warns that supply could exceed demand as early as 2027, as the world shifts to renewable energy and biofuels.

In February a former oilsands executive writing in Maclean’s dared to admit that “market forces, not politics, killed the oil boom.” The high oil prices that propped up Alberta time and time again are unlikely to return.

Political scientist Wesley says it’s a message people outside the province need to absorb as well. “The rest of Canada needs to stop looking at Alberta as a beacon of capitalistic progress that’s so advanced that doesn’t need support,” he said. “While that might be true fiscally and politically, what’s driving a lot of this anxiety is the realization amongst most Albertans that peak oil is around the corner.”

Reaching peak oil would be a blow not only to the livelihood of many Albertans, but to their core identities. And many already sense the day is coming.

The choice they face is stark. Mobilize to address the failures of an inequitable system. Or double down on the narrative that oil and gas can make Alberta great again if free of the yoke of Ottawa.

Delilah Dupuis has made her choice. She is a member of Alberta’s United Conservative Party who lives in Didsbury, a small town in central Alberta between Calgary and Red Deer.

Although today she enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, raising two daughters as a single mother meant Dupuis had to work more than one full-time job at a time to support her family.

“I would work extra to try and get more money so we could have the lifestyle that my parents had just working regular jobs,” she told The Tyee. “I feel like I had to work two or three times harder to get everything I wanted.”

Protecting the values she holds dear — hard work and self-sufficiency — is the main reason Dupuis came to champion the idea of an independent Alberta.

“If we could just be done with this system that is designed to take care of Ontario and Quebec and not anyone or anything in the West, I would have a much better life,” Dupuis said. “Canada can’t afford these lucrative social programs designed to make weak people weaker and dependent on the government.”

During the Alberta Prosperity Project’s town hall in Red Deer, Sylvestre expressed a similar sentiment.

“We’re going to have a dwindling population of people that actually contribute to this province,” he said. “Where we have this ever-expanding base of completely useless people who don’t feel that they have to work because the Liberal government will just take care of them like they’re babies for the rest of their lives.”

Contrast that with the view held by Red Deer and District Labour Council president Johnston. The leaders he holds accountable for Alberta’s situation — and mapping a path forward — are much closer to home.

“We have a lot of opportunity to do things better in Red Deer,” said Johnston. “But the reality is that years of conservative ideals in this province have created a race to the bottom.”

He’s echoed by Roberta Lexier, an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University whose research focuses on social movements and activism.

“Alberta politicians could look at what’s actually causing the problem: the multinational oil and gas sector that’s trying to expand its profits as much as possible.” Instead, they “distract from that problem because it’s going to raise questions about capitalism,” she said.

When it comes to protecting workers from precarity, the federal government plays an important role too. But while the feds provide billions to support the expansion of the oil and gas sector, little is being done to address the coming consequences of reaching peak oil, including widespread unemployment, meagre wages and limited revenue to fund the public services all Albertans rely on.

Instead, more seeds of separation are planted every time Albertans are encouraged by their political leaders to avoid the difficult conversation about preparing for leaner times and economic transition. From those seeds will grow a harvest of false expectations.

“As the oil industry starts to collapse, everything is going to get worse for the daily lives of Albertans,” Lexier said. “But the solution isn’t separation. The same problems would exist in ‘separate’ Alberta than they would within Canada. Because the problem isn’t Ottawa. It’s capitalism.”