The UCP Separatist Wing Is Winning. Here’s What Comes Next

Jeffrey Rath, the caricature of an Alberta separatist who happens to be Alberta’s best-known separatist at the moment, isn’t right about much.

But he was right when he got up at the recent United Conservative Party annual general meeting and told the premier that her party was a separatist party now.

“Their party wants a free and independent Alberta and they better start leading like we’re going to become that country, because that’s what their members demand,” Rath, who wore a black ball cap to the late-November AGM instead of one of his trademark cowboy hats, told a reporter after his convention-floor speechifying.

And, yes, Rath is right. The UCP really is a separatist party now, however much Danielle Smith tries to play both ends against the middle to her own political advantage.

Look, as Smith would say when she’s about to tell a lie, it doesn’t really matter if the premier is a foolish ninny channelling David Cameron — the Conservative British prime minister who let the Brexit referendum go ahead on the assumption it was sure to lose and shut up his party’s little-England faction — or a sly separatist actually engaging in sedition bordering on treason.

Beats me which one is the real Danielle Smith, but either way she has done a grave disservice to Alberta and Canada by caving to what is obviously the party’s dominant faction and giving them a way to get their separatist referendum on a ballot, notwithstanding the fact a court has just declared it to be unconstitutional.

As CBC’s Jason Markusoff explained the manoeuvre, were it not for the UCP passing Bill 14 — the Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, which came into force on Thursday — “the Alberta Prosperity Project’s citizens’ initiative would have been in peril, thanks to a judge’s ruling that the existing initiative law didn’t permit a referendum on independence.

“That new bill revives the separatists’ project by removing the ability for Elections Alberta — or anyone — to vet a proposed question’s constitutional validity.”

The Alberta Prosperity Project got right to it and marched back to Elections Alberta with a lightly tweaked version of its old application to get their divisive and destructive question on a ballot as soon as possible due to Smith’s machinations.

So Albertans who don’t want to see their country destroyed, their pensions looted, their streets flooded with firearms and their province eventually absorbed by the shit show to the south had better wake up and smell the coffee. We’re about to be subjected to the biggest disinformation and election interference campaign since Brexit, quite possibly with similar unpredictable results.

And it’ll all be thanks to Smith and the UCP. About the best thing that we can hope for is that Alberta will soon become an international joke for months or possibly years. That will be sad, but it still beats being an international tragedy.

Meanwhile, social media was abuzz on the weekend with suggestions a reconstituted Alberta Party, now led by former UCP cabinet minister Peter Guthrie, could soon change the province’s electoral math, win moderate conservative votes and deliver us from separatist evil.

Guthrie seems like a nice enough guy, and it’s reassuring to see a conservative willing to stand up and admit he’s not a MAGA separatist, but readers will have to forgive me if I’m skeptical about the ability of the Alberta Party to deliver the promised political earthquake.

The Alberta Party is the stealth bomber of Wild Rose politics — unable ever to get on the radar with voters as, at various times in its history, a right-wing fringe party, a home for disaffected Liberals and a refuge for Red Tories sent packing from the UCP. As one wit observed of the party the last time it had a member in the house, when everything was said and done, an awful lot was said, and nothing much was done.

Now that he’s the only Alberta Party MLA in the house, can the former UCP infrastructure minister — not exactly a political dynamo before his split with the UCP over those dodgy health-care contracts — now somehow turn the Alberta Party into the new Progressive Conservatives, even if Bill 14 also won’t allow them to call themselves new, progressive, conservative or PCs?

Well, hope springs eternal and a poll supposedly suggests that a lot of small-c conservative Albertans would indeed be relieved to be able to vote PC again and see the last of the MAGA lunatics who elevated Smith to the premier’s office. But achieving that would be an overwhelming task for a party with few members, no bankroll and a brand new, hitherto low-profile leader.

With the UCP likely to call an election in the spring, such a turnaround would seem improbable even for a campaigner with the talents of Thomas Lukaszuk — the former PC deputy premier who led the campaign that got nearly half a million Albertans to sign a pro-Canada petition in just three months — at the helm.

And Lukaszuk told me Monday he’ll be spending his efforts in the next few months battling separatism and ensuring that Alberta remains forever Canadian.

Even the manner of Guthrie’s appointment — by the Alberta Party board, not an election by party members, if any — is not an auspicious beginning to what is supposed to be an earth-shaking political development.

For the next two years, at least, it seems probable the only credible alternative to the UCP will be the NDP led by Naheed Nenshi.