Originally published on May 10, 2026 in issue 07 of Forward Weekly
Probably the most baffling thing about the leaders of Alberta’s separatist movement is that they are the absolute last people you would want running a new country. Whether they’re actively leaking every Albertan’s private data to the world, getting professionally censured or just letting it be known that they are unapologetic leaders of a white movement, they routinely demonstrate the sort of judgement you would expect from someone who solves their persistent pants-wetting issue by buying another pair of jeans.
The one thing you can say for them is that they accurately represent their base. According to a recent CBC/Janet Brown poll, the group of Albertans most likely to support separation — besides UCP voters, naturally — were those whose annual household incomes surpass $150,000 and yet still find it hard to make ends meet. Nearly half of Albertans who fall into this illustrious category of “struggling high earners” are willing to blow up the country, I guess because they feel they have nothing left to lose.
For some context here, the median household income in Alberta is in the ballpark of $100,000 a year, meaning half of households in the province make less than that. To put it plainly, though rising costs of living come for us all, if you are unable to figure out how to balance a basic budget while making fully 50 percent more than everyone you meet in a day, you have made some spectacularly bad decisions. Probably repeatedly. Maybe they just amount to not downsizing your lifestyle a little bit after suffering a setback, but I’d be willing to guess that at least one of them involved being drunk on a speedboat you are financing for north of nine percent.
If you are unable to figure out how to balance a basic budget while making fully 50 percent more than everyone you meet in a day, you have made some spectacularly bad decisions.
And while we should all aspire to a certain level of grace towards our brethren’s foibles — let he who has never paid $39 plus tip to Door Dash a banh mi sandwich cast the first stone — there are limits to everything. Personally, my limit is: “this person is willing to set fire to a society that has put them in the top 20th percentile of nationwide earners because they can’t get through a winter without four trips to Scottsdale.” Particularly since this notable subclass of people — the broad group that the media has assigned 19 different pseudonyms for economically insecure because it offends journalistic neutrality to point out that some people are fucking dense — has been responsible for virtually every sledgehammer blow to the global load-bearing walls since Brexit.
The best minds of this particular political movement have produced an economic justification for their position that has less basis in reality than Redditors still “HODLing” onto GameStop. Among other things, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s economic platform, titled The Value of Freedom, seeks to hedge an unpredictable resource revenue by creating a Bitcoin reserve. Apparently realizing that’s not the winning pitch they thought it was, they now tend to rely on promises of forcible deportation and further reliance on U.S. geopolitical dominance, even though the former has proven historically unpopular and the latter catastrophically compromised.
It behooves us to fully digest the fact that we are currently engaged in a rational debate about our future with the sort of people whose capacity for self-reflection is exhausted when the Tim Hortons drive-thru menu switches screens.
If you think I’m being a little mean to Alberta separatists, I’m old enough to remember when spouting off about “Wexit” was like sharing your best Bigfoot recipe. The only reason my opinion might “feel” counterproductive is that this movement has since received a massive assist from the political and media power structures of this province that have decided to start treating them seriously. The former started this by rigging democratic structures to make their fringe demands more plausible, and then the latter pitched in by acting like this finger on the scales has materially grown their base of support.
It’s one thing to take the threat of separatism seriously: as, again, Brexit and everything after has shown, an idea does not need to be clever or well-considered to wreak havoc on our lives. But it’s something else entirely to act like anyone who actively supports this nonsense has a sensible handle on the consequences.
The separatists’ simplistic, knee-jerk tantrums about not getting whatever they want — even when they are demonstrably among the richest people in the province — have been neutralized for decades by the simple politics of group derision. It's high time we returned to that august tradition in this province. We owe it to ourselves to show these people — and the spineless MLAs who think they can manage them — just how little we think of the kind of person who tries to soothe a stubbed toe by burning the house down.
David Berry is a writer, editor and organizer who was born and raised in the shadow of Elk Island National Park, and currently lives in Edmonton. He’s written two books, the latest of which is How Artists Make Money and How Money Makes Artists.
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