Canadian Separatists Discover That Polite Meetings At The American State Department Do Not Count As Votes

The Canadian province of Alberta has held its long awaited vote on independence, and the result has been impressively unkind to the people who demanded it. In Monday's referendum, question ten of ten asked whether Alberta should stay a province of Canada or start the legal process toward a binding separation vote. Preliminary counts put the stay side at around 76 percent; official results follow on 29 October, and the government itself had declared none of the ten questions binding. The movement was driven by a coalition of activists and conservative politicians profoundly irritated by federal energy policy and old pandemic rules.

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project had tried to lend their quest for sovereignty some weight by meeting officials of the US State Department in Washington several times, apparently believing that freedom is best negotiated in a foreign office building. The State Department called the contacts routine and said no commitments were made. British Columbia's premier called the outreach treason. The logistical confidence was staggering.

Activists set out to detach a vast territory from a modern nation while largely ignoring the First Nations whose treaties predate the province itself; in May a court ruled that they had not been consulted and that separation on these terms would violate treaty rights. Prime Minister Mark Carney now says Albertans chose unity. The movement operated on the beautiful fiction that founding a country requires only regional resentment and a few promising conversations with foreign diplomats, and the voters politely declined to share it.