This time is different. On October 19, Albertans will actually have a provincewide ballot offering a legal route toward independence. Never has the modern independence movement combined this level of public organization, a successful mass petition, institutional legitimacy, and an actual vote that could begin the constitutional process toward a binding referendum.

As described in many of my essays, the central issue is economic subordination. Alberta produces extraordinary wealth, sends a disproportionate share of it to Ottawa, and then watches federal governments spend those revenues (and not very wisely), while restricting many of the industries responsible for producing them. How long should Alberta continue financing a system in which it has comparatively little political power to determine the rules?

The Fraser Institute calculates that from 2007-08 through 2026-27, Albertans will have contributed a net $321.9 billion more to federal revenues than they received in federal spending. Its methodology can be debated, but the larger point survives: Alberta has long been one of Confederation’s largest net contributors.

At the same time, Canada’s economic performance has weakened where ordinary Canadians actually feel it. Statistics Canada reported real GDP per capita falling 1.3% in 2023 and another 1.4% in 2024. The Bank of Canada has called Canada’s productivity problem an economic “emergency” and estimated that matching the productivity performance of comparable G7 economies since 2000 would have left Canadian GDP roughly 9% higher.

And Ottawa’s bills continue to grow. Federal public-debt charges are projected to rise from about $54 billion in 2025-26 to $80.9 billion by 2030-31. Alberta is being asked to remain one of the high-output engines of a federation consuming an ever-larger share of its revenues merely servicing yesterday’s spending. Imagine the schools, roads, hospitals, and services that we could build with those funds?

Immigration adds another dimension. The Liberal government chose historically high immigration levels, and the consequences were dramatic. Canada’s population grew 3.2% in 2023, its fastest rate since 1957, with 97.6% of that growth attributable to international migration. Alberta subsequently grew 4.3% in 2023-24, faster than any other province.

Ottawa has since reduced its targets, but changing the target does not magically produce the houses, hospitals, schools, roads, and other infrastructure required for the population already added. Nor does it remove those who should not be here, who are here under fraudulent means or are here illegally. 

Alberta had 5.057 million people on April 1. The province’s medium projection anticipates roughly 1.3% annual long-term growth, with about 62% of future growth coming from international migration. Applied to today’s population, that puts Alberta near 5.4 million people by 2031 — roughly another 330,000 Albertans in five years.

Similar arguments have played out in the United States, where exceptionally high migration during the Biden years fuelled accusations that immigration would eventually alter the electoral math. That motive cannot be proven, and non-citizens cannot vote. What can be demonstrated is simpler: governments can change the demographic, fiscal, and political character of a country remarkably quickly. Alberta is experiencing that change now.

Demographic and economic change are not the only trends worth watching. Britain offers a warning about how quickly governments can move from regulating genuinely harmful conduct to policing online expression. During a 2025 House of Lords debate, figures were cited showing more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under two communications laws governing offensive or malicious messages.

Canada is expanding its own laws governing hate, online activity, and lawful access to communications. The circumstances are not identical, and each measure comes with stated public-safety objectives. But the broader direction should concern anyone who believes political dissent requires unusually broad protection. Governments that acquire new authority over speech, platforms, and communications rarely volunteer to give it back.

That brings everything back to October 19. 

Albertans are not being asked to declare independence that day. They are being asked whether they want to preserve the opportunity to seriously consider it: to begin the constitutional process that could lead to a binding referendum. Questions about currency, pensions, debt, treaties, trade, and federal assets would still have to be researched, negotiated, and ultimately considered by Albertans before independence could occur.

Meanwhile, the forces working against Alberta’s position are accelerating. Our population is changing rapidly. Federal debt is compounding. Canada’s economy is struggling to produce meaningful per-capita growth. Alberta remains a major contributor to Ottawa while federal authority continues expanding into areas ranging from energy to online communications.

Political windows do not remain open forever. Every year that passes changes the electorate, increases fiscal dependency, and further entrenches institutions that rarely surrender powers once acquired.

That is why October 19 matters so much. 

Alberta has spent decades trying constitutional reform, Senate reform, negotiation, accommodation, and appeals for a fairer federation. None of that has fundamentally altered the relationship. Now Albertans have something previous generations rarely possessed: a lawful, democratic opportunity to produce significant leverage and to grow the independence option.

If it does not pass, no one can say another opportunity will never arise. But given our history of failure, the demographic changes, mounting federal debt, deteriorating economic performance, and expanding centralized control, if another opportunity ever arises, it will be decades out.  

October 19 may very well be our last practical chance to decide the future of Alberta for ourselves.

I’m certain most Canadians would say the same thing if you asked them. So why is the Canadian government, and particularly Heritage Minister Marc Miller, taking cues on so-called “social cohesion” from the UK’s Labour Party? Isn’t the UK a royal mess?

If you consult AI about the situation in the UK, it happily reports that such worries are unjustified. According to the 2026 report Crime in England and Wales, for instance, homicide, theft, and incidents of violence are down from last year. 

These stats might reassure people looking for easy answers, but they fail to explain the anxiety among many UK citizens, which appears concerningly high. Reports of riots, police making arrests because of tweets containing “hate speech,” and problems controlling immigration regularly make the news. Many leftists blame this tension on the “politics of grievance,” which is code for conservative populism.

At certain times, that “grievance” is barely contained.

On June 2, a near one-thousand-man mob gathered at a police station and then marched to the family home of a 23-year-old Sikh, Vickrum Singh Digwa, in Southampton, England. The Sikh was sentenced to life in prison for the cold-blooded murder of 18-year-old university student Henry Nowak. Digwa lied and claimed he was a victim of a racist attack. The police believed him and arrested Nowak, who had already been fatally stabbed by Digwa. Just minutes later, Nowak died in handcuffs.

After the resulting outrage led to riots and violent clashes with police, 33 people were charged, and two officers are being investigated for potential gross misconduct. Several rioters were sentenced to three years in jail or more.

Then there was Belfast a week later, on June 9.

Masked rioters went berserk and burned cars, houses, and businesses in Northern Ireland. Violent protestors took to the streets because a Sudanese asylum-seeker, 30-year-old Hadi Alodid, attempted to behead a hearing-impaired man, 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie. Ogilvie’s injuries were so severe that he had to be put into an induced coma, and although he is now recovering, he’s lost sight in his left eye, and his right eye, back, and neck remain badly damaged.

Police, meanwhile, refuse to call Alodid’s attack terrorism.

These terrible events followed Tommy Robinson’s 60,000-strong “unite the kingdom” march on May 16 in Central London, which The Guardian accused of promoting “Islamophobic and ethnonationalist hate speech.” That’s a crowd over three times the size of the Freedom Convoy’s most packed weekend. The rally saw 20 people arrested, 9 of whom were charged with hate crimes.

If all this mayhem wasn’t disturbing enough, it seems the Canadian government is looking carefully at everything going on in UK society and taking notes. According to Blacklock’s Reporter, in July, Prime Minister Mark Carney sent Marc Miller to find out just what the UK Labour government has been doing to achieve the kind of “social cohesion” they are currently experiencing.

That’s right. Immediately after this series of events demonstrating a highly unstable society in May and June, the federal Liberals took a trip across the Atlantic in July to learn how the UK enforces “social cohesion.”

Because they are doing such a good job, perhaps? 

What does Miller think “social cohesion” is anyway?

Back in February, Miller told Conservative MP Rachael Thomas and the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, “Social cohesion is the ability for people to trust their institutions, to not feel like society is falling apart: that we are all living together and able to exercise the rights — in the case of Canada — that define us, freedom as enshrined in the Charter of Rights.”

The late author Bill Gairdner argued in The Trouble with Canada… Still! that the best way to build and maintain a free society — which could be considered building and maintaining social cohesion — was to lawfully push back against the coercive force of the state. This was done by autonomous citizens using their freedom to willingly organize institutions of civil society, like marriages, clubs, teams, churches, schools, businesses, and Facebook pages. 

Alright, I admit Gairdner didn’t explicitly mention Facebook pages in his book. But he would have included them in future editions, because they are ideally formed by autonomous citizens using online freedom to discuss important matters. Facebook pages promote freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, and freedom of speech, which are all core tenets of democracy. 

But when Marc Miller talks about “social cohesion,” he’s talking about government-controlled cohesion. The government will enforce freedom from hate, for instance, is one approach the Liberals have fixated on. But this is not a true freedom for the citizenry. It’s freedom from being offended that is ensured by the state, which means it necessarily involves force or coercion. 

Despite this, in February, Miller denied any connection to the “social cohesion” practiced by the Chinese Communist Party, but that was disingenuous. The method by which Miller believes “social cohesion” is achieved is similar to the one communists use.

Take the CBC for example. In February, Miller clearly stated that he believes the CBC, as “state-financed” but “not state-controlled” media, is essential to combat disinformation, which is implied as the source of protests, violence, and the like. He stated this while he paradoxically claimed the CBC is “ferociously independent in its mandate.” He believes that the CBC is vital for social cohesion because it’s part of Canadian culture and it provides an alternative to those dangerous sources of disinformation.

But it gets worse. 

Thanks to the reporting of the Western Standard’s always perspicacious Alex Zoltan, we learned that Marc Miller has consulted some sources even more questionable than the UK’s Labour Party or the CBC on promoting “social cohesion.”

In a blistering exclusive, Zoltan showed that Miller consulted with the Emeritus Chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Bernie Farber, in March this year.

The key takeaway from Farber? Forget freedom for citizens to discuss matters on Facebook and other online platforms. Under a section labelled “platform accountability” on the departmental summary obtained by Zoltan, Farber called for “Ensuring there are real consequences and not relying on platforms’ willingness or convenience to act. They should not be allowed to police themselves; the government should do it.”

There it is: government force and coercion in place of institutional freedom.

What are ideologues like Miller, Farber, and those in the UK Labour government all missing? They are missing that under increasingly strict laws and the reduction of democratic freedoms to assemble, express, and speak, resentment naturally increases. Social cohesion decreases. In the age of digital media, our government has decided to rush toward totalitarian methodology to control the people, even though it’s clearly not working in the UK.