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The Separatists Lost. So Why Does Canada Feel like the Loser?

Albertans rejected the movement in a landslide, but not before it made a mockery of our institutions

The separatists lost. Alberta residents voted overwhelmingly yesterday against the option of holding a second vote on whether to secede from Canada. As of this writing, nearly 76 percent of voters have chosen to remain, per CBC reporting. Yet the separatists won on other fronts, and their victories are more considerable than we could have anticipated.

They turned their cause into a national crisis. They widened the Overton window of what is politically possible in Canada, making narrowly transactional gripes about policy—what one separatist leader called a choice between “freedom or tax slavery”—a credible argument for busting up a country. They not only captured a sitting premier, who won the leadership of her United Conservative Party largely through her initial support of their cause, but the governing UCP party itself, in which as many as eighteen sitting members of the legislative assembly (out of forty-seven) have been identified as separatists. They opened the door to foreign interference, with bots, influencers, and a whole disinformation industry boosting pro-separation voices. They actively courted a hostile United States administration intent on absorbing Canada, sending separatist leaders to Washington three times last year to meet with American officials. They have shown an astonishing willingness to undermine their own country. There’s a word for that.

And what did we do about it? Mostly, we watched. We scrolled and we ranted. Politicians made barnstorming speeches. Like many outlets across the country, The Walrus reported on the separatists, parsing their arguments, churning out thousands of the kind of well-intentioned words we win awards for. Our writers clocked shocking activities, which included a separatist group getting hold of a voter list in one of the largest data breaches in Canadian history. They shared that secession would be an economic disaster for Alberta. They pointed out the racist underpinnings of the movement. They argued that the........

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