January 29, 2026
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February 12, 2026
Stop Separatism
Alberta separatism is being transformed from a grassroots fringe movement into a foreign funded political threat.
Separatism is a serious threat to our economy, our province, and our country. It doesn’t create jobs or attract investment. It does not make us safer, healthier and happier. Danielle Smith and this UCP have changed the rules repeatedly to allow separatists to gain momentum and we need to deal with it.
It is getting hard to watch the news and see what is happening south of the border. The United States is increasingly exhibiting authoritarian tendencies, and experts argue it is becoming a fascist police state. Meanwhile, leaders of Alberta’s separatist movement are holding meetings with U.S. officials, to discuss a potential $500‑billion line of credit to support separation from Canada. Alberta’s separatist organizers are seeking financial backing from the U.S. government to remove Alberta from Canada and potentially turn it into a U.S. territory.
Jeffrey Rath, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, the group leading the separation campaign, confirmed meetings have happened with "very senior level" U.S. officials, including at the State Department. Another delegation is planning to travel next month to continue discussions with the State Department and potentially Treasury officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly acknowledged separatist talk in Alberta, and Rath said, “We were thrilled with Scott Bessent’s comments.”
With the U.S. State Department’s involvement, Alberta separatism is being transformed from a grassroots fringe movement into a foreign funded political threat. It seems to me Danielle Smith and the UCP are enabling this.
This is an extremely serious threat to Canada’s sovereignty and we need to treat it as such. Imagine how the U.S. government would react if high ranking officials of Canada’s federal government took meetings with separatists from Montana to explore how Canada could help support its separation from the U.S. I expect the madman from Mar-a-Lago would ask us to get lost.
The U.S. State Department is well-acquainted with intervening in the affairs of other countries. It has done so numerous times, with each foreign intervention driven by economic opportunity. This explains their recent invasion of resource-rich Venezuela, current threat to resource-rich Greenland, and now, notable interest in resource-rich Alberta.
An historical example can be found in Panama, which used to be a part of Colombia, until the U.S. sponsored a separation campaign in that territory. In exchange for their help, the U.S. was granted a perpetual lease on the land surrounding the Panama Canal. Over the next six decades, this deal benefited the U.S. by hundreds of billions of dollars, while Panama itself saw only a fraction of that value.
Some Albertans who support separatism may not have pieced all of this together yet, but I am sure the U.S. State Department and the people leading the separation petition have done the math. Danielle Smith and the UCP Cabinet have too, which is why I am particularly bothered that the UCP passed Bill 14 making a separation referendum easier and transferring decision‑making authority from the independent Chief Electoral Officer to the provincial cabinet, specifically the Justice Minister.
We cannot afford to ignore what is happening in the news, as the U.S. slides towards fascism. It is a tragic thing to witness but we cannot stick our heads in the sand and hope it will just go away. We have to wake up to what is going on and do everything we can to stop it from coming here to Alberta.
This column was published in the Sherwood Park News on February 12, 2026, and written by Kyle Kasawski, the MLA for Sherwood Park. If you have questions about this column or any provincial issues, please contact us.
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