Alberta separation vote: Mark Carney warns 'dangerous bluff' and Canada's Brexit moment
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Alberta separation vote: Mark Carney warns 'dangerous bluff' and Canada's Brexit moment")
A view of an oil refinery of the Syncrude joint venture project in the Wood Buffalo municipality, 40 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, in Canada's western province of Alberta, on May 5, 2026. Photograph: (AFP)
Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta will vote in October on whether to pursue a path toward separation. Prime Minister Mark Carney compared the move to Brexit as tensions over oil, federal power and nationalism intensify.
The oil-rich Alberta province of Canada is planning to hold a referendum in October to decide whether it will break away from the nation, as announced by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has voiced his condemnation of the move, calling it a “dangerous bluff”. Carney was the governor of the Bank of England during Britain's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. He drew a parallel between the two, saying that people are still trying to undo what they voted for.
"I saw firsthand what happened in the United Kingdom ... They're still 10 years later trying to undo what people didn't think they were voting for, but what they ended up having," Carney said, referring to the 2016 Brexit vote. The vote scheduled for October 19 will ask Albertan wether they want to stay with Canada or want to initiate the process of holding a binding referendum to secede.
“Is it helpful to ask these fundamental questions?” Carney said while talking to reporters on Monday. “No, it’s not helpful. Of course, it’s not. Is it the democratic will of Albertans? Did they vote for this in the last provincial election? No, they didn’t. It wasn’t on the ballot paper; it wasn’t in the mandates or platforms of the governing party and the official opposition.”
The comments were the harshest criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Her centre-right United Conservative Party did not mention a referendum in the run-up to its election victory in the province in 2023. Danielle Smith had voiced her opposition to separation but said that she will work to materialise the process of the referendum. It came after a grassroots movement named Stay Free Alberta, which gathered 300,000 signatures for a petition calling for a separation from Canada, enough to trigger a referendum. The movement is led by senior provincial conservative organiser Mitch Sylvestre and directly backed by MAGA and Donald Trump. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on right-wing media to publicly validate the secession rumours, calling Alberta a “natural partner for the United States”. There are also reports from the Financial Times that members of the Trump administration held meetings with Alberta secessionist groups to enable credit lines if they succeeded at freedom.
Alberta is an oil-rich province of Canada, and holds over 95 per cent of the oil reserves of Canada. Until now, Carney and Smith had been cooperating to build an oil and gas pipeline from British Columbia to supply the Asian Markets. Canada contains the third-largest oil reserve in the world, just after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
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