Two courts have said it. Indigenous leaders have said it. A Manitoba premier said it to Danielle Smith's face. The separation movement still has not answered it.
Russell, thank you for this. Dr. McIvor’s piece sharpens something important that my article approached but did not fully land on. The duty to consult, which is where the courts have focused, is actually the lesser argument. The stronger one is that Alberta cannot unilaterally terminate the treaties under any circumstances, and a referendum cannot create that power. Consultation is a procedural requirement. Consent is the substantive one. Those are not the same thing, and the public conversation has been collapsing them. I will be returning to this distinction in future coverage. Genuinely useful, thank you.
I know someone will call it "AI slop", but given my lack of resources as a private citizen I used Gemini LLM as a faster typist to further add the Northwest Territories aspect of this ongoing land dispute discussion.
The claims that disagreements with Alberta Elites being "anti-democratic" needs to be challenged, as Smith's and the separatists arguments are fundamentally built on gerrymandering.
Russell, the internal colony argument is one I have been sitting with for months and have not yet fully written. The geometric disconnect you are describing, southern population, northern resources, the same extraction logic operating at every tier of Canadian geography, is exactly the structural story I keep circling. Alberta accuses Ottawa of treating it as a resource colony while treating the Athabasca and Peace River regions by the same logic. The Overton Window observation is precise and uncomfortable.
I am wrestling with a piece about this very problem, the geographic and economic imbalance not just within Alberta but across the country, Northwestern Ontario, the middle north, the unheard vastness of Canada that feeds the south and gets very little back. Your framing of the 1905 operating system as an administrative act that imposed a southern settler majority on northern territories that had their own distinct histories is going to be useful to me when I get there.
Thank you for taking the piece further. This is exactly the conversation it was meant to open.
I'm an IT guy who turned Lawrence Lessig's "Code and other laws of Cyberspace" around to try to encourage other technical people to better understand governance. And thus the whole "operating system" thing, but also a reminder that new operating systems can be installed (I'm a Linux/Android/ChromeOS guy, and never owned computer running MacOS or Microsoft Windows).
What sparked my thinking about the gerrymandering was actually a book with the amazing map on the cover written in 1995 in the context of that Quebec Referendum.
Sovereign injustice : forcible inclusion of the James Bay Crees and Cree territory into a sovereign Québec.
I believe a considerable amount of regional disputes and democratic deficits could be cleaned up if the gerrymandering of the creation and expansion of "provinces".
I know that Alberta is getting all the headlines at the moment, but it is the same problem with Quebec (City) separation or even conversations about the "Ring of Fire" (and all the boil water advisories) in Ontario.
Canada's longest boil water advisory is at Neskantaga First Nation in northwestern Ontario. The remote Ojibway community has been living without safe, drinkable tap water for over 30 years, with the advisory originally issued on February 1, 1995.
How can an extremely distant (physically, ideologically, etc, etc) capital in Toronto have any clue what is happening in the True North (that is no longer Strong and Free).
There is so much of what happens within Canadian governance that relates to this gerrymandering.
I think I've shared this: I was born in Sudbury, which was part of Northern Ontario in 1867 but was clearly part of the southern 1/3 of Ontario when I was born 101 years later. And yet, contemporary Sudbarians claim they live in "Northern Ontario". Canada is really odd in that most Canadians don't learn much about real Canadian History or real Canadian Geography.
Good points all. I was raised in Thunder Bay and lived for in west of Edmonton for quite a few years. I well know that discourse in this country rarely addresses anything not specific to the southern corridor major urban centres.
This is a superb untangling of the issues. The separatists really have no case. The courts have already ruled. The treaties hold as the first principle. The fact that the various separatist factions are now flailing against the judges is telling. Would the new country of Alberta they envision have no courts? No judges? No laws?
Thanks for this remarkable work, Leni. It is a study in the formation of Canada, not just in terms of Alberta, but of the whole country. The history and circumstances vary across the nation. The treaties remain. They are living documents, and breathe as fully and inescapably as the long border between Canada and the USA.
Donna, your question about the courts is the one I keep coming back to. The separatist movement calls rulings anti-democratic when they go against them, but a sovereign state requires a legal order. You cannot selectively reject the judiciary and then claim you are building a nation. And your framing of the treaties as breathing as fully and inescapably as the border itself is exactly right. They are not historical artifacts waiting to be set aside. They are the legal foundation of the land relationship, and they predate every argument the movement is making.
The structural argument you're making here, that obligations which predate a political entity cannot be dissolved by dissolving the entity, applies to more than treaties. I was writing this week about offshore tax structures that operate on the same logic in reverse. Wealth predates the regulatory entity that taxes it, so the wealthy build structures designed to outlive any single state's authority. Your essay is the moral version of that argument. The treaties came first. The province came second. The province cannot retire obligations it never held in the first place.
The Kinew exchange is going to be one of those small moments that historians point at later. He corrected a colleague on a constitutional fact, in public, and the correction held. That's how the record actually gets written. I did not read about this anywhere else. I read about it here.
Neela, your offshore tax parallel opened something up for me. In both cases the attempt is to use the restructuring or dissolution of an entity to nullify obligations that predate it and survive it. The wealthy build structures designed to outlive any single state’s regulatory authority over their wealth. The separatists are proposing something structurally similar: dissolving the province to avoid obligations the province never originated in the first place.
What makes the treaty situation the moral version, as you put it, is that the obligations are not regulatory. They are relational. Made between nations, not between a government and its subjects. A tax structure can eventually be legislated around. A nation-to-nation relationship cannot be dissolved by one party deciding it no longer applies.
Your summary is sharper than anything in the piece: the province cannot retire obligations it never held in the first place.
And thank you for the last line. That is exactly what this publication is trying to do.
Paul, that phrase is going to stay with me. A long road to truth is exactly right, and the shadow metaphor holds too. The history was never hidden. It just wasn’t being looked at. Thank you for reading.
Great article to help with some of the basic education about Canada that most Canadians seem to lack. I was one of these people until I was sparked to finally look into it after the #ShutDownCanada activities in solidarity with the Wetʼsuwetʼen peoples.
Your article included, "The province of Alberta is 121 years old. It entered Confederation in 1905."
I believe this is being extremely generous.
There was a District of Alberta that was an administrative unit of the Northwest Territories under the Canadian Crown (What Albertans like to call the distant capital of "Ottawa"). The Canadian Crown then took that territory, and parts of the Districts of Athabasca, Assiniboia and Saskatchewan and rebranded it as the Province of Alberta in 1905.
* Did Alberta ever “enter confederation”, or did "Ottawa" create these institutions to administer land that was already claimed by the Dominion of Canada as the Northwestern Territories (and therefore already part of confederation)?
* Did the District of Alberta have any land if it can be claimed to have “entered Confederation”?
* If we for the sake of argument that the District of Alberta entered Confederation, the District of Athabasca and other districts of Northwest Territories were clearly not part of that.
* Whatever the settler majority in the southern District of Alberta, or the government of the distant capital in Edmonton have to say about separating, whether the District of Athabasca JOINS Alberta or STAYS part of Canada is an entirely separate matter.
* If Alberta separatists knew that “Athabasca” being separate predates what "Ottawa" did in 1905, and that land would not be part of their separation, would they be interested in separation at all? Much of their grievances relate to resources in northern lands that the distant southern separatists should never be making claims to.
* Isn’t the distant government in Edmonton doing the very thing that the separatists believe the distant government in Ottawa is doing to them?
Thank you for this clear explanation. I would only add that the original treaties were signed with the (British) Crown. Subsequent constitutional transfers, I would assume, mean the the Government of Canada now assumes the role of "The Crown" in matters pertaining to these treaties. That brings Ottawa squarely into the separation debate.
John, you are right that the treaty obligations sit with the Crown, and through constitutional succession that means the Government of Canada now holds that role. So yes, Ottawa is squarely implicated in any actual separation process.
The complication is timing. The Clarity Act, as written, prevents Ottawa from weighing in until a clear question on actual separation is put to voters. What Alberta has proposed is a referendum on whether to commence the process of holding a future separation referendum. That two-step structure is precisely why Carney’s panel concluded the Clarity Act is not triggered yet. Ottawa cannot formally intervene until the question is direct. Which means for now, the Crown’s treaty obligations are present but the federal mechanism for acting on them is not yet activated. That gap is one of the more ‘interesting’ tensions in this whole situation.
Thank you for explaining this so precisely. And why can Smith not understand this? My conclusion is, she does not want to. She would do us all a service by shutting down this referendum.
Delphine, the charitable reading is that she understands it perfectly well and has calculated that the political cost of shutting it down is higher than the cost of letting it run. Keith’s point about her base is the key variable. Whether that calculation serves Albertans is a different question entirely.
Keith, the political physics of her situation are not lost on anyone watching closely. What is remarkable is that she has constructed a position where she campaigns for remain while allowing the question to proceed, and somehow believes that threads the needle. Whether it does is what October will tell us.
This is generally the problem that populists (whether marketed as "left wing" or "right wing") have to deal with.
If you get into power based on grievances (and other less-than-helpful emotions), then the conflicts created with that politics and any facts shared (documented by courts, constitutions, treaties, international human rights instruments, etc) will make such a coalition unstable. Will the current Alberta UCP government survive until October? I'm not even convinced of that at the moment, as it was never as "United" as the branding claims.
Live by populism, die by populism.
This is a Southern Alberta Elite led conversation about a question about a question where an answer only opens more questions. I now wonder if the 7/50 rule (70% of Canada's population being south of the 49th parallel) could be successfully used to separate the northern District of Athabasca from the alleged jurisdiction of the southern Edmonton capital if this culture of grievances generates too much noise.
Not at all likely the question they wanted anyone to ever ask.
Back in 1995 I was still a loyalist to the official government versions of Ontario and Canada, and did my part to help the “no” side of the Quebec referendum. I have an entirely different concept of what Canada and its provinces are today than the misinformation I assumed was true then.
Many Canadian political elites, and not only in current-day Alberta, rely on us never looking these things up.
Love this analogy from https://www.firstpeopleslaw.com/public-education/blog/alberta-secession-requires-more-than-consultation
"The idea that Alberta can unilaterally secede from Canada is as absurd as suggesting that a child has the power to annul their parents’ marriage. "
Russell, thank you for this. Dr. McIvor’s piece sharpens something important that my article approached but did not fully land on. The duty to consult, which is where the courts have focused, is actually the lesser argument. The stronger one is that Alberta cannot unilaterally terminate the treaties under any circumstances, and a referendum cannot create that power. Consultation is a procedural requirement. Consent is the substantive one. Those are not the same thing, and the public conversation has been collapsing them. I will be returning to this distinction in future coverage. Genuinely useful, thank you.
I know someone will call it "AI slop", but given my lack of resources as a private citizen I used Gemini LLM as a faster typist to further add the Northwest Territories aspect of this ongoing land dispute discussion.
The claims that disagreements with Alberta Elites being "anti-democratic" needs to be challenged, as Smith's and the separatists arguments are fundamentally built on gerrymandering.
https://r.flora.ca/p/legal-fiction-democracy
Russell, the internal colony argument is one I have been sitting with for months and have not yet fully written. The geometric disconnect you are describing, southern population, northern resources, the same extraction logic operating at every tier of Canadian geography, is exactly the structural story I keep circling. Alberta accuses Ottawa of treating it as a resource colony while treating the Athabasca and Peace River regions by the same logic. The Overton Window observation is precise and uncomfortable.
I am wrestling with a piece about this very problem, the geographic and economic imbalance not just within Alberta but across the country, Northwestern Ontario, the middle north, the unheard vastness of Canada that feeds the south and gets very little back. Your framing of the 1905 operating system as an administrative act that imposed a southern settler majority on northern territories that had their own distinct histories is going to be useful to me when I get there.
Thank you for taking the piece further. This is exactly the conversation it was meant to open.
I'm an IT guy who turned Lawrence Lessig's "Code and other laws of Cyberspace" around to try to encourage other technical people to better understand governance. And thus the whole "operating system" thing, but also a reminder that new operating systems can be installed (I'm a Linux/Android/ChromeOS guy, and never owned computer running MacOS or Microsoft Windows).
What sparked my thinking about the gerrymandering was actually a book with the amazing map on the cover written in 1995 in the context of that Quebec Referendum.
Sovereign injustice : forcible inclusion of the James Bay Crees and Cree territory into a sovereign Québec.
https://archive.org/details/sovereigninjusti0000gran
A better photo of the book cover is at the bottom of https://r.flora.ca/p/alberta
I believe a considerable amount of regional disputes and democratic deficits could be cleaned up if the gerrymandering of the creation and expansion of "provinces".
I know that Alberta is getting all the headlines at the moment, but it is the same problem with Quebec (City) separation or even conversations about the "Ring of Fire" (and all the boil water advisories) in Ontario.
Canada's longest boil water advisory is at Neskantaga First Nation in northwestern Ontario. The remote Ojibway community has been living without safe, drinkable tap water for over 30 years, with the advisory originally issued on February 1, 1995.
How can an extremely distant (physically, ideologically, etc, etc) capital in Toronto have any clue what is happening in the True North (that is no longer Strong and Free).
There is so much of what happens within Canadian governance that relates to this gerrymandering.
I think I've shared this: I was born in Sudbury, which was part of Northern Ontario in 1867 but was clearly part of the southern 1/3 of Ontario when I was born 101 years later. And yet, contemporary Sudbarians claim they live in "Northern Ontario". Canada is really odd in that most Canadians don't learn much about real Canadian History or real Canadian Geography.
Good points all. I was raised in Thunder Bay and lived for in west of Edmonton for quite a few years. I well know that discourse in this country rarely addresses anything not specific to the southern corridor major urban centres.
Will be a very thorny untangling of consult and / vs consent. But, I look forward to seeing you do it , Leni!
This is a superb untangling of the issues. The separatists really have no case. The courts have already ruled. The treaties hold as the first principle. The fact that the various separatist factions are now flailing against the judges is telling. Would the new country of Alberta they envision have no courts? No judges? No laws?
Thanks for this remarkable work, Leni. It is a study in the formation of Canada, not just in terms of Alberta, but of the whole country. The history and circumstances vary across the nation. The treaties remain. They are living documents, and breathe as fully and inescapably as the long border between Canada and the USA.
Donna, your question about the courts is the one I keep coming back to. The separatist movement calls rulings anti-democratic when they go against them, but a sovereign state requires a legal order. You cannot selectively reject the judiciary and then claim you are building a nation. And your framing of the treaties as breathing as fully and inescapably as the border itself is exactly right. They are not historical artifacts waiting to be set aside. They are the legal foundation of the land relationship, and they predate every argument the movement is making.
So good, Leni.
The structural argument you're making here, that obligations which predate a political entity cannot be dissolved by dissolving the entity, applies to more than treaties. I was writing this week about offshore tax structures that operate on the same logic in reverse. Wealth predates the regulatory entity that taxes it, so the wealthy build structures designed to outlive any single state's authority. Your essay is the moral version of that argument. The treaties came first. The province came second. The province cannot retire obligations it never held in the first place.
The Kinew exchange is going to be one of those small moments that historians point at later. He corrected a colleague on a constitutional fact, in public, and the correction held. That's how the record actually gets written. I did not read about this anywhere else. I read about it here.
Neela, your offshore tax parallel opened something up for me. In both cases the attempt is to use the restructuring or dissolution of an entity to nullify obligations that predate it and survive it. The wealthy build structures designed to outlive any single state’s regulatory authority over their wealth. The separatists are proposing something structurally similar: dissolving the province to avoid obligations the province never originated in the first place.
What makes the treaty situation the moral version, as you put it, is that the obligations are not regulatory. They are relational. Made between nations, not between a government and its subjects. A tax structure can eventually be legislated around. A nation-to-nation relationship cannot be dissolved by one party deciding it no longer applies.
Your summary is sharper than anything in the piece: the province cannot retire obligations it never held in the first place.
And thank you for the last line. That is exactly what this publication is trying to do.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Thank you Leni
Same to you as well :)
Thank you Leni
Same to you as well :)
I have often said, History has a long shadow, or in this case, a long road to truth!
Thank you for this valuable history lesson.
Paul, that phrase is going to stay with me. A long road to truth is exactly right, and the shadow metaphor holds too. The history was never hidden. It just wasn’t being looked at. Thank you for reading.
NEVER … SEPARTISTS DONT OWN ALBERTA THEY CAN LEAVE. THEY LOVE TEXAS, CANADA WILL GIVE THEM ONE WAY TICKETS. 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦
Great article to help with some of the basic education about Canada that most Canadians seem to lack. I was one of these people until I was sparked to finally look into it after the #ShutDownCanada activities in solidarity with the Wetʼsuwetʼen peoples.
Your article included, "The province of Alberta is 121 years old. It entered Confederation in 1905."
I believe this is being extremely generous.
There was a District of Alberta that was an administrative unit of the Northwest Territories under the Canadian Crown (What Albertans like to call the distant capital of "Ottawa"). The Canadian Crown then took that territory, and parts of the Districts of Athabasca, Assiniboia and Saskatchewan and rebranded it as the Province of Alberta in 1905.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_of_the_Northwest_Territories
There are so many questions:
* Did Alberta ever “enter confederation”, or did "Ottawa" create these institutions to administer land that was already claimed by the Dominion of Canada as the Northwestern Territories (and therefore already part of confederation)?
* Did the District of Alberta have any land if it can be claimed to have “entered Confederation”?
* If we for the sake of argument that the District of Alberta entered Confederation, the District of Athabasca and other districts of Northwest Territories were clearly not part of that.
* Whatever the settler majority in the southern District of Alberta, or the government of the distant capital in Edmonton have to say about separating, whether the District of Athabasca JOINS Alberta or STAYS part of Canada is an entirely separate matter.
* If Alberta separatists knew that “Athabasca” being separate predates what "Ottawa" did in 1905, and that land would not be part of their separation, would they be interested in separation at all? Much of their grievances relate to resources in northern lands that the distant southern separatists should never be making claims to.
* Isn’t the distant government in Edmonton doing the very thing that the separatists believe the distant government in Ottawa is doing to them?
https://r.flora.ca/p/alberta
I too like roads as useful metaphor ; like to add potholes to shadows - perhaps exit ramps not fully understood ?
Thank you for this clear explanation. I would only add that the original treaties were signed with the (British) Crown. Subsequent constitutional transfers, I would assume, mean the the Government of Canada now assumes the role of "The Crown" in matters pertaining to these treaties. That brings Ottawa squarely into the separation debate.
John, you are right that the treaty obligations sit with the Crown, and through constitutional succession that means the Government of Canada now holds that role. So yes, Ottawa is squarely implicated in any actual separation process.
The complication is timing. The Clarity Act, as written, prevents Ottawa from weighing in until a clear question on actual separation is put to voters. What Alberta has proposed is a referendum on whether to commence the process of holding a future separation referendum. That two-step structure is precisely why Carney’s panel concluded the Clarity Act is not triggered yet. Ottawa cannot formally intervene until the question is direct. Which means for now, the Crown’s treaty obligations are present but the federal mechanism for acting on them is not yet activated. That gap is one of the more ‘interesting’ tensions in this whole situation.
Thanks for the clarification!
Thank you for explaining this so precisely. And why can Smith not understand this? My conclusion is, she does not want to. She would do us all a service by shutting down this referendum.
Delphine, the charitable reading is that she understands it perfectly well and has calculated that the political cost of shutting it down is higher than the cost of letting it run. Keith’s point about her base is the key variable. Whether that calculation serves Albertans is a different question entirely.
But then the separatists in the UCP would kick her out, and she can't have that. She wants to be Prime Minister. Or Governor.
Keith, the political physics of her situation are not lost on anyone watching closely. What is remarkable is that she has constructed a position where she campaigns for remain while allowing the question to proceed, and somehow believes that threads the needle. Whether it does is what October will tell us.
This is generally the problem that populists (whether marketed as "left wing" or "right wing") have to deal with.
If you get into power based on grievances (and other less-than-helpful emotions), then the conflicts created with that politics and any facts shared (documented by courts, constitutions, treaties, international human rights instruments, etc) will make such a coalition unstable. Will the current Alberta UCP government survive until October? I'm not even convinced of that at the moment, as it was never as "United" as the branding claims.
Live by populism, die by populism.
This is a Southern Alberta Elite led conversation about a question about a question where an answer only opens more questions. I now wonder if the 7/50 rule (70% of Canada's population being south of the 49th parallel) could be successfully used to separate the northern District of Athabasca from the alleged jurisdiction of the southern Edmonton capital if this culture of grievances generates too much noise.
Not at all likely the question they wanted anyone to ever ask.
Back in 1995 I was still a loyalist to the official government versions of Ontario and Canada, and did my part to help the “no” side of the Quebec referendum. I have an entirely different concept of what Canada and its provinces are today than the misinformation I assumed was true then.
Many Canadian political elites, and not only in current-day Alberta, rely on us never looking these things up.
THE CARVING OF THE NEW WEST: HOW ALBERTA WOULD BE DISMEMBERED BEFORE IT EVER LEFT Series
Part One: The Vultures Don't Wait for Death
https://kellydwills55.substack.com/p/the-carving-of-the-new-west-how-alberta?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r5v2
Part Two: The Americans, The Feds, and The Eastern Slice
https://kellydwills55.substack.com/p/the-carving-of-the-new-west-how-alberta-d9d?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r5v2
Part Three: The Timeline, The Winners, and The Way Out
https://kellydwills55.substack.com/p/the-carving-of-the-new-west-how-alberta-bdd?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r5v2
Please Comment, Love and Restack!