Donald Trump has always specialized in knifing friends in the back. Canadians have picked up on that better than many Americans.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent commented Thursday on the separatist movement in Alberta — making him the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration to weigh in on the province’s politics.
While appearing on the right-wing TV station Real America’s Voice, Bessent claimed Canada won’t let Alberta build a pipeline to the Pacific.
“I think we should let them come down into the U.S., and Alberta’s a natural partner for the U.S.,” he said.
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“They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people,” Bessent said, adding there’s a “rumour that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not.”
When asked if he knew something about it, Bessent said, “People are talking. People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”
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Some organizers of the Alberta independence movement have claimed they had meetings with members of the Trump administration, although they have not disclosed any names. Their message has started to spread among MAGA influencers online, and among Republicans broadly.
Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman in Tennessee, told a BBC panel earlier this week that the people of Alberta would “prefer not to be a part of Canada and be a part of the United States because we are winning day in and day out.”
The Alberta independence movement is collecting signatures to trigger a referendum. The question that referendum would ask is whether Alberta should be independent from Canada — not whether it should join the United States.
This is freaking some of the separatist Canadians out, since they know that everything Trump touches, dies, and that current Prime Minister Mark Carney was elected precisely because of his opponent’s close affinity with Donald Trump.
Any chance they have to say it, petition leaders from the group Stay Free Alberta will insist that their movement doesn’t favour unity with the United States as part of its push for separation from Canada.
“Andy Ogles’ suggestion that we join the U.S. is out of left field,” Jeffrey Rath, a lawyer and spokesperson for the group, told CBC News on Friday.
“Statehood is not on the table. We’re not fighting tooth and nail to get out from the clutches of the CRA [Canada Revenue Agency] to have to pay federal income tax [to Washington].”
There’s always been a subsegment within Alberta’s pro-independence subsegment that does fancythe province becoming part of Trump’s country.
But organizers are aware their big idea has far less appeal if it’s bundled with Alberta becoming a U.S. state or territory.
A Research Co. survey of Albertans earlier this month found that while 31 per cent of respondents support the idea of Alberta independence, the figure drops to 24 per cent when they’re asked about joining the U.S.
A mere seven per cent said they “strongly” support Alberta becoming part of America; 65 per cent strongly oppose it.
The first time Robb Stuart heard about the billboard in his town calling for Alberta to join the United States was when he received an angry email about it last week.
“It just said that they were disgusted, that they thought they’d never have to email anybody about having a sign that promotes joining the United States,” Stuart, mayor of Bowden, Alta., told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
“And a few other odds and ends in there. Most of it’s not for public hearing.”
A second email followed 20 minutes later, he says — and they haven’t stopped coming since.
But while Stuart is fielding calls and messages from residents upset about the sign, he says the town of Bowden didn’t approve it, and doesn’t have the authority to take it down.
“The billboard has absolutely nothing to do with the town of Bowden. We weren’t even aware of it until after the fact, ” Stuart said. “The town of Bowden does not deserve the negative feedback that we’ve been subject to.”
Spot Ads, the company that owns the billboard space overlooking the highway that connects Edmonton and Calgary, says the advertisement does not violate its standards.
The company behind the ad, a Western Canadian separatist organization called America Fund, says it plans to run more billboards across the province in the coming weeks.
U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 100 per cent tariff on all Canadian goods entering the United States if Canada “makes a deal with China” — a forceful message that comes days after Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, widely viewed as pushback on U.S. actions.
Trump did not specifiy what a “deal” means in his social media post. Last week, Canada reached an agreement with China to allow 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the market at a lowered tariff rate of 6.1 per cent in exchange for China lowering tariffs on Canadian canola.
I’m sure Alberta will have no trouble paying for its own wildfire service.
There are so many people wearing cowboy hats in Alberta, that many Albertans already see the province as a second Texas. On a different note, Albertans (like Greenlanders) enjoy socialized health care. From my perspective, their quality of health care would drop if either just became a state, or would fall flat to zero if either became a possession like Puerto Rico or Guam.