Three in four Albertans who voted on Monday chose to remain in Canada, according to unofficial results from Elections Alberta, denying a separatist movement courted by Russian influence networks and USian political operatives the mandate its leaders said they needed. Official results are due on 29 October.
Albertans voted by a margin of roughly three to one on 19 October to keep their province in Canada, rejecting a proposal to begin the constitutional process towards a binding independence referendum. With 3,655 of 5,586 polls reported at 3:22 a.m. Mountain time on 20 October, option one, that Alberta should remain a province of Canada, held 75.8 per cent with 1,221,243 votes. Option two, that the provincial government should commence the legal process for a separation referendum, held 24.2 per cent with 390,406 votes, a gap of 830,837. CBC News projected a remain win shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, and CTV News projected 76.4 per cent for remain.
Elections Alberta must publish its unofficial count within 48 hours of the last poll closing and has scheduled official results for 29 October. Before polling day, 1,356,873 Albertans, or 43.1 per cent of 3,148,343 eligible electors, had already voted in advance or by mail.
Mitch Sylvestre, chief executive of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), set the movement's own benchmark before polls closed. "If we're over 40 per cent, it's game on," he said, predicting strong support in rural Alberta. The separation option ran about 16 points below that mark. With 53 of 60 polls reported, Central Peace-Notley in the north-west was the only one of Alberta's 87 electoral divisions where option two led, by 51.1 per cent to 48.9 per cent. Remain took at least 75 per cent in every division in Calgary and Edmonton, and more than 60 per cent in early returns from Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock, a rural seat organisers had counted on.
What a separatist win would have set in motion
Albertans were asked whether to start a process, and a separatist win would have opened at least four further stages before any negotiation on leaving Canada could begin. Question 10, set by Order in Council 160/2026, asked whether the provincial government should "commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada." The Alberta Freedom Foundation, which campaigned for option two, told voters on its own site that the result was non-binding on the Government of Alberta.
A majority for option two would have committed Alberta's government, politically, to drafting a secession question and holding a second, binding referendum. Under section 1 of the federal Clarity Act, the House of Commons must then decide by resolution, within 30 days of the question's release, whether it would produce a clear expression of the province's will to secede. The Act states that a question focused only on a mandate to negotiate, or one that mixes secession with other economic or political arrangements with Canada, is unclear. In judging clarity, the House must consider the views of the provincial legislature's parties, other governments, the Senate and representatives of Aboriginal peoples. If the House finds the question unclear, the federal government may not negotiate the terms of secession.
A second referendum would face a second test under section 2. The House must decide whether a clear majority of the province's population had clearly voted to secede, weighing the size of the majority, the share of eligible voters who took part and any other relevant circumstance, so 50 per cent plus one carries no guarantee. Smith had said a simple majority would decide Question 10. The federal government may negotiate only after the House finds a clear majority.
Section 3 of the Act then recognises that no part of the Constitution allows a province to secede unilaterally, so secession requires a constitutional amendment negotiated by the federal government and all the provinces. No federal minister may propose that amendment until negotiations have addressed the division of assets and liabilities, provincial borders, the rights and territorial claims of Aboriginal peoples and the protection of minorities. The Supreme Court of Canada's 1998 Reference re Secession of Quebec reached the same structure: a clear majority on a clear question would create a duty to negotiate in good faith, and neither the Constitution nor international law gives a province any right to leave on its own. Constitutional lawyers disagree on whether such an amendment would need seven provinces with half the national population or the unanimous consent of Parliament and all 10 legislatures.
A win for option two on Monday would therefore have triggered no duty on the federal government or any other province to negotiate secession. It would have given Smith's government a mandate to write a question that the House of Commons would then test against a statute designed to reject questions of exactly the kind Albertans had just answered.
The separatists' budget and its critics
Albertans voted by 642,501 to 399,169 in October 2021 to remove equalisation from the Constitution, 61.7 per cent of valid ballots, and the separatist campaign was built on the grievance behind that result. The APP, Let Alberta Decide and allied groups said that Alberta sends far more to the federal treasury than it gets back, that federal energy regulation and the proposed emissions cap have driven away investment, and that an independent Alberta could prosper on the oil that makes up most of Canada's proven reserves, the fourth-largest in the world.
The APP set out its numbers in a draft fiscal plan titled "The value of freedom", dated July 2025. It said an independent Alberta would keep $68 billion to $75 billion a year in federal tax now paid by Albertans, scrap federal income tax and the GST, and still run a surplus of $23.6 billion to $45.5 billion. Its projected revenue of $142.1 billion to $149.1 billion included $23.34 billion a year from an Alberta Pension Plan built on $183.7 billion in assets, with the group expecting about $167 billion to transfer from the Canada Pension Plan. It put one-time set-up costs at $2.8 billion to $5.7 billion, and an earlier version of the plan proposed a new currency backed by gold, oil and bitcoin. Rath called Smith's cost estimates "completely false" and described separation as a "negotiated divorce" in which existing federal systems would pass to an Alberta government.
University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe called the plan a "fiscal fantasy", noting that abolishing income tax and the GST would remove nearly $80 billion in revenue, more than half the APP's own projected total. The pension figures rest on a 2023 LifeWorks report commissioned by Smith's government, which put Alberta's share of CPP assets at 53 per cent, or $334 billion of $575 billion. Canada's Chief Actuary found in December 2024 that the share would be 20 to 25 per cent and that the 53 per cent calculation "does not respect" federal pension law; Tombe put the corresponding sum at about $135 billion.
The University of Calgary's School of Public Policy, in a study commissioned by the provincial government and led by Tim Sargent with economists Kent Fellows, Tombe and Jennifer Winter, estimated transition costs of $50 billion to $170 billion over five years. Under its smoother scenario Alberta's economy would be 2.2 per cent below its projected path after five years; under a disorderly break it would be 10.1 per cent smaller, with employment down by as much as 10 per cent. Its overview report found Alberta would take on about 10 per cent of federal debt if the split followed past contributions and about 12 per cent if it followed population. Lennie Kaplan, a former senior manager at the provincial Treasury Board, put transition costs at $299.4 billion, including $174.2 billion as Alberta's population share of the national net debt and $93.5 billion to secure trade access with Canada and under CUSMA. Smith estimated in June 2026 that transition would cost almost $400 billion, plus $25 billion to $50 billion a year to replace federal banking regulation, border control, pensions, employment insurance, telecoms oversight and NATO commitments.
An independent Alberta would also be landlocked. The Trans Mountain pipeline to the Pacific crosses British Columbia and is owned by a federal Crown corporation; the Enbridge Mainline runs east through Saskatchewan and Manitoba; and Keystone runs south into the United States. The Calgary Chamber of Commerce modelled the cost to provincial income of a 10 per cent rise in the cost of exporting oil and gas, and set out the trading costs of leaving the Canadian dollar, citing euro-area research that a shared currency raises trade between its members.
Russian content, State Department meetings and a Michigan app
Russian networks produced and spread separatist content from abroad, APP leaders met US State Department officials, and Michigan Republican operatives brought campaign software into the province. The three activities involved different actors, left different kinds of evidence and fall under different laws.
Researchers who tracked the Russian material documented covert foreign origin and inauthentic scale: websites posing as Alberta voices and content farms publishing far more about Alberta than about any other Canadian subject. Meetings with foreign officials are lawful in themselves; the federal Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act requires registration only when a person enters an arrangement with a foreign state or its agencies to influence a Canadian political process, and its registry came into force after the 2025 State Department meetings. Practical campaign help is governed by provincial law, which bars registered referendum advertisers from accepting money from outside Alberta and restricts who may hold and use the List of Electors. The misuse of that list by the Centurion Project is under investigation by Elections Alberta, the RCMP and Alberta's Information and Privacy Commissioner.
Pravda, Storm-1516 and USian commentators
Insikt Group, the threat intelligence arm of Recorded Future, traced the website albertaseparatist.com to Storm-1516, a covert Russian influence network that grew out of the St Petersburg Internet Research Agency. A May report by DisinfoWatch, the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience and CASiLabs counted 67 items on Alberta or the "51st state" published by the Pravda News Network, a cluster of sites aligned with the Russian government, between 24 December 2025 and 25 April 2026, nearly five times its output on any other Canadian topic. The report said Russia's interest in Alberta separatism "is not opportunistic, it is doctrinal". Its authors documented sustained amplification and found no money, instructions or personnel passing from Russian state bodies to any Alberta group.
Benny Johnson, a USian commentator who had produced videos for Tenet Media, told viewers that Alberta separation was a "genius move" and that Alberta could join the United States peacefully or be taken. A 2024 US Justice Department indictment said Tenet received nearly $10 million from employees of RT, the Russian state broadcaster; the commentators said they were unaware of the source and none was charged. Elon Musk posted that Alberta "should separate", Al Jazeera reported. Drew Born, a founder of the Michigan firm 10X Votes, publicly called for Alberta's annexation, and Alberta organiser David Parker wrote "Me too" in reply, according to a summary of The Globe and Mail's reporting.
Three meetings at the State Department
APP leaders met US State Department officials at the department's headquarters in Washington in April, September and December 2025, APP co-founder Dennis Modry told NBC News. The Financial Times disclosed the meetings in January 2026 and reported that the group wanted a further meeting with State and Treasury officials to seek a $500-billion credit facility for an independent Alberta. The APP's legal counsel, Jeffrey Rath, who attended, told the newspaper that "the US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta." Modry later told The Globe the group had listed what an independent Alberta could offer the United States, including fresh water, crude oil royalties, a Pacific pipeline and land for a rail corridor to Alaska. "We just brought up water as a possible issue," he said.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed the meetings and said no commitments were made; a senior official later told NBC News that no senior officials had attended. A person familiar with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's thinking said Treasury knew of no credit request, although Bessent had said on television in January that Alberta was "a natural partner for the U.S." US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra told Global News in July: "No, we're not meeting with the separatists and strategizing this at all," six months after the State Department had confirmed three meetings. President Donald Trump made no public statement on the referendum during the campaign, and Bloomberg reported that the White House had told Hoekstra to stay out of it. Corey Hogan, Alberta's only Liberal MP, said on 14 October that he was "generally satisfied" the administration was not interfering, while raising concern about separatists' meetings with Republicans.
The Michigan app and Alberta's voter list
10X Votes is the trading name of Voteatron LLC, founded by Born, a Grand Rapids commercial real estate broker who runs Michigan Family Action, and Drew Wierda, PressProgress reported. Its app asks each Republican supporter to recruit 10 infrequent voters from their own circle and was promoted during the 2024 US election by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. In late January 2026, Wierda and other Michigan Republican operatives met Sylvestre in a Calgary airport boardroom, in a meeting Parker brokered, The Globe found. Parker pressed for the APP's supporter list to be loaded into the software, and Sylvestre refused, according to The Globe's account as summarised by Prairie Watchdog.
Parker, the former Take Back Alberta leader, said on a podcast in spring 2026 that he had worked with 10xVotes for "almost two years" and was "massively impressed" by it. He told audiences he had learned of the app on Tucker Carlson's live tour and had persuaded Carlson to endorse it. PressProgress reviewed a version of the 10xVotes app and found its interface and functions substantially similar to the app of Parker's Centurion Project, which he formally launched in Edmonton on 29 April 2026, saying the app had helped deliver Michigan to Trump in 2024. Canada's National Observer reported on 20 May that Alberta voter data had appeared on the 10x Votes website, as cited by TriplePundit.
The Centurion app was loaded with the provincial List of Electors, holding names, addresses and phone numbers for nearly three million Albertans. Elections Alberta traced the copy, through security markers known as salted names, to the 2025 list issued to Republican Party of Alberta leader Cameron Davies, and said it had "unlawfully ended up in the hands of The Centurion Project." The party denies sharing it. Parker said he relied on a third party for the data and, The Walrus reported, said the group had bought the list on the black market for $45,000. Elections Alberta said 23 people received full copies and 545 others searched the database. A judge ordered the data removed in late April, and Elections Alberta, the RCMP and Alberta's Information and Privacy Commissioner opened investigations. Elections Alberta said on 12 May that Parker was not co-operating and had not signed its cease-and-desist declaration.
Hoekstra, who chaired the Michigan Republican Party until February 2025, urged a Warren rally on 2 November 2024 to remember 10xVotes, sat in a Carlson event suite alongside a 10xVotes executive, and serves with Born on the board of the Mecosta Environmental and Security Alliance, PressProgress found. Born's stepfather, JC Huizenga, is a past donor to Hoekstra's congressional campaigns. Hoekstra told PressProgress: "I have never had any financial relationship with 10xVotes," and said of the company's Canadian clients: "Who they work with in Canada is not our responsibility."
Parker, Hoekstra and what 10X supplied
Parker is the documented link between the campaign-assistance strand and the APP: he brought 10X Votes to the APP's chief executive and built his own app on its model. Hoekstra is personally tied to the 10X founders and represents the administration whose State Department met the APP, and he denies any role in either. The USian media figures who promoted 10xVotes, among them Carlson and Bannon, belong to the same ecosystem that championed Alberta separation online.
The central unresolved question is what 10X Votes gave the Centurion Project and on what terms. The company says its app is free to Republican users, and its head of public affairs, Lance Griffin, told PressProgress: "We raise our own money." Born, 10xVotes, Parker and Parker's lawyer, Chad Williamson, did not answer PressProgress's questions about the collaboration, its funding or whether Alberta voter data was stored on US servers. Who paid for the Michigan delegation's travel to Calgary, whether 10X staff trained Centurion volunteers and whether any licence fee changed hands are all absent from the public record. Alberta bars registered referendum advertisers from accepting contributions from outside the province, so whether software, development work or data supplied by a Michigan company counts as a contribution is a question for Elections Alberta's continuing investigation. Federal oversight stops short: Anton Boegman, Canada's Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner, said money from foreign entities other than governments lies outside his mandate, which places a private Michigan firm beyond the federal registry.
Boegman contacted more than 60 people and groups involved in the referendum, including the APP, and said the 2025 State Department meetings fall outside the registry because they predate it. The APP never registered as a third-party advertiser with Elections Alberta, so its donors appear in none of the weekly disclosures registered groups must file. By mid-September, registered separatist group Let Alberta Decide had reported $502,259 in contributions, more than any other advertiser on either side.
Trade war, NORAD and a landlocked Alberta
Albertans voted while the Trump administration was waging a trade war on Canada and the president was repeating his call for the country to become the 51st state. Prime Minister Mark Carney told voters the referendum came at the "worst possible time" and warned that "a vote against Canada is a dangerous bluff that will lead to years of deep uncertainty." He told an Edmonton rally on 16 October that the city's 49th Battalion had fought at Vimy Ridge, and said: "Polls don't vote, only people do."
Alberta holds most of Canada's proven oil reserves and hosts 4 Wing Cold Lake, whose CF-18s fly for NORAD, as well as 3rd Canadian Division headquarters in Edmonton and the army's manoeuvre training area at CFB Wainwright. A separate Alberta would have started outside NATO and NORAD. NATO admits members only by unanimous agreement, which would have given Canada a vote on Alberta's entry, and NORAD is a bilateral treaty between Canada and the United States. Every pipeline route from Alberta to tidewater crosses British Columbia, Saskatchewan or the United States, and the APP's offer of water, oil royalties and transport corridors to State Department officials showed what separatist leaders were prepared to trade for recognition and credit.
How Smith's government put separation on the ballot
Smith campaigned for option one and voted to remain. On Monday night she said: "Albertans have voted for a stronger Alberta in a united Canada," and she was due to address the province at 6:45 p.m. Mountain time on Tuesday on "where our province goes from here."
Her government built the legal route to the vote, starting with Bill 54, which it introduced the day after Carney's Liberals won the April 2025 federal election and which cut the signature threshold for citizen referendums to about 177,000 and raised third-party spending limits to $500,000. On 4 December 2025 it tabled Bill 14, which moved the power to refer citizen initiative questions to court from the chief electoral officer to the justice minister; chief electoral officer Gordon McClure said the change interfered with the independence of his office. The bill came the day before Justice Colin Feasby ruled the APP's first independence proposal unconstitutional, and it required the APP to reapply. After Justice Shaina Leonard quashed approval of that second petition on 13 May, Smith announced eight days later that her government would put its own separation question on the ballot. The Associated Press reported that she called a vote she opposed under pressure from separatist activists inside the United Conservative Party who had helped bring her to power.
Smith framed the other nine questions as a way to win bargaining power within Canada, and her government campaigned for yes on all of them. With 62.1 per cent of polls counted, the five immigration and voting questions led yes with between 56.9 and 62.4 per cent, while the four constitutional questions were far closer. Question 8, which asks whether Alberta should work with other provinces to amend the Constitution so a province can opt out of federal programmes in provincial jurisdiction while keeping the associated federal funding, stood at 50.0 per cent each way, with yes ahead by 75 votes. Elections Alberta expects to finish those counts on Wednesday.
Rath blamed the premier as the result came in. "Alberta will never be independent as long as Danielle Smith is the leader of the United Conservative Party," he said. Former premier Jason Kenney had said a week earlier, alongside former NDP premier Rachel Notley, that the UCP would face a reckoning: "You're either for Canada, national unity, or you're not."
What the courts said about Treaties 6, 7 and 8
Treaties 6, 7 and 8 were made between First Nations and the Crown in 1876, 1877 and 1899, before Parliament created Alberta in 1905, and section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 affirms the rights they protect. In Chief Electoral Officer of Alberta v Sylvestre, 2025 ABKB 712, Feasby held in December 2025 that the APP's proposal that Alberta "become a sovereign country" contravened the Constitution. He accepted arguments from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and other intervenors that substituting Alberta for the Crown as a treaty party would contravene the numbered treaties, that an international border would infringe treaty rights including the mobility right in Treaty 8, and that changing a party to the treaties requires consent. He left open whether First Nations hold a veto over independence.
In Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation v Alberta (Chief Electoral Officer), 2026 ABKB 375, Leonard quashed the chief electoral officer's approval of the APP's second petition on three grounds: he misapplied the amended Act's transitional provisions, he failed to consider Sylvestre, and his approval triggered the province's duty to consult, which the Crown breached. The applicants were the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Piikani Nation, Siksika Nation and Blood Tribe. Leonard declined to rule on the constitutionality of the amended Citizen Initiative Act, and Smith said the province would appeal.
Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation wrote in a separate statement of claim that "consent, not consultation, is required before the question of secession is delegated" to the settler population. Piikani Nation Chief Troy Knowlton, president of the Blackfoot Confederacy, said in 2025: "This is Treaty country." On polling day, Mikisew Cree First Nation Chief Melody Lepine called the referendum a "distraction" and said: "Separating does not make sense, not right now." Sheldon Sunshine, chief of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, said: "To have a referendum is utter nonsense."
A provincial referendum cannot extinguish obligations the Crown owes to treaty partners, and section 3 of the Clarity Act lists Aboriginal rights and territorial claims among the terms any secession must settle. In treaty territory, one poll in Cardston-Siksika was still open at 10:35 p.m. on Monday, two and a half hours after the scheduled close, because voters who had queued before 8 p.m. were still casting ballots, and Elections Alberta could publish no results until it closed. Elections Alberta said 106 polls across the province had opened late.
Ipsos, soft separatists and a cross-party remain campaign
The final Ipsos poll for Global News, conducted online among 801 Albertans from 13 to 16 October, found 70 per cent planning to vote remain and 23 per cent for the separation process; the unofficial count put remain about six points higher. Support for option two in that poll was highest among men, voters aged 35 to 54 and residents outside Calgary and Edmonton, at 27 to 29 per cent. Pollster Janet Brown's research, reported by The Globe, identified about 11 per cent of Albertans as "soft separatists" who wanted Alberta to stay in Canada but believed the federation was failing them, and found that voters aged 18 to 24 made up 10 per cent of the electorate but 2 per cent of committed separatists.
No independent economic study published during the campaign supported the APP's estimate of set-up costs below $6 billion, and every major party leader campaigned against separation: Smith, Carney, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, Kenney and Notley all backed remain. Thomas Lukaszuk, whose Forever Canadian petition gathered more than 400,000 signatures, warned against using the ballot to send the federal government a message. "We saw what happens with sending messages through a ballot during Brexit," he said.
Separatists vow to keep going
Keith Wilson of Let Alberta Decide said: "Regardless of what happens tonight, it's going to keep going forward." Rath said the push for independence would "absolutely" continue and told Global News: "Our movement isn't going anywhere." Bill 54 left a lower threshold in place for future citizen petitions, and the province's appeal of Leonard's ruling keeps the treaty question before the courts.
McGill University's Media Ecosystem Observatory warned before polling day that groundwork had been laid online for separatists to dispute a loss, and the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy expected post-count fraud claims to be pulled into the US online ecosystem. Elections Alberta has already labelled one viral ballot-tampering video, which Agence France-Presse traced to Quebec in 2025, as disinformation.
Carney said on Monday night that Albertans "chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other." Nenshi said: "We saved Canada. Now, we save Alberta." Smith now holds a three-to-one mandate to stay in Canada and, if the constitutional questions pass, a mandate to press other provinces and the federal government for amendments that need at least seven provinces with half the national population, and for some, unanimity.
One-quarter of the vote
Alberta’s separatist leaders asked for a mandate to start taking the province out of Canada. To get it, they carried their case to the US State Department and put Alberta’s fresh water and oil royalties on the table, brought Michigan campaign software into the province and watched one of their organisers load an app with the names and addresses of nearly three million Albertans from a voter list Elections Alberta says he had no right to hold. The APP’s chief executive set 40 per cent as the mark for “game on”. Albertans gave the separation option 24.2 per cent.
The movement lost Calgary and Edmonton by more than three to one. It lost Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock, the kind of rural seat its organisers had promised would carry them. It led in one electoral division out of 87. It lost after Russian content farms spent four months promoting Alberta separatism at five times the rate of any other Canadian subject, after Trump-aligned commentators told Albertans that leaving was a “genius move” and after the Treasury Secretary of a government waging a trade war on Canada called Alberta a “natural partner”. Albertans heard every one of those voices and voted three to one against what they were selling.
Alberta’s grievances over pipelines, equalisation and federal energy rules are real, and Albertans have now decided they will be fought inside Canada, through the institutions they voted to keep. The questions about the organisations that sought separation are still open and demand answers: who funds the APP, what 10X Votes supplied to the Centurion Project and how a separatist app came to hold the personal details of almost every voter in the province. Elections Alberta, the RCMP and Alberta’s privacy commissioner are still investigating.
The people who set out to break up the country have their answer, delivered by their own neighbours at the ballot box.
Canada holds. Alberta remains part of Canada. Forever Canadian.
