U.S. interest in Alberta separatism raises red flags over what might come next

Communications between the Trump administration and Alberta's separatist movement raised alarm at the highest levels in Canada last week. It also raised questions about Washington's possible intentions.

Some even see dangerous parallels between American efforts to inflame Alberta separatism and the Russian campaign to gin up a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine a decade ago.

Last week, an Alberta separatist group revealed that it was hosted at three meetings by the U.S. State Department.

"Rumour [is] that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not," U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told right-wing channel Real America's Voice following those meetings.

"People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got."

"The department regularly meets with civil society types," a U.S. State Department spokesperson confirmed to CBC News. "As is typical in routine meetings such as these, no commitments were made."

Alberta separatist Jeffrey Rath says least one of those meetings was held in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), a room purpose-built to defeat sophisticated foreign intelligence eavesdropping.

Maria Popova, a political science professor at McGill University and author of two books on Russian-Ukrainian relations, sees the meetings as evidence that "we're now under hybrid attack from the U.S."

She says the meetings are part of a larger strategy of "repetitive denials of our existence as an independent state."

Patrick Lennox, a former RCMP intelligence manager and author of the book At Home and Abroad: The Canada-U.S. Relationship and Canada's Place in the World, says U.S. interference efforts can also take less visible forms.

"The U.S. has declared a form of information warfare against us. They're going to use everything that they can to destabilize our country, to disrupt us, potentially to break us apart in order to execute on their national security strategy," he said.

Beyond direct U.S. government interference is a more amorphous campaign of influencers in U.S. President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement such as Matt Wallace (2.3 million followers on X), who lend support to homegrown Alberta separatists online.

"It makes sense that you go for the low-hanging fruit, seeing Alberta as a province that you could peel off based on the supposedly surging separatist sentiments there," said former Canadian diplomat and international lawyer Sabine Nölke.

Nölke was Canada's permanent representative to the international courts at The Hague as well as ambassador to the Netherlands until 2019.