A Referendum for Others, Never for Itself: Alberta and the Double Standards of the American Hegemon
On Monday, 19 October, voters in Alberta decided whether their province should remain part of Canada or whether the provincial government should launch the process for a binding referendum on secession.
The answer was clear. According to CBC and CTV projections, more than 76 percent of voters chose Canada, while around 23 percent backed the path toward secession. Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote that Albertans had “chosen Canada.” Premier Danielle Smith spoke of “a stronger Alberta within a united Canada.”
American Fingerprints
Separatism in Alberta did not appear overnight. Disputes with Ottawa over the oil industry, particularly under Justin Trudeau, fed it for years. But there is a vast difference between fringe discontent and a province-wide vote on the existence of a country. People from across the border played a crucial role in bridging that gap.
According to AFP, supporters of Alberta’s independence met with representatives of Donald Trump’s administration and his political allies and received advice from them. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
publicly called Alberta a “natural partner.” Elon Musk, a billionaire and one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, endorsed the province’s secession on his platform X. All of these events happened while Trump repeatedly and dismissively referred to Canada as the “51st state” and hit it with tariffs.
This is no ordinary neighbor. It is America’s closest ally, a member of NATO, the G7 and the joint NORAD defense system. If this is how Washington treats an ally, how does it treat those who are not?
The referendum failed, but the damage is done. Nearly a quarter of voters in Canada’s wealthiest province are prepared to begin breaking up the country. That figure will not vanish with the ballots. It will remain as a fracture in society, between neighbors, within families, and between Alberta and the rest of Canada. A divided ally is a weaker ally, and a weaker ally is easier to steer.
Canada Dares to Ask
Canada could afford such a vote in the first place because of its own democratic maturity. In its 1998 opinion on Quebec, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a province cannot secede unilaterally. However, if a clear majority were to support secession in response to a clear question, the federal government and the other provinces would be obliged to negotiate. Canada, in other words, allows people to ask the question and acknowledges that their answer carries weight.
And the United States?
Now let us look at the country that likes to present itself as the cradle of modern democracy and that so generously “advised” Alberta’s separatists.
The U.S. Constitution does not mention secession at all. It does not provide for it, does not regulate a procedure for it, and does not recognize a right to it. When the Supreme Court ruled on the question in Texas v. White in 1869, it held that the Union is indissoluble and that a state cannot leave at will. The late Justice Antonin Scalia summed it up without embellishment in 2006: there is no right to secede; the Civil War settled that question.
At most, a U.S. state can hold an advisory, symbolic vote with no legal weight whatsoever. California’s Calexit initiative illustrated this well. Even its backers admitted that, even if they won, there was no mechanism by which California could actually leave.
Even more telling was the reaction to an earlier version of the same initiative. When it emerged in 2017 that the movement’s leader was living in Russia, the American public denounced it as foreign interference in U.S. internal affairs. The campaign collapsed. Yet when an American cabinet secretary calls a Canadian province a “natural partner,” and when Alberta’s separatists travel to Washington for advice, it is called free speech and cooperation. The Yugoslav Lesson
Here is a comparison Western commentators do not like to hear: socialist Yugoslavia, which the West likes to describe as undemocratic, had the right to secession written into its constitution. Both the 1946 constitution and the later 1974 constitution stated that the nations of Yugoslavia were united on the basis of the right to self-determination, including the right to secession.
It is true that this right was more a matter of principle than of practice. There was no clear procedure; the question of whether it belonged to nations or to republics was never resolved, and in practice the breakup brought war. Yet the idea that a community has the right to leave was at least recognized and written down. Slovenia invoked it when it held its independence plebiscite in 1990. In this crucial respect, the Yugoslav constitution was more honest than the American one: at least on paper, it acknowledged that the state existed by the will of its nations, not regardless of it.
The Hegemon That Devours Its Own Allies
This is the heart of the hypocrisy. The United States reserves for itself the right to advise, encourage, and financially and politically support processes in other countries that undermine their territorial integrity. At the same time, it denies its own states that very right, with constitutional resolve and the historical memory of the Civil War.
Let us imagine the reverse. Canada’s finance minister calls Texas a “natural partner,” a Canadian billionaire publicly backs California’s secession, and Texan separatists travel to Ottawa for advice. Washington would, without hesitation, call it an attack on American sovereignty. And it would be right.
The same standards should apply to everyone. Because they do not, this is not about democracy but about power. Alberta is no exception: the United States has recently spoken in a similar way about Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, another NATO ally. When a hegemon no longer distinguishes between adversaries and allies, but only between those it can exploit and those it cannot, it is a warning to everyone, including Europe.
This time, Albertans chose Canada. But what was sown among them will take a long time to ripen. And the collective West will most likely remain silent about who did the sowing.
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