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alberta
Alberta Separatists Accused of 'Treason' After Secret Meetings With Trump Officials
“To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there’s an old-fashioned word for that," said one provincial premier.
Jan 29, 2026
The leader of British Columbia on Thursday excoriated separatists in neighboring Alberta who met secretly on several occasions with officials from the administration of President Donald Trump, whose frequent talk of making Canada the "51st state" has tanked relations with the US' northern neighbor.
The Financial Times reported Wednesday that leaders of the right-wing Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), who want the fossil fuel-rich province to become an independent nation, were welcomed for three meetings with Trump officials in Washington, DC since last April.
APP is reportedly seeking US assistance, including a $500 billion line of credit from the US Treasury Department to help bankroll an independent Alberta, if any potential independence referendum succeeds.
According to the CBC:
Organizers of the Alberta independence movement are collecting signatures in order to trigger a referendum in that province. The pro-independence campaign has been traveling across the province as organizers try to collect nearly 178,000 signatures over the next few months.
"To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason," British Columbia Premier David Eby, who leads the center-left BC New Democratic Party, said in Ottawa.
"It is completely inappropriate to seek to weaken Canada, to go and ask for assistance, to break up this country from a foreign power and—with respect—a president who has not been particularly respectful of Canada's sovereignty," Eby continued.
"I think that while we can respect the right of any Canadian to express themselves to vote in a referendum, I think we need to draw the line at people seeking the assistance of foreign countries to break up this beautiful land of ours," he added.
APP co-founder Dennis Modry told the Financial Times Wednesday that the separatist movement is "not treasonous."
“What could be more noble than the pursuit of self-determination, the pursuit of your goals and aspirations, the pursuit of freedom and prosperity?” he asked.
Trump and some of his senior officials have repeatedly expressed their desire to annex Canada, despite polite but vehement Canadian rejection of such a union. Trump's coveting of Canada comes amid his threats to acquire Greenland by any means necessary, his planning for a possible Panama Canal takeover, and his attacks on Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, and other countries.
Last week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent poured more fuel on the fire by seemingly encouraging Albertan separatism.
"They have great resources. Albertans are a very independent people," Bessent said during a media interview. "Rumor [is] that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not... People are talking. People want sovereignty. They want what the US has got."
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith of the province's United Conservative Party said Thursday that she "supports a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada," even as critics—including Indigenous leaders—accuse her of making it easier for a pro-independence petition to succeed last year.
Smith said the she expects US officials to "confine their discussion about Alberta's democratic process to Albertans and to Canadians."
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'Sellout of the Century': Canada PM Carney Ripped Over Tar Sands Pipeline Deal
“We will use every tool in our toolbox to ensure that this pipeline does not go ahead,” said one First Nations leader after the deal struck between Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Conservative premier of Alberta.
Nov 28, 2025
First Nations groups backed by environmental and conservationist allies in Canada are denouncing a pipeline and tanker infrastructure agreement announced Thursday between Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, calling it a betrayal and promising to fight its implementation tooth and nail.
“We will use every tool in our toolbox to ensure that this pipeline does not go ahead,” said Heiltsuk Nation Chief Marilyn Slett in response to the Carney-Smith deal that would bring tens of millions of barrels of tar sands oil from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia for export by building new pipeline and lifting a moratorium against oil tankers operating in fragile British Columbia coastal water.
While Carney, who argues that the pipeline is in Canada's economic interest, had vowed to secure the support of First Nations before finalizing any agreement with Alberta, furious reactions to the deal made it clear that promise was not met.
Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai, the president of the Haida nation, was emphatic: "This project is not going to happen."
The agreement, according to the New York Times, is part of Carney’s "plan to curb Canada’s trade dependence on the United States, swings Canadian policy away from measures meant to fight climate change to focus instead on growing the oil and gas industry."
In a statement, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) "loudly" voiced its opposition to the memorandum of understanding signed by Carney and Smith.
"This MOU is nothing less than a high-risk and deeply irresponsible agreement that sacrifices Indigenous peoples, coastal communities, and the environment for political convenience," said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the UBCIC. "By explicitly endorsing a new bitumen pipeline to BC's coast and promising to rewrite the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, the federal government is resurrecting one of the most deeply flawed and divisive ideas in Canadian energy politics."
Slett, who serves as secretary-treasurer of the UBCIC, said the agreement "was negotiated without the involvement of the very Nations who would shoulder those risks, and to suggest ‘Indigenous co-ownership’ of a pipeline while ignoring the clear opposition of Coastal First Nations is unacceptable."
Avi Lewis, running for the leadership of the progressive New Democratic Party (NDP) in the upcoming elections, decried the agreement as a failure of historic proportions.
"Carney’s deal with Danielle Smith is the sellout of the century: scrapping climate legislation for a pipeline that will never be built," said Lewis, a veteran journalist and climate activist. "We need power lines, not pipelines. Our path is through climate leadership and building good jobs in the clean economy."
Carney’s deal with Danielle Smith is the sellout of the century: scrapping climate legislation for a pipeline that will never be built.We need powerlines, not pipelines. Our path is through climate leadership & building good jobs in the clean economy.
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— Avi Lewis (@avilewis.ca) November 28, 2025 at 12:05 AM
In response to the deal, the minister of Canadian culture, Steven Guilbeault, who formerly served as environment minister under the previous Liberal administration, resigned in protest.
“Despite this difficult economic context, I remain one of those for whom environmental issues must remain front and center,” Guilbeault said in a statement.
"Over the past few months, several elements of the climate action plan I worked on as Minister of the Environment have been, or are about to be, dismantled,” he said. “In my view, these measures remain essential to our climate action plan.”
David Eby, the premier of British Columbia who opposes the new pipeline into his province and was not included in the discussions between Carney and Smith, echoed those who said the project is more dead than alive, despite the MOU, calling it a potential "energy vampire" that would distracts from better energy solutions that don't carry all the baggage of this proposed project.
“With all of the variables that have yet to be fulfilled—no proponent, no route, no money, no First Nations support—that it cannot draw limited federal resources, limited Indigenous governance resources, limited provincial resources away from the real projects that will employ people,” Eby added.
Keith Brooks, the program director at Environmental Defence, decried the deal as "worse than we had anticipated" and "a gift to the oil industry and Alberta Premier Smith, at the expense of practically everyone else."
"Filling this pipeline and expansion would require more oil sands mining, leading to more carbon pollution, more tailings, and worse impacts for communities near the tar sands," warned Brooks. "The pipeline to BC would have to cross some of the most challenging terrain in Canada. The impacts of construction would be severe, and the impacts of a spill, devastating."
Jessica Green, a professor at the University of Toronto focused on environmental politics, equated the "reckless" deal to a "climate dumpster fire" and called the push for more tar sands pipelines in Canada "the energy equivalent [of] investing in VHS tapes in 2025."
At least the United States under President Donald Trump, she added, "has the cojones to say it doesn’t give a shit about climate" while Carney, despite the contents of the deal with Alberta, "is still pretending that Canada does."
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Air Pollution From Canadian Tar Sands Up to 6,300% Worse Than Industry Reports
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels," said a Greenpeace campaigner, "these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades."
Jan 26, 2024
Aircraft measurements of pollutants over the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada show levels exceeding industry reports by 1,900% to more than 6,300%, scientists revealed Thursday, underscoring the need for humanity to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
While the Canadian government requires air quality monitoring around oil sands operations, industry figures focus on certain compounds. For this research, published Thursday in the journal Science, experts from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government, accounted for a wider range of emissions.
After collecting data from 30 flights around 17 tar sands operations in 2018, "what we saw were very large emissions of total gas-phase organic carbon from these facilities," said co-author and Yale professor Drew Gentner in a statement. "On average, the majority of the total gas-phase organic carbon was from often overlooked compounds, which are typically outside of the scope of routine monitoring."
"This report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Co-author John Liggio of Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that "the magnitude of the observed emissions from oil sands operations was larger than expected, considering that it was roughly equivalent to the sum of all other anthropogenic sources across Canada when including all the motor vehicles, all the solvents, all the other oil and gas sources, and everything else reported to the inventory."
Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, a University of British Columbia atmospheric chemist who has worked with Liggio but was not involved with this study, told Nature that "I'm concerned by how big this number is."
"You want to be measuring all this carbon. For air quality, for health, but also for climate," she said, explaining that some of the molecules are oxidized to planet-heating carbon dioxide.
Thanks to the tar sands deposits across northern Alberta, which are estimated to contain 1.7-2.5 trillion barrels of oil, Canada trails only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of total known reserves.
As Inside Climate News detailed Thursday:
The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds, and refinery-like "upgraders." The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region. The mines have stripped away an area larger than New York City, lands that had long been occupied by people from several Indigenous First Nations. One of those First Nations, Fort McKay, is now surrounded by mines.
Jean L'Hommecourt, an enrolled member of the Fort McKay First Nation, told Inside Climate News she wasn't shocked by the new findings.
"I was just like, eh, I knew all along," said L'Hommecourt, who has worked to clean up nearby operations. "We feel the physical effects here."
Jesse Cardinal of the Indigenous-led group Keepers of the Water similarly said to The Guardian, "We are told this is all within the limits and OK but this report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Asked to comment on the research, Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, wrote in an email to The Independent, "I suppose 'Holy s***' isn't printable."
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades," Stewart added. "This is making people sick, so our governments can and should require these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they've made."
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