How to Talk to the Temporary Strategic Separatist in Your Life
Five practical messages to explain this isn’t a game worth the risk of playing.
With Alberta’s weird-as-hell 10-question referendum only weeks away, most people seem to have made up their minds about separation.
But one group sits in a paradoxical spot: people who don’t want Alberta to leave Canada, but are considering a strategic Option 2 vote to “send Ottawa a message,” believing it strengthens our hand down the road. Most of us know at least one—in the family, at work, or in the group chat. These are the only moveable voters in this debate, and if you’re voting against separation (which, spoiler alert: I already did, and I voted “No” on the other nine questions), they’re worth having a conversation with.
With Thanksgiving landing the week before the vote, many of us will be sitting across the table from exactly these people. That conversation can be fraught, and with so much information and misinformation flying around, it’s hard to sort out the best messages to help them decide. Here are a few ground rules for your approach, then five messages for those conversations:
GROUND RULES:
Be cool. People in the Political Chattering Class often forget that most people are not driven by ideology, but by making a choice they believe offers the best future for themselves and their community. Not everyone is trying to “own the Libs” and most people don’t duke it out in social media comment sections. Keep that frame of reference handy.
Be open. By immediately signaling you are open to listening to their thought process without judgement, you may find that their consideration of Option 2 makes sense given their personal history and experiences. You can acknowledge those perspectives and grievances without agreeing that they are enough to vote for separation.
Be gracious. The objective here is not to force people to do what you want; it is to ask them to consider your perspective before they vote. If it moves them, great. If they remain unconvinced, you don’t have to endorse their choice or even like it, but you should respect it.
Message 1: The separation referendum itself is already the strongest possible message we can send to Ottawa.
In 2026, Alberta has made it clear that it is willing to flirt with, poke at, and maybe even slam the Self-Destruct button on Confederation, and perhaps even Alberta itself. Imagine the reaction of a typical Laurentian Elite®, sitting high in their Parliament Hill office wallpapered with Alberta Petrodollars, watching Alberta steadily march toward bringing separation to a vote in record time:
We tabled legislation to allow for citizen-initiated referendums;
Then we lowered the number of required signatures by more than half and doubled the signature collection period;
Then our government actively encouraged the collection of signatures to trigger a separation referendum;
Then a separation referendum petition gathered enough signatures to be reviewed (but wouldn’t have under the previous rules);
Then, when it got held up in the courts for a constitutional violation of Treaty rights, our government decided to put it on the ballot anyway with five months’ notice (and somehow used 400,000 anti-separation ballot initiative signatures as added justification).
Years of legislation, a $134,000,000 referendum, the economic opportunity cost, and the damage to our provincial reputation we’ve been willing to take have sent a clear and unambiguous message.
THOUGHT TO LEAVE THEM WITH: Ottawa knows we are serious. We’re using real tools that were unthinkable in Alberta ten years ago and we can see it’s paying dividends. If you have issues with Ottawa, here’s the good news: Premier Danielle Smith herself has said that the existing leverage is already working. Adding your Option 2 vote doesn’t actually strengthen that position.
Message 2: Pro-separation campaigners need you to “send a message to Ottawa by voting Option 2” because it is the only way to keep their movement alive.
Political movements are built on escalating momentum, with Election Day results always being the strongest proof point. Separatists know they can’t win this vote, but they can show growth to keep their particular party-bus going, and maybe with enough tries, they can get lucky. Pro-separation organizers are very clear that they will soldier on pushing separation regardless of the Oct 19th outcome, and are certain to spin any result as evidence of momentum.
But they need your Option 2 vote to do that.
In the post-referendum positioning, your strategic Option 2 vote—one that you don’t actually mean, remember—is indistinguishable from a 100% serious Option 2 vote and will be used by separatists to fuel a socially and economically damaging “neverendum” debate long after separation is democratically defeated. The closer to 50% the separatist political rattletrap can get the result to, the more they can say they deserve another kick at the can. If they can convince enough soft voters to accidentally tip the result into 50% this time, that’s a big win for them, and our politics get even uglier.
THOUGHT TO LEAVE THEM WITH: Voting strategically to send Ottawa a message ultimately strengthens the pro-separatist campaigns that you are planning to oppose in a potential future binding separation referendum. If that time comes, you will wish you had acted to stop it today.
Message 3: Giving your vote to the separatists is apparently what Moscow and MAGA want you to do.
When foreign AI slop factories in Russia and the US start pumping out propaganda trying to influence our politics, it’s time to stop and think about why. We are seeing attempts to use Alberta’s homegrown separatist movement as a Trojan horse for foreign influence attacks on Canadian unity, sovereignty, and stability. That is—in a word—bad. But the defence is simple: when we head to the ballot box, Albertans can show we recognize and reject this meddling trickery.
THOUGHT TO LEAVE THEM WITH: Don’t let malignant foreign adversaries use our democratic freedoms against us.
Message 4: To paraphrase Logan Roy from Succession, these are not serious people.
If you decide to give your vote to the separatists, who are you actually giving it to? The group of separatists who held secret meetings with the US State Department and, by one organizer’s account, proposed offering Alberta’s water, oil royalties, and land in exchange for financial support? Even that report set off public infighting within separatist ranks. How about the group who drafted a new Alberta constitution, only for one of its co-authors to use a racial slur while presenting it? Or perhaps the group who presented a costing and ongoing budget for separation that relies on magical thinking to keep separation from looking like a pending economic disaster?
In a recent Postmedia op-ed, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to the same conclusion, warning against voting for separatism just to send a message and remarking that “nothing resembling the credible leadership necessary” to establish a new country existed within the separatist movement.
THOUGHT TO LEAVE THEM WITH: If you lend your vote to the cause of separation, it will also be used by a dysfunctional rogues’ gallery that has demonstrated bad judgement at best, ill intent at worst. The last thing we need as a province is a steady stream of incidents like this.
Message 5: You cannot take back your vote if you don’t like the resulting downstream consequences.
There is a reason that Russian roulette is a profoundly unpopular party game, despite a player only having a 16.7% chance of losing. The small odds of the downside are vastly outweighed by the tragic, permanent consequences. Using a protest vote to show you mean business to extract concessions only works if you don’t fall ass-backwards into the result you want to avoid.
That’s what happened with Brexit. Those results are well documented: a self-proclaimed unburdened nation slowly dragged down over a decade as one “Leave” campaign promise after another fails to materialize the economic and social benefits it promised. Alberta’s social, economic, and national separation would be an order of magnitude more complex than leaving the EU, and it stands to reason that the consequences would be, too.
THOUGHT TO LEAVE THEM WITH: Recent history is laden with protest votes that led to negative consequences that we were clearly warned about at the time. This isn’t a game worth the risk of playing.
Becoming Neighbours Again
This debate has not been a good period in Alberta’s history—emotions have run hot throughout. But no matter the result, we all must live with each other as Albertans and Canadians. When we pick up the pieces, we will be better off if we can do it together, committed to building a better Alberta and a better Canada where we all can feel secure and where we all benefit from our collective prosperity.
That’s going to be impossible to do if we can’t bear to look each other in the eye.
Good luck with your conversations this Thanksgiving.
Chris Henderson is the Chief Strategist and Partner at Y Station Communications & Research in Edmonton, AB. He is a lifelong proud Albertan and Canadian, from a line of proud Albertans and Canadians, and has long been a friend of the people of Daveberta.