A dual American citizen, a man from Arizona, and an Ontario law professor walk into a bar — well, actually, a casino conference room in Red Deer. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but the punchline is this: they came to stage a separatist intervention in Alberta.

The headliner to the event was Cameron Davies, leader of Alberta’s newest right-wing political party. During the event he told the assembled crowd that “One of my greatest regrets is pushing the PC and Wildrose parties together. Oil and water don’t mix,’ he said.

DeSmog reached out to Davies and did not hear a response.

The evening unfolded as a mix of political frustration, secessionist rhetoric, and a clear throughline: disillusionment with Confederation.

“Alberta is in a bad marriage,” Bruce Pardy, a Queen’s University law professor and executive director of the libertarian think tank Rights Probe, told the crowd. “The inclination of some Albertans to want to go over and over again back to Canada to say, ‘Well, if you just understood us better, you wouldn’t be so mean’… Alberta is behaving like a battered spouse.”

More than 400 people gathered for what felt more like a revival meeting than a policy discussion, the launch event of the newly registered Alberta Republican Party. The cast included Pardy, political scientist Dr. Michael Wagner, former MLA Gordon Kesler, and political hopeful Cameron Davis, all united by their disdain for Canada’s federal structure and by their deep sympathies for the oil and gas sector.

Anti-regulation Pardy

Pardy wasn’t just there to compare federalism to domestic violence. He urged Albertans to “embrace the risk” of a “political revolution,” framing separation not as a matter of policy or economy but as a moral imperative. “The problem,” he said bluntly, “is Canada.”

Rights Probe, Pardy’s organization, operates under the Energy Probe Research Foundation — an entity with a long history of climate change denial and fossil fuel advocacy that has at times been funded by organic fair-trade coffee.

Pardy himself has spoken against climate regulation, critical race theory, and federal oversight of online speech, including in appearances on Jordan Peterson’s podcast and the Justice with John Carpay show. He opposed the now-defunct Online Harms Act (Bill C-63), which aimed to regulate non-consensual intimate imagery, hate speech, and child sexual exploitation online, calling it an overreach that threatened civil liberties.

In Red Deer, Pardy continued his rhetorical offensive. “You do not negotiate first and then hold a referendum. No, no, no, no, no. Other way around. You hold a referendum first,” he said. “[Canada] has become a socialist, progressive dumpster fire.” He likened Alberta’s current position to that of pre-revolutionary America under British rule — subject to remote control, overtaxation, and illegitimate political representation.

Several other speakers echoed his point about not having to have all the answers about how separation will work before the province votes to leave.

Pardy has publicly advocated for the development of Canada’s oil and gas resources to reduce global carbon emissions. In testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, he argued that Canadian energy could be a significant part of the solution to global emissions challenges, particularly through the export of natural gas to countries like China.

DeSmog reached out to Pardy to ask about his use of domestic violence metaphors and the legal basis for a separation strategy, but did not hear a response.

The new separatism

Gordon Kesler, a former MLA in southern Alberta got billing as the only separatist to ever hold a seat in the province in 1982. Kesler held the seat for less than a year. He now lives in Arizona according to his Facebook page.

“You are here to hear the good news: there is hope for Alberta and you’re the hope,” said Kesler.

He asked for a show of hands from the 400 people in attendance to ask who was in favour of Alberta separating. A majority of the room raised their hands.

Kesler referenced the 1995 movie Braveheart, about a 13th-century Scottish warrior who leads a rebellion against the English crown after suffering personal tragedy at the hands of occupying forces.

He told the audience that Mark Carney was “the most destructive man who was ever in politics.”

“He was installed by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and his buddies the world bankers,” said Kesler.

Kesler’s social media feed is filled with pro-Trump posts and a recent racist screed against South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who he calls a “black thug” and says that “Ramaphosa is just another black butcher in a long line of butchers inhabiting the Dark Continent,” (a historically loaded term used to refer to Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and accuses him of engineering a plan to “destroy all white South Africans.”

DeSmog reached out to Kesler about his comments but did not hear back.

As Tyler Dawson notes in the National Post, separatist sentiment in Alberta is not new and there have often been tie-ins with Alberta’s oil and gas industry. During the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s New Energy Program, the controversial federal policy was designed to increase national ownership and control of the resource extraction industry. The program was never fully implemented but still looms large in any discussion of Western Alienation. In 2019 there was also a Wexit movement and the freedom convoy of 2022 that blockaded Ottawa in a protest against vaccine mandates which both expressed significant dissatisfaction with the federal government under Trudeau.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith brought this conversation to the forefront again when she recently proposed legislation to reduce the number of signatures that would be needed for a referendum — from 600,000 to 177,000. Smith’s government also released a list of demands for the federal government that included guaranteeing Alberta full access to oil and gas corridors, repealing Bill C-69, lifting the tanker ban off the B.C. coast, eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap, scrapping the Clean Electricity Regulations, abandoning the net-zero car mandate, returning oversight of the industrial carbon tax to the provinces and ending federal censorship of energy companies.

Another speaker, Dr. Michael Wagner, who calls himself an independent researcher, holds a PhD in political science from the University of Alberta and has authored several books that argue for Alberta’s sovereignty. His work often highlights how federal policies, such as the National Energy Program (NEP) of the 1980s, have negatively impacted Alberta’s economy and its oil and gas industry. He contends that such policies have led to economic exploitation, where Alberta contributes significantly to the national economy through its natural resources but receives less in federal funding in return.

The emcee for the event Nadine Wellwood spoke about how the movement would grow because people are not satisfied with Danielle Smith. She spoke about being a recent gathering of influential people in the conservative movement.

“The one thing I heard loud and clear from everybody in that room was that the status quo was not acceptable. Not one person agreed that the status quo was acceptable, and yet Danielle somehow thinks that this time is different, that the 120 years of history that Alberta has since 1905 that somehow she is going to be the one to broker a better deal.”