Alberta Separatists Confident Of Victory In Poll That Shows Them Losing By 40 Points
A new poll suggests Alberta's separatist movement is holding steady at roughly one in five voters, a number its organisers describe as "momentum."
"The polls said we'd lose," one organiser told a community hall in Sundre, standing beside a folding table with 19 unsold flags on it. "The polls also said we'd win. Depends which poll. Depends which day. Depends who you ask at the Co-op."
The confidence is not new. Alberta separatism has spent four decades in the same condition: 20 per cent support, 100 per cent certainty. It is the only political movement in Canada whose internal maths is done entirely by vibe, and the vibe has never once been off by less than 30 points.
The specifics get slippery under questioning. Asked what currency an independent Alberta would use, three organisers gave three answers, one of which was "the dollar, obviously," and none of which addressed which dollar. Asked about the landlocked pipeline problem, the room agreed that Saskatchewan would be reasonable, a claim no one in Saskatchewan has ever made about anything.
Meanwhile the actual Alberta economy is having its best year in memory, because oil is up and the province's tariff losses are quietly being papered over by a windfall nobody campaigned for. Prosperity is the movement's greatest enemy. Grievance polls badly at $90 a barrel.
One attendee summed up the mood with unusual honesty.
"We're going to win," he said. "And if we don't win, that proves the whole thing was rigged, which means we should have won, which is basically winning."
He then asked if anyone could give him a lift back to Calgary.