For months, Premier Danielle Smith has been teasing the idea of a referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada. Volunteer canvassers are gearing up to collect the thousands of signatures needed to call the question, and a notable conservative is leading the campaign.

But wait—he’s referending in the other direction?

Former PC MLA Thomas Lukaszuk argues that forcing a vote on separation in the Legislature would accomplish... something. Photograph from Dave Cournoyer's Flickr

The person in question is Thomas Lukaszuk, the Progressive Conservative ex-MLA for Edmonton Castle Downs and former deputy premier to Alison Redford. He’s opposed to separation and told the CBC that his goal is actually to force a vote on separation in the Legislature, not a referendum.

This means there could soon be two competing teams door-knocking for very similar questions. The Alberta Prosperity Project (APP) is running a pro-separation campaign and will have more time to collect fewer signatures, since the rules were changed after Lukaszuk sent his paperwork in.

But Lukaszuk’s team has a head start, with the separatists’ campaign awaiting a court ruling on whether their proposed line of questioning is constitutional.

Lukaszuk’s petition would ask the MLAs in the Legislature: do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?

The proposed APP referendum question would instead ask the public: do you agree that the Province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province in Canada?

The questions aren’t that different, and in a thematic sense I’d say neither are the petition campaigns.

On the separatist side, we have people organizing for a referendum that does not have the legal force to knock Canada out of confederation.

And now with Lukaszuk we have someone else organizing with the stated objective of simply making the UCP have an uncomfortable afternoon in the Legislature on a symbolic vote.

Both claimed goals are nebulous at best and in all likelihood not the real point. For the separatists, even a symbolic referendum gives them an excuse to campaign and grift—and a few of them get to have day jobs leading parties or issue groups. 

As for Lukaszuk, it’s not clear what ambitions someone who hasn’t been in office for a decade has, but I’m sure a seasoned politician like him can find some use for a supporter list with contact information for thousands of Albertans. And I think we can skip helping him build it.

From the Report

• Examining the financial disclosures from a recent trip down south, Jeremy found that the Premier’s office billed the public at least $20,000 in order to send Danielle Smith to help out at a fundraiser for PragerU, an American far-right propaganda operation. Much of the bill came from Smith’s Wormtongue, Rob Anderson, who claims he has a doctor’s note that says he has to fly first-class.
  
  
• Many of the municipal candidates in Calgary didn’t begin their fundraising last year, so there’s only so much to see in the data, but we found that four candidates dominated municipal fundraising in Calgary in 2024.
  
  
• The Opposition NDP are calling on the UCP government to revoke a permit granted to Sean Feucht to perform at the Legislature on August 22, which prompted a flurry of media coverage last week—much of it lacking. The dominant mainstream narrative has portrayed Feucht as just a Christian singer who likes Trump, which really understates why he’s such a problematic figure. So Jeremy dug into it
  
  It turns out that Feucht, a failed GOP candidate, is an activist affiliated with the hateful Christian nationalist movement and dogged by allegations of fraud and embezzlement. When he toured Portland in 2021 with his (Albertan) associate Artur Pawlowski, they brought the Proud Boys with them, who then spent the evening getting into violent brawls up and down Southwest Jefferson Street. 

Sundries

• The NDP appear to be taking longer to counter-organize against the overall separation campaign than the freelancing Lukaszuk; they have announced a series of rallies starting in Lethbridge, Red Deer, Airdrie, Calgary, Edmonton and Sherwood Park, but they don’t begin until August 18.
  
  
• Data obtained by the Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association found that in 2024, fully 90% of the trespass tickets issued by transit police in Edmonton went to people with no fixed address, a significant worsening from 2023’s already miserable 70%.
  
  
• A group operating under the name Christians That Care organized a dozen rallies in rural communities in Alberta in July that they called Christian Municipal Rallies. This flew under our radar, as well as the mainstream media’s; the only coverage I could find was from the St. Alberta Gazette, which covered the events about a month after they kicked off. The rallies, which featured speakers including former Canadian Alliance opposition leader Stockwell Day and anti-LGBTQ activist John Hilton O’Brien, received support from the Leadership Institute, an American organization which trains right-wing activists.

• Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls, who was recently in Alberta to speak at the Alberta Federation of Labour convention and a pre-election federal NDP rally alongside Jagmeet Singh and Rachel Notley, was detained and beaten by the Israeli military last weekend while attempting to deliver aid supplies to Gaza by sea with the Handala flotilla.
  
  
• Years ago we thought public pressure had chased the Calgary Police Service off of embracing facial recognition surveillance technology. An investigation by Euan Thomson reveals otherwise: CPS has signed contracts with several firms that specialize in scraping social media and using the AI to identify people, an approach that a criminal justice professor has described as doing digital “dragnet” surveillance.

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