In early May 2026, canvassers for a grassroots group called the Alberta Prosperity Project delivered more than 300,000 signatures to Elections Alberta, nearly double the number legally required to force a referendum on whether the province should separate from Canada. Premier Danielle Smith confirmed a non-binding referendum will be held this fall. What happened next is the part of this story most American coverage has missed: the movement did not stay contained to Alberta. Within weeks, a sister organization, the Saskatchewan Prosperity Project, was hosting town halls across that province too, drawing crowds energized by Alberta’s momentum and explicitly discussing unification with an independent Alberta should both provinces choose to leave Confederation. “Alberta’s been at it for a long time now, so whatever gains they get there is definitely a positive for us, because the people of Saskatchewan are ready to go,” said Ed Ramsey, a board member of the Saskatchewan group, this past May. None of this means Canada as a whole is on the verge of asking to join the United States. It does mean this is no longer a single province’s grievance. It is now a regional movement, gaining organizational ground in two provinces at once, and it deserves to be understood as exactly that.
A Nation Says No, Mostly
Honesty requires starting with the numbers most Canadians would want emphasized first. Nationally, opposition to joining the United States remains overwhelming and remarkably stable. Angus Reid Institute polling conducted in both January and March of 2025 found roughly nine in ten Canadians would vote no in a hypothetical referendum on statehood, and a follow up Ipsos survey in October 2025 found that core opposition, at 79 percent, had barely moved. When the Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary claimed publicly that half of Canadians would be interested in joining the U.S., Angus Reid’s own pollsters responded pointedly that they had no idea where he found that number.
But that national picture flattens a regional story that has clearly been building. A consistent minority, roughly 9 to 10 percent of Canadians nationally, say they would actually vote to join the United States, and that number concentrates heavily west of Ontario. A Pollara Strategic Insights survey from January 2026 found support for outright separatism at 19 percent in Alberta and 20 percent in Saskatchewan, compared with just 11 percent in British Columbia and 8 percent in Manitoba, a gap wide enough to make clear this is a prairie story specifically, not a diffuse national one. A separate Angus Reid poll from September 2025, using a broader “leave Confederation” framing, put support even higher: 36 percent in Alberta and 34 percent in Saskatchewan.
Fast Facts
10 percent: Canadians nationally who would vote to join the U.S., per Angus Reid Institute
19 to 36 percent: Range of separatist support in Alberta across different 2025-2026 polls, depending on question wording
20 to 34 percent: Range of separatist support in Saskatchewan across the same polls, now running neck and neck with Alberta
11 percent / 8 percent: Separatist support in British Columbia and Manitoba, by comparison, per Pollara
300,000+: Signatures the Alberta Prosperity Project submitted in May 2026, clearing the referendum threshold
125,000: Signatures needed to trigger a similar non-binding vote in Saskatchewan
Fall 2026: When Alberta’s referendum on separation is now scheduled to take place
It’s Spreading: Saskatchewan Joins the Movement
What makes this moment different from previous waves of western alienation is that Saskatchewan is no longer just watching Alberta from the sidelines. The Saskatchewan Prosperity Project, whose Facebook group has grown to roughly 10,000 members, has spent 2026 holding town halls across the province, with its president Brad Williams telling reporters that many of the group’s supporters “aren’t even online,” a sign the movement’s real reach may extend well past its digital footprint. Williams has been explicit that unification with Alberta, should Albertans vote to leave Canada, is a live option many Saskatchewan supporters would welcome, and he says the sentiment cuts across the same grievances driving Alberta: federal overreach, taxation Saskatchewan residents feel is disproportionate to what the province gets back, and fears that provincial culture and freedoms are being steadily overridden from Ottawa.
Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe has taken a more cautious public stance than Alberta’s Danielle Smith, saying his government is not itself pursuing separation but will not stand in the way of a citizen-triggered referendum, for which organizers need 125,000 signatures. Alberta’s success in clearing its own, much larger threshold has visibly energized the Saskatchewan effort. “That sets a bit of a precedent,” Williams said at a joint summit in Saskatoon this past May, where Alberta separatist leaders appeared as guest speakers, a striking image of a movement that has stopped operating as two isolated provincial grievances and started coordinating as a single regional cause.
Decades of Feeling Punished for Producing
To understand why this sentiment has taken root so deeply across the prairies, it helps to go back more than four decades, to a policy Albertans and Saskatchewanians of a certain generation still bring up unprompted. In 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s federal government introduced the National Energy Program, capping domestic oil prices well below world market rates and redirecting a substantial share of prairie oil revenue toward Ottawa and the more populous provinces of central and eastern Canada. The policy devastated the region’s economy before being repealed in 1985, but it left behind a durable political culture of “western alienation,” first channeled by premiers like William Aberhart and Ernest Manning, built around the belief that Ottawa has never stopped treating prairie resource wealth as something to redistribute rather than respect.
That grievance has found plenty of modern successors: federal carbon pricing, pipeline restrictions that organizers argue have strangled access to new markets, and equalization formulas both provinces believe extract more than they receive back. Layer on top of that the disruption of Trump-era tariffs, which hit prairie energy and agricultural exports especially hard, and you have two provinces that increasingly see themselves as economically vital, politically overruled by Ontario and Quebec’s combined electoral weight, and geographically closer in interest and temperament to Texas, North Dakota, and Montana than to Ottawa.
A Real Person’s Case for Prosperity
Behind the polling numbers are individual westerners making a genuinely personal calculation. CBC News profiled Jordon Kosikowie, a 35-year-old working in Edmonton’s oil and gas industry, who said plainly that life had been hard in recent years and that he was open to Alberta joining the United States if it meant more prosperity. “There’s no Canadian dream,” he said, a line echoed almost exactly by organizers in Saskatchewan describing why their own town halls have been drawing crowds: a sense, widely shared across both provinces now, that the economic promise Ottawa offers no longer matches the reality on the ground for people whose work quite literally powers the country.
“There’s no Canadian dream.”
— Jordon Kosikowie, Alberta oil and gas worker
Not Quite Secession, and Not Quite Annexation Yet
Fairness requires noting real tension within the movement and real skepticism about where it actually leads. Some polling, including a March 2026 analysis from Ipsos Public Affairs, argues that western alienation actually peaked in the aftermath of the 2019 federal election rather than today, and that current media attention has created an impression of surging momentum the underlying numbers don’t fully support. Alberta’s own premier has been careful to say she favors “a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada” rather than outright separation, and business groups in Calgary have warned that separatist discourse itself carries real economic costs, with one estimate putting the price of full Alberta independence at roughly 20 billion dollars in lost activity. And it remains true that most organizers on both sides of the Alberta-Saskatchewan border are focused first on independence from Canada, with American statehood as one possible destination afterward rather than the singular, universally shared goal.
Why This Matters for America
None of that complexity changes the news itself: what began as an Alberta grievance has, within the space of about a year, become a two-province movement with cleared referendum thresholds, cross-border meetings with the U.S. State Department and Treasury, and open talk of prairie unification. Whatever one makes of the ultimate outcome, the underlying story remains a strikingly American one: people who produce enormous wealth, who feel that wealth is extracted rather than respected by a distant capital, and who are increasingly willing to organize, province by province, around the idea that they would govern themselves better than Ottawa governs them.
The Bottom Line
Canada as a nation is not on the verge of becoming the 51st state, and the polling on that broader question has remained lopsided for well over a year. But this is no longer simply an Alberta story, and treating it as one misses what actually changed in 2026. A referendum threshold cleared. A second province organized around the same complaint. Cross-border meetings held not once but three times. A regional grievance forty years in the making has stopped being a fringe curiosity and started being a coordinated political movement, and it is spreading exactly where its logic would predict: across the prairie provinces that feel Ottawa has never really been listening.
References
CBC News, “‘There’s no Canadian dream’: Meet some who want Canada to become the 51st U.S. state,” March 2025
Angus Reid Institute, “51st State: Canadian resolve in saying ‘no’ continues,” March 2025
Angus Reid Institute, “Referendum Reality? Half in Alberta & Saskatchewan call for vote on independence,” September 2025
Ipsos, “Canadians Dismiss U.S. Annexation as Unlikely to Happen,” October 2025
Pollara Strategic Insights, “Western Alienation Persists, But Separatism Remains Fringe,” January 2026
Global News, “Saskatchewan separatists promise independence would bring prosperity,” June 2026
CBC News, “Sask. separatists buoyed by Alberta referendum plan,” May 2026
CBC News, “Saskatchewan group seeking independence from Canada holding meetings across the province,” December 2025
CNN, “A separatist group is asking for Trump’s help to split from Canada. Here’s what we know”
The Walrus, “How Alberta’s Separatist Movement Could Shake North America,” March 2026
Graduate School of Public Policy, “The Apex of Alienation: What Longitudinal Data Reveal About Alberta and Saskatchewan Separatism,” March 2026
