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Can Alberta Keep Foreign Meddling Out of Its Secession Vote?
There are about 200 days left before we trundle to polls, through fall leaves and under gym lights behind cardboard dividers, after what will no doubt be unconscionably long waits, to decipher nine referendum questions—with a potential tenth being about whether Alberta should cut itself loose from Confederation.
On April 10, an Edmonton court threw the breaks on that. Justice Shaina Leonard found the potential for “irreparable” harm to the treaty relationship between First Nations and the Crown (Alberta did not become a province until later) and blocked election officials from certifying the separatist petition for one month while the court renders its final decision on three matters before her.
The final decision will involve the important second order question: Is Canada ready to defend an Alberta sovereignty referendum from foreign interference? Lawyers from the Government of Alberta argued there was no evidence of foreign interference in the process to date. They also asserted that the structures were in place to insulate any potential referendum from foreign interference.
On whether there has been foreign interference in the process to date, the public record suggests strongly that there has been. I’ve treated this issue of ongoing foreign interference in this process elsewhere, as have many others, now that the Alberta Prosperity Project’s meetings with the Donald Trump administration have become mainstream news.
I’ll move on, then, to the question of whether Alberta and Canada are in any state of readiness to take on this developing national security threat. That is, are they ready to check the potential of the United States to leverage a secession referendum in Alberta into an occupation or annexation aimed at bringing about Trump’s fantasy of making Canada the fifty-first state?
Short answer: not even close.
Any secessionist referendum is a provincial political process. This gives the province jurisdiction over safeguarding its outcome from the designs of malicious foreign actors intent on loading the proverbial dice in favour of their own preferred result—a successful Leave Vote.
It should go without saying that the province has no experience running a referendum process on a question of such consequence. It has no independent provincial intelligence service—none that it has announced to the public anyway—or a provincial cybersecurity capacity. It doesn’t have a capability to trace foreign funds or dark money entering the process. It has no independent non-partisan task force set up to monitor the referendum and advise Albertans of foreign interference that is occurring in real or next-to-real time.
The only thing they’ve done is ask people to renew their driver’s licences so they can get citizenship markers added. That belies a profound misunderstanding of the foreign interference threat vector that is either wilfully ignorant or intentionally aimed to abet external influence over the process.
Elections Alberta is the department that would be responsible for ensuring the integrity of the referendum. Their organizational chart demonstrates the lack of capacity to head off foreign interference coming from extremely capable state-based adversaries. Just eight contract investigator positions exist. It is not known how many of those positions are currently filled.
This past December, an additional $6.7 million was added to Elections Alberta’s baseline funding level to help handle recall petitions, but the Globe and Mail has reported that the agency’s compliance and enforcement budget remains unchanged from last year, at $695,000. A recent Elections Alberta investigation into the losing side of a non-binding referendum on support for a coal mine in Crowsnest Pass took eight months to complete.
Elections Alberta has a tiny budget, contract investigative staff, and even for the most banal and inconsequential investigations, can take up to eight months to make a determination. Expecting Elections Alberta to conduct complex, transnational investigations into foreign interference and disinformation campaigns when set up in the way it is, with likely no connectivity to or support from the federal security and intelligence architecture, is fanciful.
Setting in motion a democratic process as consequential as a secessionist referendum without the safeguards in place to defend the integrity of its outcome is, accordingly, profoundly dangerous in this disinformation age.
Can we expect the organizations that comprise the national security community to become engaged?
Let’s start with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS.
Director Dan Rogers was asked about the issue back in November of 2025, after his first ever address on the state of our national security. Rogers responded that the CSIS Act restricts the agency from looking at a category of activities that could be described as “lawful advocacy or protests or any sort of political debate.” That’s the right answer and quotes almost verbatim from the CSIS Act.
Pushed further, later in the day, on the CBC’s Power and Politics, Rogers eventually conceded that “we definitely have to be attentive to the possibility of information operations or interference.” He also noted that any time foreign adversaries seek to divide Canadians and amplify certain narratives is a concern for his agency. “We have to position ourselves to be able to identify those intentions and actions by foreign states,” said Rogers.
In watching the director’s appearances that day, one got the impression that he hadn’t expected to be questioned on the topic of Alberta separatism quite so thoroughly. Amidst the dark milieu he deals with daily, it’s hard to imagine that he, or the intelligence service he leads, has much time to consider hypothetical threats on the somewhat distant horizon coming from Alberta of all places.
It’s fair to say that the more recent international media coverage of the Alberta Prosperity Project and their trips to Washington DC to solicit assistance from the Trump administration to break up the country might have altered his calculus somewhat. But it bears repeating that, as of November, CSIS was likely looking at a plethora of other national security threats and hadn’t turned its collective mind to the rather “provincial” threat of the Alberta Prosperity Project.
Moving on to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—my former agency. Federal policing investigations on average take several years—4.3 (to be exact) according to the 2022 Federal Policing Annual Report. So even if the federal force were to take on a novel, complex, politically fraught investigation in a province in which they also handle the contract policing, it wouldn’t happen in time to have any meaningful prophylactic impact on the integrity of the referendum process. In other words, the damage would be long done before any charges were laid.
That being said, the federal government has recently furnished the justice system with exquisite new laws that would be well positioned to factor in a referendum process potentially rife with foreign interference.
Now punishable with life imprisonment is the following offence per the newly enacted Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act:
20.4 (1) Every person commits an indictable offence who, at the direction of, or in association with, a foreign entity, engages in surreptitious or deceptive conduct with the intent to influence a political or governmental process, educational governance, the performance of a duty in relation to such a process or such governance or the exercise of a democratic right in Canada.What constitutes surreptitious or deceptive conduct is key to making out the elements of this new offence; connecting that conduct to the mens rea of intentionally influencing a political process is also critical. To be clear, I’m neither lawyer nor criminal investigator, but let’s reason through a scenario drawn from the public record in lay terms.
An evidentiary line from members of the Trump administration and its far-right entourage to a leader of the Alberta Prosperity Project is traced. It is substantiated through investigative techniques that a particular thread of disinformation being perpetrated by that leader on social media about, for example, the “Chinese Communist control of Ottawa” being a rationale for separatism was constructed by someone in the US state department or elsewhere within the Trump administration.
It is then shown that the Trump administration or members of its orbit had instructed that APP leader to expound that particular thread of disinformation on social media platforms. The vast global network of far-right bots and so-called influencers had been enlisted thereafter to amplify that piece of disinformation in a clear attempt to influence the provincial referendum. If this could be demonstrated to an evidentiary standard, well, perhaps someone or other could find themselves locked up for life.
And playing fast and loose with foreign powers and falsehoods while holding the rest of the country hostage would be proven to have severe consequences.
Global Affairs Canada has a shop dedicated to reporting on state-sponsored disinformation aimed at influencing democratic processes. Whether GAC would be willing to report on American funded and generated disinformation, much of which emanates directly from the White House, is an open question.
My guess is that they will hesitate to involve themselves not just out of fear of upsetting a potential new Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement deal but also for fear of inflaming the separatist movement further. I wouldn’t rule GAC out completely, but if they play a role at all, it will be a rather minor one. They don’t have enforcement powers. So accordingly, all they could hypothetically do is provide warning of the disinformation. Sunlight being the best disinfectant.
Lastly, let’s consider the new kid on the block: the foreign influence transparency commissioner, who will administer and enforce the new Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act, a 2024 Canadian law requiring anyone working on behalf of foreign governments to register those activities publicly. It’s an attempt to bring hidden influence into the open.
I watched, with some interest, Anton Boegman’s appearance at the Standing Committee on House Affairs in support of his nomination for the commissioner role. In my early assessment, he’s well suited to the position. But he’s got his work cut out for him, as he acknowledged that part of his job will be to build the nascent registry with what sounded like few positions to work with and a limited budget of $25 million over the next ten years. With an annual budget of roughly $2.5 million to cover salary and overhead, he’ll be lucky to field a staff of twenty full-time equivalents.
Boegman doesn’t know when the registry will be up and running and hasn’t been involved in any hiring to this point. There is a transition team working on the file in Public Safety, but beyond that, Boegman had little to offer on the registry’s state of readiness.
If Boegman’s office is just a registry, it will be the paper tiger of all paper tigers. My read of the new act and its regulations law, though, is that if required registrants fail to register a “description of the arrangement” they have with a foreign principal, significant monetary penalties up to a million dollars could be issued. The registry itself is to have a public-facing element to it as well, which would allow Canadians to see, in theory, what foreign actors have relations with the Alberta Prosperity Project and any other entities aiming to factor in the referendum.
At his confirmation hearing, Boegman was asked by Alberta senator Paula Simons whether his office could have a bearing on the Alberta secession referendum. He confirmed that the new law he would preside over would indeed cover provincial processes such as referenda.
If he can stand up his office in time, Boegman could have an important role to play in defending the integrity of an Alberta secession referendum from foreign meddling. It will be a race against time and against the inertia of the federal bureaucracy.
The last time we had a secession referendum in Canada was in 1995. We didn’t get Hotmail until the next year. We were still ripping Pearl Jam and Oasis bootlegs from Napster. Social media wasn’t a thing. Our relationship with the US was chill. China was a developing economy.
Let’s make no mistake here: none of Canada’s present day adversaries are going to weigh in to keep us unified. A divided Canada is a weakened Canada. In a post rules-based world order, in a post-truth era that is rapidly trending authoritarian, willingly exposing the nation to this sort of “direct democratic” experiment is either pure folly or treasonous on its face. It is the antithesis of responsible government.
Alberta has no capacity to insulate the referendum the provincial government is orchestrating from malicious foreign interference and disinformation. Is this intentionally the case? Has the United Conservative Party intentionally left the barn door open and invited the wolves in amongst the chickens?
We will see how far the UCP goes in reaching out to the federal government’s security and intelligence community for assistance in preserving the integrity of their grand experiment in direct democracy that is scheduled to take place on October 19. We will also see how willing and able the federal security and intelligence community is to deal with such a novel threat amidst the myriad of other priorities it must manage.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves as spring arrives in Alberta. It is crucial that we recall that none of us voted for this. We live in a representative, constitutional democracy, not a pure one. If the UCP wanted this, they could have run in 2019 or in 2023 as a separatist party; they could have run on a MAGA-adjacent, white-supremacist platform; they could have said straight up that they exist to end Canada as we know it.
They didn’t, and yet here we are.
Originally published as “Can a referendum in the disinformation age be protected from foreign interference?” by Patrick Lennox (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
The post Can Alberta Keep Foreign Meddling Out of Its Secession Vote? first appeared on The Walrus.
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