This is the first essay in a series that begins today, 1 September 2026, the 121st anniversary of Alberta’s founding, and runs until after the referendum of 19 October. The series will cover the questions on that ballot, arguments of Albertans voting yes and no, key features of Alberta political culture, and how Albertans have been treated for asking questions when they do.
Happy Alberta Day, everyone!
In September 1937, a group of farmers in the provincial riding of Okotoks-High River filed the paperwork to remove their own Member of the Legislative Assembly. They paid the $200 deposit. They wrote out their grounds: the member had failed to keep the promises he made before the election, and had lost the confidence of the electorate. The member in question was William Aberhart, Premier of Alberta, and the recall law they were using had been passed by his own government eighteen months earlier. His government repealed it, retroactively, and Aberhart kept his seat.
Alberta’s democratic tradition produced that petition. Alberta’s governing class killed it. Both halves of that story belong to us, Albertans, and anyone who wants to understand the 10-question ballot Albertans will mark on 19 October should start there, not in May of this year.
Indeed, the ballot will include ten questions. Five concern provincial policy on immigration and elections, four propose constitutional amendments sought jointly with willing provinces, and the tenth asks whether the government should begin the legal process toward a binding vote on separation from the Canadian State.
Commentary from Laurentian Canada has treated the exercise as an eruption, a novelty, an anomaly, a stunt engineered by one premier in one bad season. But that reading fails miserably against the historical record. The instrument predates the province’s paved roads.
The 1913 statute nobody mentions
Alberta’s legislature passed the Direct Legislation Act in March 1913, eight years after the province’s founding. The Act let citizens force the hand of their own government: gather signatures equal to ten per cent of the vote in the last general election, and the legislature must pass the requested law or put it to the people. Temperance organizers used it almost immediately, delivering a petition of roughly 24,000 names, and Alberta held its first province-wide plebiscite in June 1915. Eight years later, a petition of some 56,000 names produced a second vote, which went the other way and buried prohibition by a wide margin.
That the same instrument produced opposite results eight years apart speaks to the oft-used action-reaction of this province’s politics. Nothing is ever settled with finality here, not the climate, not the science, not the policies of government. We like to revisit and re-examine things.
Consider what that sequence demonstrates. Albertans built a mechanism for putting questions to themselves, used it, lost with it, used it again, and won. The mechanism did not serve one faction. It served whoever could organize, which is the whole point.
The practice isn’t entirely foreign to the Rest of Canada. Ottawa put conscription to the whole country to a plebiscite in 1942 and did the same with prohibition in 1898. The last time this country asked its citizens a direct constitutional question was the Charlottetown referendum of 1992; every province voted, and Alberta and Quebec both said no. Quebec has held two sovereignty referendums, and the second posed a question so tangled and mangled that Parliament later passed a statute to prevent a repeat.
Against that standard, Alberta’s tenth question is a model of plain drafting: stay a province, or begin a legal process. Whatever one thinks the answer is, nobody needs a lawyer to understand what is being asked.
What the word means out here
Contemporary progressive usage has flattened “populism” into a term of abuse, roughly synonymous with demagoguery, nativism and contempt for expertise. That usage would puzzle anyone who has read the literature on the Canadian prairies, which is substantial, and which nobody in the national commentariat appears to consult.
C. B. Macpherson, the notable Marxist scholar from the University of Toronto, opened the file in 1953 with Democracy in Alberta, a study written from the political left and hostile to much of what it described, yet clear that Alberta had generated a distinctive form of representation rather than a pathology. Macpherson’s farmers wanted delegates who carried instructions, not trustees who exercised independent judgment on their behalf from a great distance.
David Laycock’s Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies mapped the terrain properly in 1990, and found four separate strands rather than one: crypto-Liberal, radical democratic, social democratic, plebiscitarian. Note where he placed them. Henry Wise Wood’s United Farmers supplied the radical democratic strand, the Farmer-Labour movement and the CCF the social democratic, and Aberhart’s Social Credit the plebiscitarian. Three of the four grew on prairie soil, and they pointed in different ideological directions. Tom Flanagan’s Waiting for the Wave traced how the impulse organized itself into the Reform Party and then into national government. Jared Wesley’s Code Politics examined the durable political cultures of the three prairie provinces and why campaigns here sound the way they do.
Something curious happens to that scholarship when the thing it describes walks into the room. Studied at a century’s remove, prairie populism becomes a respectable object: a political culture, a delegate theory of representation, a set of variants worth cataloguing. Encountered in the present tense, on a ballot, in one’s own province, the same phenomenon gets reclassified as a crisis. Macpherson wrote about the quasi-party system as a defect requiring explanation. Laycock catalogued four traditions and left the reader to judge. Wesley documented why prairie campaigns speak the way they do, and has since helped assemble a group whose founding statement calls the present moment a separatist crisis and argues against putting the question to a vote at all. One register for the academy and one for political activism.
No need to assign hypocrisy is required to explain this. Distance flatters and power distorts. The UFA convention of 1921 reads as folk democracy at a hundred years; the town hall of 2025 reads as a mob at ten months. Progressive scholars share the same instinct as everyone else: to treat the past as finished and the present as dangerous, and the instinct grows stronger the closer the subject sits to one’s own commitments. Recognizing a tradition in the archive costs nothing. Recognizing it at the door costs something, and that price separates description from understanding.
Read the literature rather than its authors’ recent commitments, and one fact becomes impossible to avoid. Prairie populism has never exclusively belonged to the right.
The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was founded in Calgary in 1932 and issued the Regina Manifesto the following year. Tommy Douglas built the first social democratic government in North America out of Saskatchewan grain country using exactly the organizing methods, the hall meetings and the delegate conventions, that Aberhart’s Social Credit used to win Alberta in 1935. The United Farmers of Alberta took power in 1921 on Henry Wise Wood’s theory of group government, an idea considerably stranger than anything on the October ballot. Alberta’s New Democrats won in 2015 and now campaign under a leader who made his name in municipal politics wrapped in purple and speaking directly past the press gallery to a crowd.
The machinery came out again in the autumn of 2025, and it came out swinging at a conservative government. Some 51,000 teachers left their classrooms on 6 October in the first province-wide teachers’ strike this province has seen, and the government ended it with back-to-work legislation carried on the notwithstanding clause. Fury at that manoeuvre produced twenty-six recall petitions against members of the legislature, nearly all of them United Conservatives, the Premier included, filed under a Recall Act the United Conservatives themselves passed in 2021.
Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour told his members that if the government would not shrink the size of their classrooms, they would shrink the size of its caucus. By the end of March, every petition had failed or been withdrawn, the strongest gathering roughly 6,500 signatures against a threshold above 16,000. Whether they succeeded is a separate matter from what they demonstrate. Teachers and union locals in 2025 reached, it seems unwittingly, for the same instrument farmers used in 1937, and they did so against a government of the right. The idiom is identical. Only the policy content changes.
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The lineage of the protest
The Prairie’s habit of protest runs continuously from before the provinces existed. Louis Riel’s people at Red River and along the South Saskatchewan pressed grievances against a distant capital that did not consider itself obliged to answer, and Riel won election to the House of Commons three times without ever taking his seat. The United Farmers replaced a party system they judged captured. Social Credit rose out of the Depression on a monetary theory that was wrong and an anger that was not. The Western Canada Concept elected Gordon Kesler in Olds-Didsbury on 17 February 1982 by better than a thousand votes, and nine months later the party ran a near-full slate, took close to twelve per cent of the provincial vote and elected nobody, Kesler included.
Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report gave the sentiment a printed voice and a steely spirit for thirty years. Preston Manning built Reform around similar discontent with the slogan, “the West wants in,” which conceded federalism while demanding a renewed place inside it. Six conservatives published the Firewall Letter in January 2001. Wildrose formed, merged, and reshaped the governing party. The truckers’ convoy gathered its momentum here in 2022, and much of the organizing that carried it to Ottawa started with Tamara Lich, a woman of Métis heritage living in Medicine Hat.
Each of those movements failed on its own terms. Each of them changed the country anyway. That is what a healthy protest tradition does, and a political culture that produces one every generation is not sick. It is awake, and it is alive.
The most recent demonstration required no new party. On 18 May 2022, Jason Kenney learned that 51.4 per cent of his own members approved of his leadership: 17,638 yes against 16,660 no, out of 34,298 mailed ballots. Party rules let him stay, but he resigned that evening. A sitting premier with a majority government, once a popular federal MP and minister elected in his riding with massive majorities, the architect of the merger that created his party, was removed by ordinary members who bought memberships, filled in a card and posted it. The machinery was constituency associations and kitchen tables, and it worked precisely as the tradition intends.
In 1937, Premier Aberhart escaped the wrath that Kenney could not in 2022. Aberhart survived his members by repealing the law they used. Kenney could not attempt the equivalent. In essence, it was the same event separated by eighty-five years. Whatever else divides those two men, the spirit that came for both was recognizably the same spirit.
The Laurentian puzzlement
Alberta’s practice looks bizarre from Ottawa and from Halifax for a reason worth naming honestly. The dominant Canadian theory of representation descends from Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol: the elected member owes his constituents his judgment, and betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion. Burke was largely right. Parliamentary government requires deliberation, and referendums decide nothing about the questions they do not ask.
The prairie answer to Burke is narrower than its critics allow. Delegate democracy claims authority on the questions a governing class refuses to put on any agenda at all. Alberta voted 61.7 per cent to remove equalization from the constitution in October 2021, and Ottawa never opened a single discussion. Albertans have elected Senate nominees since 1989 under provincial legislation, and prime ministers have honoured the results when convenient and ignored them otherwise.
None of this means that the Alberta populist spirit gives us perfection. The same Aberhart government that killed the recall law pushed the Accurate News and Information Act through the legislature in October 1937, a bill that would have forced newspapers to print government corrections and to surrender their sources on demand. The Lieutenant Governor withheld assent and referred it, and in March 1938 the Supreme Court held it beyond Alberta’s power. The bill never became law. Plebiscitary enthusiasm can turn on the press, on minorities of different sorts, on procedural restraint, and the machinery that stopped it in 1938 was the federal state.
The tradition survives the memory. Alberta’s instinct, tested and occasionally disgraced across eleven decades, remains that a government which will not ask has stopped governing by consent. Albertans will keep asking the questions. Ten questions will be asked on 19 October, and Albertans will answer them in numbers, and the answers will be recorded.
Laurentians, especially upper Laurentians, may find the exercise unfamiliar. Alberta does not.
More next week.
Thank you, Ken. The Bloc's caricature of Alberta is precisely the misguided Laurentian view that all Albertans have and care about is oil and gas (some might include cattle). That's what the mainstream there chooses to believe. I too think/know we are distinct, for many reasons. That was part of the line of argument in the piece on Alberta's COVID reaction a couple of weeks ago.
Wonderful, Sir!
Yes, yes, yes, the Laurentians et al simply do not understand our democratic impulses. That certainly explains their incomprehension at the idea that we would want OUT particularly when they wouldn't allow us IN.
Hmmmm .... Does that make us a distinct culture, dare I say, a distinct society? I certainly think so, the musings of the leader of the Bloc Quebecois notwithstanding.