Natalie St. Hilaire: The tale of Alberta's two referendums

Will Danielle Smith be punished for her democratic solution to the question of independence?

(Alberta Premier Danielle Smith addresses the province, photo taken from X.)

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. So try real democracy and let the people have their say. A referendum process should clear the air. Or not.

The official campaign calling for a separation referendum to be held in Alberta formally started last summer, though it wasn’t characterised as such.

A group calling itself Forever Canada, led by former MLA Thomas Lukaszuk, spent the summer collecting over 400,000 signatures to try to stop a separation referendum from happening.

‘Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?’ was the question when the paperwork was officially filed. The whole petition process had been completed before the separatists were even able to start collecting their first signature.

Mr. Lukaszuk gained signatures by explaining to people that this question could potentially block a separation referendum in two ways. The first was that he had filed it so that it would go through the legislative process prior to any referendum, which would force the Legislative Assembly to abide by it. The second was that no single referendum could be held with two opposing questions.

However, Mr. Lukaszuk miscalculated because, although many people happily signed the petition, they did not think their actions all the way through.

The reality was that 400,000 people signed a petition to ask, ‘Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?’ as a referendum question, not as a legislative instruction that legislators were bound to implement. Putting it to legislators first simply meant that they would decide the petition’s pathway to a referendum. And the rub was that this question could also be answered in the negative when put to a referendum.

This meant Mr. Lukaszuk had done the opposite of his claimed purpose, thereby misleading a swathe of Albertans into signing something that could actually bring about the exact thing they thought they were stopping. The Forever Canada petition sat in a legislative committee while the separatists had the chance to gather their 300,000 signatures.

Two referendum petitions now sit before Smith and her government, with opposing intentions. One group wishes to stop a referendum from happening at all, and the other wants the referendum to happen immediately.

That was when, last week, Smith surprised everyone and announced a question that solved a number of problems and also, like any good negotiation, left everyone less than totally satisfied.

The official referendum question will ask whether Albertans wish to engage in a process whereby a legally binding separation referendum will be developed and put to voters in the future. While it’s easy to take a cynical view of Smith’s motives, what most people miss is that Smith is actually being true to the heart of democracy; she is genuinely looking to understand the will of the people.

If one group of people was misled and does not want a referendum at all, while another group wants it, the best solution might just be to ask that exact question in an official way. In doing so, Albertans can have it out over the real issue at hand: whether to hold a referendum on separation at all.

Smith is restoring the voices that were lost through the missteps of Lukaszuk’s group, while still giving the separatists their opportunity to be heard. She is also turning the temperature down on an issue that was about to set the province on fire for the entire summer.

In the meantime, if Albertans vote to go forward with the official separation referendum, she can give Ottawa more time to work with Alberta and resolve the many grievances and disputes at hand. Everyone will have the opportunity to surface the real issues and address them.

Should Albertans want to hold a referendum, she can guide the process through legal channels, ensuring less pushback after a vote to leave, while consulting Indigenous groups and maybe even the other provinces along the way.

Smith can create structures and systems to provide stability and autonomy, so that, should Alberta become its own country, it is ready to govern when the time comes. And those structures and systems might be exactly what Alberta needs regardless of whether it becomes a separate entity from Canada.

And, to those who do want to separate, she is providing a longer runway on which to gather support, because surely they have all seen the polls showing that a separation vote was far from exceeding 50 per cent support at any point thus far.

Smith has listened to the root of the dispute between these two petitioning groups and is presenting Albertans with an official opportunity to vote on it.

But the question remains: will this attempt at real and principled democratic action go unpunished?

Can the people who did not get exactly what they wanted engage in a process that is more likely to yield a result that is both legitimate and reflective of the true will of the people?

Or has the democratic genie been let out of its proverbial bottle, and are we, the politicised and divided people of 2026, unable to clean up its mess?

Natalie St. Hilaire is a political commentator and journalist located in Calgary, Alberta.