Albertans began voting Tuesday on whether their province should remain in Canada. Elections Alberta opened just over 300 polling stations for the first of five days of advance voting, ahead of the official polling day on October 19.
There are ten questions on the ballot. The one that matters asks whether Alberta should stay in Canada or hold a second, binding referendum on leaving Confederation. Premier Danielle Smith is urging a yes to the other nine. They call for the province to take more control of immigration, and to work with other provinces to pull powers from Ottawa through constitutional change. Smith has said repeatedly that she will vote to stay, and her office says she will cast her ballot at advance polls later this week.
The queues told their own story. One downtown Edmonton station had a line stretching almost half a block when doors opened at 9 a.m., with waits of between thirty minutes and an hour. A northeast Calgary station had no line at all by the afternoon. Michelle Gurney, a spokesperson for Elections Alberta, said the first day went well, with minor delays at 17 stations because of technology.
While Albertans queued, the sharpest attack on the referendum came from the man who built the governing party. Jason Kenney, who co-founded the United Conservative Party and led it to victory over Rachel Notley's NDP in 2019, told an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce luncheon that separatists have got inside it.
"There's no doubt that those folks have infiltrated (the party)," Kenney said. "They're welcome to participate in democracy, but if their primary goal is separation, then they have to do it in a separatist party."
He said the party faces a reckoning once the votes are counted, and that it would not exist at all had its founding parties not agreed on loyalty to Canada. As leader he invalidated some three dozen would-be candidates before the 2019 election because they had advocated separation. "Separatists trying to infiltrate a federalist party are fundamentally dishonest and disrespectful of democracy," he said.
Kenney also drew a comparison that will sting in Alberta. In Quebec, he said, it would be unthinkable to hold a referendum on secession without first winning an election on it. "We should have at least as much respect for the democratic process here as Quebec separatists do there."
He traced the movement's organisers to the same hard-right Albertans angered by what he called COVID conspiracy theories, who organised then and have moved on to this fight. Kenney himself stepped down in the spring of 2022 with 51.4 per cent support in a leadership review, amid party anger over pandemic restrictions. Smith replaced him that autumn.
Notley, sitting beside her former opponent, put it in harder terms. The rest of Alberta, she said, is being held hostage by a small segment of the population, and Smith should remove from caucus and cabinet anyone who will not commit to staying in Canada. "In failing to do that she is abdicating her obligation to Albertans and to Canadians." She said the party needs to understand how "such a small tail on an otherwise completely respectable dog" came to wield the influence it does.
Smith has argued that every party contains a range of views and that the majority view prevails. Asked about her leadership, Kenney declined. "I don't want to be a Monday morning quarterback," he said.
The other campaign worry is turnout. Opposition NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, who voted in Calgary, said he feared complacency among those who want to stay. "They will crawl over broken glass to vote," he said of separatists. He said he did not want pro-Canada voters to see a long line and assume the result was already settled.
Four more days of advance voting remain before October 19.