Donald Trump’s bellicose proposals to annex Canada have triggered widespread shock and outrage — but for a small number of Canadians, he might be onto something.
A couple dozen of them gathered at a roadside restaurant in the western province of Alberta two weeks before Canada’s general election to discuss the merits of a political union with the United States.
Trump is reviled across much of Canada but in Alberta — a conservative-leaning province whose economy hinges on oil — 23 percent of people support the US president, according to a March survey from pollsters Leger.
Peter Downing, who helped organize the pro-Trump meeting, told AFP he has supported the billionaire president for years and was energized when Trump began musing about making Canada the 51st US state.
But the 43-year-old oil worker made clear he sees US annexation as a solution to a larger problem that predates Trump’s return to office: alienation of Canada’s west from the rest of the country.
“We just have to separate from Canada, whether you take the 51st state position like I do, or you think Alberta should be their own country,” Downing said.
Natasha Crouser, a fervent Trump supporter at the separatist meeting, agreed.
“What is paramount is having our freedoms back, and if that means being the 51st state, or joining the US – well then that’s where it’s at.”
‘Mismanagement’
Backers of independence for French-speaking province Quebec have been a force in Canadian politics for decades, but Western separatism has historically received less attention.
Downing began advocating for western independence before Trump returned to power — but said the president’s apparent openness to absorbing Canada gave him momentum.
“The difference this time is we have Donald Trump in our corner,” Downing told AFP by phone after the meeting.
Western separatism has also featured in Canada’s election campaign.
Writing in the Globe and Mail this month, one of the ideological founders of the modern Conservative Party, former opposition leader Preston Manning, argued Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney “poses a threat to national unity.”
“Large numbers of Westerners simply will not stand for another four years of Liberal government,” Manning wrote.
The Liberals’ decade in power under ex-premier Justin Trudeau had brought “mismanagement of national affairs,” he charged.
Manning’s complaints include climate-focused policies that restrict Alberta’s oil industry, notably resistance to a cross-country pipeline to bring Alberta oil to foreign markets.
He also complained about Liberal “identity politics.”
“Support for Western secession is therefore growing,” Manning wrote in the piece that stirred up a political storm.
Data suggests Manning’s concerns are not trivial.
According to an April Angus Reid Institute survey, 30 percent of people in Alberta and 33 percent in neighboring Saskatchewan would vote to leave Canada if Liberals win another term.
‘Regular Republicans’
Downing, who lives near Alberta’s capital Edmonton, said he had become “extremely resentful,” of the way Liberals “demonize” the oil industry while promoting “net-zero” emissions policies.
But he does not see electing the Conservatives as an answer.
“There’s nothing Conservative about the Conservative Party,” he told AFP, insisting no Canadian leader can make “a better offer” than Trump.
“You look at the American system, we would just be regular Republicans,” said Downing, an Apostolic Christian.
Dave Bjorkman is from Alberta, but currently works in the eastern province of Ontario at the Darlington nuclear power plant.
He said when Trump first described Canada as the 51st state — in a December social media post mocking Trudeau — it was “like a super dream.”
He has collaborated with Downing, but bristles at suggestions that wanting to join the United States is confined to aggrieved westerners.
Bjorkman sees a potential win-win scenario that may seem unlikely to some, believing Americans would enthusiastically adopt Canada’s public universal healthcare system.
He argued the US economy promotes opportunities that Canada restricts through cumbersome bureaucracy, saying Canadians would be foolish to pass up a rarely offered path towards statehood.
“You’ve just surpassed one of the most hardest, insurmountable odds ever, and Donald J. Trump gave that to Canada,” Bjorkman said.
