Pandemic restrictions spurred many Alberta separatists to activism

CALGARY — Many Albertans now campaigning for the province's independence say their political activism began with opposition to COVID-19 public health restrictions and vaccine mandates.

"Most people are like that," said Chris Scott, leader of the sovereignist group Let's Talk Alberta. "They ignore things around them until it affects them personally, until they have a reason to get involved."

Scott defied indoor dining restrictions at his Whistle Stop Café in Mirror, Alta., in 2021, ignored a closure order, and was arrested after leading a protest outside his restaurant. He later fought a successful court case against the charges.

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"It kind of shattered my illusion of what I thought a free Canada was," he told CBC News.

Scott has since become a key figure in the Alberta Prosperity Project, the group behind a 300,000-signature petition that helped push Premier Danielle Smith to schedule an October referendum on holding a future binding separatism vote.

Bonnie Meikle, who works registration at separatist events, said Alberta Health Service's COVID mandate forced her to get a vaccine she didn't trust or lose her job at a Ponoka medical centre. She got the vaccine, which she derisively calls "the jab," but lost her job anyway after developing knee problems she attributes to the shot.

"Of course, you can't necessarily prove anything, but I was seeing these things happen around me," Meikle said.

She said the law-enforcement response to the 2022 convoy protests in Ottawa and Coutts, Alta., "broke" her. "I learned that the Canada I lived in wasn't the country that I thought it was," she said.

Nick Klinck, a heavy equipment operator who attended a separatist event in Calgary, said he also became politically active during the pandemic lockdowns and mandates. He watched friends lose jobs and vehicles, while rodeo shutdowns cost him two competitive bull-riding seasons.

"I don't like the way Canada is going, not proud of the direction," he said.

Jean-Christophe Boucher, a University of Calgary political scientist who has tracked post-pandemic activism, said pandemic protesters are a blend of anti-vaccine people and anti-government populists "that were mostly on the far right."

"COVID created conditions to create a political movement without parties necessarily being the main drivers," Boucher said.

He said the activism that coalesced around vaccine mandates galvanized during the 2022 trucker convoy and has since largely migrated in Alberta to trying to take the province out of Canada.

"This is kind of a movement that has been working with each other for almost more than six years now and has kind of like systematically developed their networks, built their funding bases, built their online followership," Boucher said.

Polling ahead of the Oct. 19 referendum suggests the separatist cohort is a minority of residents, just as COVID policy critics were in the minority during the pandemic.

Organizers at Scott's Calgary event last month set out chairs for 200 people, but around 50 showed up. By a show of hands, more people told Scott they'd been to a dozen or more independence events than were there for the first time.

Scott's logical bridge from his restaurant closure to wanting an independent Alberta is straightforward. "If Alberta was fully sovereign, and the federal government wasn't interfering, we could make sure that we have the rights and freedom that we thought we had before," he said.

With files from The Canadian Press and CBC News