Open this photo in gallery:
Supporters cheer as results begin to roll in at the pro-Canada watch party in Edmonton on Monday night. THE CANADIAN PRESS/James MaclennanJames Maclennan/The Canadian Press
Alberta has decided to remain in Canada, after voters in the province emphatically rejected an effort by separatists to pursue a permanent rupture with the country.
As of shortly before midnight in Alberta, it was projected that the remain side would prevail. Roughly 76 per cent voted in favour of staying in Canada and 24 per cent for a binding referendum, according to preliminary results on Elections Alberta’s website. Twenty-five per cent of the province’s voting locations had reported results.
It marked the failed culmination of decades of effort by disaffected Albertans who have demanded a chance to create their own independent country.
“I’m very pleased to see the initial results from Elections Alberta show widespread support for remaining in Canada,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wrote late Monday on social media. “Albertans have voted for a stronger Alberta in a united Canada.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney promised a future in which “Albertans and all Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose and high ambition.”
“Canada is so much greater than the sum of its parts,” he wrote in a statement. “Now it is our opportunity to take all that we have been given as Canadians – and we have been given the greatest country in the world – and make our country better for all of us.”
Thomas Lukaszuk, who led Forever Canadian, an effort to campaign for a remain vote, told a rally late Monday night that “Alberta will not be the weak link in Confederation. We Albertans are as proud to be Canadians as any other Canadians across the country.”
Public-opinion surveys had long shown that a large majority of Albertans support preserving Confederation and the province’s 121-year history as part of Canada. Separatists have already signalled, however, that they will not rest, even if voters reject their favoured outcome.
The Alberta Premier said earlier this month that if the separation question was defeated, she would not hold another vote on separation so long as she is leader of the province.
Ballots for the 10-question referendum were being counted by hand, an endeavour likely to take two days to fully complete.
Monday’s vote arrived at a perilous moment for the country, amid open threats to Canadian sovereignty from the U.S. President and the re-emergence of a separatist government in Quebec, voted back into power earlier this month.
Open this photo in gallery:
Supporters of the Alberta Prosperity Project gather at a watch party in Edmonton.Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters
The referendum was staged in the midst of a years-long bid by Ms. Smith to press Ottawa for greater concessions, while also maintaining her leadership of a provincial political party with a strong core of ardent separatists, some of whom have already pledged that they’ll seek other ways to hold a binding independence vote.
The referendum drew great numbers of Albertans. Even before voting centres opened Monday, more than 1.3 million people had cast ballots, 43 per cent of those eligible to vote, according to Elections Alberta.
Many more came out on Monday. In Edmonton, turnout surpassed expectations for Barbara Schmidt, an Elections Alberta officer who worked at multiple polling stations, each with lengthy queues of voters.
The Prime Minister, in urging Albertans to remain, had appealed to the strength of a country united and called on shared memories of patriotic pride. Separatist leaders demanded rupture, promising an independent Alberta would deliver better fortunes and decisions unfettered by people outside the province.
Separatists had mounted a vocal campaign that garnered significant attention both in this country and south of the border.
On Monday, though, Albertans fixed their own choices, ballot by ballot. For some, it was a moment years in the making.
“If we can get free of the rest of Canada, I’ll be the happiest man on Earth,” said Roy Mears, 76. He began questioning Alberta’s place in Canada in the 1970s. He persisted in his beliefs through the National Energy Program, the controversial imposition of federal power on Alberta’s energy resources. In 2015, when Justin Trudeau won election as a Liberal prime minister, Mr. Mears founded a Facebook group called The Republic of Western Canada.
“If we don’t separate, we’re screwed. I mean, the immigration’s killing us,” he said Monday, as he voted in the town of Vulcan.
Albertans voted in community centres, schools, hotels, golf clubs, a Hindu temple, sports complexes, churches and outposts of the Royal Canadian Legion, neighbours and colleagues making ballot choices that would steer their homes toward radically different futures.
“I love Canada. We need Canada. We need the whole of it, not just part of it,” said Carol Shaw, who moved to Alberta from Britain in 1981. She voted in Gleichen, a small railroad hamlet east of Calgary, where more than a dozen people arrived as morning temperatures dipped below freezing.
Some came determined to stand not merely against Alberta independence but against the fracturing of Canada at a time when Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened annexation.
“There’s people that would like to join the U.S. — it’ll be over my dead body,” said Leslie Leckie, a retired snowplow and cable ferry operator. On Monday morning, he put on a pink hat emblazoned with a maple leaf, arriving to vote struggling to comprehend how it had to come to this.
“This is foolishness. As people, can we not get together? Can we not negotiate?”
When Alberta’s Premier first proposed a nine-question referendum, she said she was seeking a “mandate” from Albertans. Critics have accused her of seeking to mollify xenophobic factions in her own party, while proposing constitutional amendments that Alberta itself has no power to enact.
The addition of the tenth question, on a possible vote for secession, has carried considerably more consequence, prompting competing displays of patriotism across the province on referendum day. In Edmonton, a man rollerbladed over the North Saskatchewan River on the Walterdale Bridge, holding aloft a hockey stick attached to a giant Canadian flag, waving through the wind.
Near Cochrane, drivers sounded their horns at two friends who stood beside a highway flying large Alberta flags in favour of the separatist cause.
At the Royal Canadian Legion in Sundre, Delena Barker, a retired accountant and union leader, enthusiastically voted yes to all the referendum questions and to take steps toward separation. She said she would also vote yes in a future secession ballot.
Ms. Barker moved to Alberta from Toronto 15 years ago.
“We’re a different type of people,” she said, “and I say ‘we’ now because I feel I’m an Albertan.”
In Wainwright, the eastern town still reeling from a deadly weekend grass fire that killed four military members at a nearby base, voters marked ballots near a memorial of flower bouquets that has grown around the town’s war memorial.
“In the service of Canada,” one of the plaques read.
“I hope everyone is doing all right, the best they can,” said local resident Brandon Barss.
“And I hope this vote goes in the way of not needing another referendum.”
The results of the referendum will reflect separatist sentiment, although only partly. Some voted against remaining in Canada, even if they had no real intention of seeking independence.
In Edmonton, Sheila Taylor said she had been “a fence-sitter,” not sure which side she’d vote for. She chose Monday to support a binding separation vote.
“Ultimately, for me, it became a decision of just saying that I’m okay with Prime Minister Mark Carney doing whatever he wants with the rest of the country – but just leave us in Alberta alone and out of it, please,” she said.
James Wocknitz, a retired drilling rig worker in Vulcan, was among those who signed a petition demanding a referendum. Yet he remains skeptical that the province could ever achieve independence.
“People think this is about leaving. It’s about leverage. It’s about getting the ability to have a say,” Mr. Wocknitz said.
Others, though, questioned the damage done by a referendum that has brought to the fore lacerating disagreements that could leave wounds for generations to come.
In Calgary, Mayor Jeromy Farkas recounted a question he was asked during a recent elementary school visit to City Hall.
“I have never felt my heart so broken as when one of the children asked me, ‘Am I a real Canadian?’ ”
That is a question, he said, that “no child should ever have to ask.”