How the Alberta Prosperity Project Is Playing With Fire

There is a difference between organic political dissent and something far more calculated—manufactured grievance, amplified fear, and opportunism dressed up as grassroots democracy. What is unfolding in Alberta today, driven in no small part by the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), is beginning to look alarmingly like the latter.

And the warning signs are not subtle.

Maria Popova, an expert on authoritarian politics and Russia’s war in Ukraine, draws a comparison that should stop Canadians cold. She points to the Kremlin’s 2014 use of proxy separatists in the Donbas as a strategic “Trojan horse”—a fringe movement elevated and legitimized to serve broader geopolitical aims.

Her description of “instant separatists” is particularly chilling: actors who appear suddenly, loudly, and with disproportionate visibility, presenting themselves as the voice of the people.

Alberta’s separatist resurgence may not have appeared overnight, but its current momentum bears unsettling similarities.

For decades, separatism in the province has been marginal—a political sideshow dating back to the 1930s. Today, however, it is being aggressively repackaged, rebranded, and relentlessly promoted by organizations like the APP, which claims to be merely “educational” while actively pushing for a referendum that would fracture the country.

Let’s be clear: no one elected the Alberta Prosperity Project. As former intelligence manager Lennox bluntly notes, it is a self-appointed entity, accountable to no electorate, now positioning itself as a vehicle for one of the most consequential political ruptures in Canadian history.

That alone should raise alarms.

But the roots of this movement are just as concerning as its ambitions. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its restrictions and uncertainty, created fertile ground for what Lennox describes as “collective paranoia.” Into that environment stepped the APP—offering not solutions, but a narrative. A narrative of overreach, victimhood, and betrayal.

For more than a few, the paranoia stuck.

Try hard figures like Tanya Clemens and Chris Scott—drawn into the movement during the pandemic—frame their involvement in terms of liberty and resistance. Their grievances are real to them. But grievances alone do not justify dismantling a country. Nor do they explain how a historically fringe idea has been so rapidly elevated into a mainstream political conversation.

That transformation did not happen by accident.

The April 2025 federal election, which brought Mark Carney and the Liberals to power, acted as a political accelerant. For individuals like Adam Derges, the loss was not just electoral—it was existential. The rhetoric quickly escalated from policy disagreement to cultural warfare, with claims that Canada’s values had been irreparably altered by so-called “woke ideologies.”

And from there, the leap to separatism became not just conceivable, but inevitable—at least within the echo chambers the APP and its allies have helped cultivate.

Within three months of the election, the APP had submitted a petition for a referendum on Alberta’s sovereignty. By January, it had been approved. Now, with claims that nearly 178,000 signatures have been gathered, the machinery of secession is no longer hypothetical—it is operational to a point.

This is where the damage becomes tangible.

Because what the Alberta Prosperity Project is doing is not merely advocating for a political position. It is actively eroding public trust in democratic institutions, inflaming regional divisions, and normalizing the idea that national unity is optional—disposable even—if election results are inconvenient.

Worse still, it is doing so in a global context where such fractures are routinely exploited.

Across Canada, analysts, academics, and First Nations leaders are raising red flags about foreign interference—particularly from the United States—in the form of disinformation and potential financial backing. These concerns are not abstract. They reflect a growing recognition that domestic instability can be a strategic asset for external actors.

In that light, the APP’s activities take on a far more troubling dimension. And allows them to continue with their grift.

Whether knowingly or not, it is playing into a broader pattern: take a fringe movement, amplify it, legitimize it, and weaponize it. The end result is not empowerment—it is fragmentation.

And fragmentation carries a cost.

For Alberta, it risks economic uncertainty, legal chaos, and deepened social divides. For Canada, it threatens the integrity of a federation already navigating complex regional tensions. For both, it opens the door to influences that do not have the country’s best interests at heart.

None of this is to say that dissent should be silenced. Healthy democracies depend on it. But dissent grounded in misinformation, fueled by grievance, and orchestrated by unelected actors with opaque motives is something else entirely.

It is not a movement. It is a destabilization strategy.

And the Alberta Prosperity Project, whether by design or by consequence, is doing real damage—to the province it claims to champion, and to the country it is so eager to break apart.

Just don’t expect them to be there when the pieces need to be picked up.