Leaders of a right-wing separatist movement in Canada say they’ve discussed everything from switching over to U.S. currency to creating a new military in conversations with U.S. officials from the State and Treasury departments at three meetings in the past year.
Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project seek to place a referendum on separating Alberta — the conservative-leaning province often referred to as the Texas of Canada — from the rest of the country on the ballot this year. They said a fourth meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., is tentatively planned in the coming weeks to further discuss a transition process should their effort prove successful.
“For those of us who are very much in support of Alberta becoming a sovereign country, it’s heartening to us at each of the three meetings that we’ve had with the U.S. administration to be informed that the entire U.S. administration is supportive of Alberta becoming a sovereign country,” Dennis Modry, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, said in an interview.
Modry said he attended all three meetings, which he said were on April 22, Sept. 29 and Dec. 16. He said another meeting is in the works for this month. Jeffrey Rath, an attorney for the separatist group, said the meetings took place at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.
State, Treasury and White House officials sought to tamp down on the seriousness of the discussions, saying senior officials were not present and no commitments were made. A senior State Department official said there will not be another meeting.
Modry, Rath and the Trump administration all declined to say which U.S. officials were present; Rath and Modry said they had agreed as a condition of meeting that they would not publicly name them.
“The genesis of the meetings was to explore … the benefits to the United States and to Alberta citizens once Alberta becomes a sovereign country and to talk about that and to see where the U.S. administration was at and … to clarify that we were not advocating for Alberta to become the 51st state,” Modry said.
The meetings mark some of the administration’s most direct involvement in Canadian politics, at a time when President Donald Trump has sought to completely reorient the U.S. relationship with its neighbor to the north.
A former senior career U.S. diplomat, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the meetings as “irresponsible as hell” and “highly unusual,” especially with a neighboring country.
“It’s really irresponsible for the United States to be engaging with these kinds of people, because it just encourages behavior that cannot be in the U.S. national interest,” the former senior State Department official said, likening it to the Canadians’ meeting with Puerto Rican independence groups.
Modry and Rath, as well as a Canadian politics professor, pointed to the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy document as helping explain why Washington would be interested in meeting with the separatists. In describing its interest in the Western Hemisphere, the administration wrote: “We will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.”
“The key issue here is how the current administration sees the use of radical conservative groups as part of its foreign policy strategy,” said Michael Williams, a politics professor at the University of Ottawa, adding that the strategy document “made clear the administration views such groups as allies in its wider civilizational struggle against liberalism and against states it views as standing in the way of what it defines as American interests.”
‘People are talking’
News of the meetings, which The Financial Times reported late last month, comes as U.S. relations with Canada are at their lowest point in modern history. Trump throughout his second term has called for absorbing Canada as the 51st state. In recent weeks, he has intensified his criticism of Canada in private conversations, according to aides, over what he sees as its vulnerability to U.S. adversaries in the Arctic.
On Monday, the president posted to Truth Social that Canada “has treated the United States very unfairly for decades” and said he will not allow a new bridge between Ontario and Michigan to open “until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them.”
In an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said there has been “a rupture” in the existing world order, adding that “great powers” are using “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
Carney also visited Beijing to “recalibrate” Canada’s relationship with China and agreed to cut its 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products.
The separatists got a boost from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent while he was being interviewed by right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec at Davos. After he criticized Carney’s overtures to China, Bessent described Alberta as “a natural partner for the U.S.”
“They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people; rumor [is] that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” Bessent added.
“Sounds like you may know something up there?” Posobiec responded.
“People are saying, people are talking,” Bessent said. “People want sovereignty. People want what the U.S. has got.”
A Treasury spokesman declined to comment on the meetings. A person familiar with Bessent’s thinking said that while Bessent neither supports nor opposes the separatist movement, he believes Carney is acting against the interests of oil-rich Alberta.
This person said Bessent is skeptical that the prime minister will bolster energy infrastructure between Alberta, in Western Canada, and the U.S. Carney recently signed a deal with Alberta to advance an oil pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, but hurdles remain, among them that the pipeline is opposed by David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, which borders the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
But Bessent, this person said, does not believe Alberta needs to become independent of Canada to boost its own relationship with the U.S. The source said neither Bessent nor other senior Treasury officials met with members of the separatist movement.
The State Department and the White House also put distance between the administration and the separatist movement.
“The Department regularly meets with civil society types,” a senior State Department official said. “As is typical in routine meetings such as these, no commitments were made.”
A White House official said: “Administration officials meet with a number of civil society groups. No support or commitments were conveyed.”
And Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, told NBC News he had “no info” about the meetings with separatists.
State and Treasury department officials did not directly address what issues were discussed at previous meetings and did not say who initially proposed the discussions.
“There have only been staff-level meetings, and no principals have been involved in any discussions,” the senior State Department official said.
The meetings covered what would happen in a potential transition to a country, said Modry, with discussions around border security, the Canadian pension plan, taxes, the national debt, the process for converting to U.S. currency and the development of an independent military. He said the group asked American officials whether the U.S. would be willing to provide a $500 billion line of credit if needed.
“Alberta will also need its own military,” Modry said, adding: “And would the U.S. be willing to work with Alberta in the development of an Alberta military? That’s on the table for discussion.”
An uphill battle
The Alberta Prosperity Project is working to collect the necessary signatures to get on the ballot in October. It has until May to gather 178,000 signatures, and leaders declined to say exactly how many have so far been gathered in the province of 5 million people, though they are optimistic they can collect roughly 1 million. The group is a nonprofit organization, not a political party, and it has no explicit backing from elected parties in Alberta.
The separatists’ concerns stem from what they see as the Canadian government’s overtaxing and overregulating the province, holding back industry. They also take issue with progressive immigration policies and a changing relationship with China, among other areas of discontent.
They face an uphill battle to succeed: An Ipsos poll conducted in January found that 28% of Albertans said they would vote yes on a potential ballot measure to separate from Canada. The survey had a margin of error of 5.4 percentage points. Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, who has sought a warm relationship with Trump and Republicans, has said she wants the province to remain in Canada.
There is a history of separatist movements in Canada, chiefly in Quebec, where two such referendums failed in 1980 and 1995. Rath said he believed the Canadian government is in a weaker spot now than it was in 1995, when -President Bill Clinton visited Ottawa and spoke about the importance of Canadian unity.
Canadian officials have offered strong pushback to the Trump administration’s involvement with the separatists. Carney, whose office declined to comment, recently told reporters, “I expect the U.S. administration to respect Canadian sovereignty,” while Eby has gone as far as to say the separatists are committing “treason” by seeking help from a foreign government.
Eby called it “deeply troubling” that the separatists would seek U.S. help as Trump calls for Canada to be absorbed as the 51st state and posts photos in the Oval Office of a map with an American flag over the entirety of Canada.
“I take the administration at its word and the public statements that they are not offering support and they’ve taken the meetings at the request of this group,” Eby said, adding: “We love our relationship with Americans, and it has been seriously tested by the president’s comments and his deeply disturbing suggestions to us that go at the heart of our sovereignty as a country. So it doesn’t help our relationship, frankly, to be engaging with this group.”
Modry said the separatists advised the administration “not to interfere with the referendum process,” adding that they suggested to officials that any comments they make about the effort “be in relation to the benefits to Alberta citizens as a consequence of Alberta sovereignty.”
Public opinion in Canada has shifted sharply against the U.S. A Pew Research Center survey last year found just 34% of Canadians held positive views of the U.S., down from 54% in 2024.
Both Modry and Rath pushed back against Eby’s suggestion that their effort was treasonous. But Rath suggested his movement could be the start of a fracturing of the Canadian nation, one where other provinces, like Saskatchewan and Quebec, will soon seek to separate. too.
“Canada will end up being Ontario and the Maritimes and Newfoundland,” he said. “What’s B.C. [British Columbia] going to do? Are they going to stay isolated on the West Coast, or are they going to vote to become an independent country? Or are they going to vote to join Alberta, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon? That’d be an amazing country, if you think about it.”