Separation Anxiety

If you live in Canada you could hardly miss the fact that last Monday the province of Alberta held an election in which Albertans were asked to vote up or down on 10 (yea, TEN) different propositions.

The headline issue was whether or not the province should arrange to hold a vote in which the proposition on the ballot would be to separate from Canada.

The news media just loves this kind of thing, as nothing is more dramatic than a vote to separate from a country, and of course there is Canadian precedent for this, as Quebec has held two actual separation referenda just since I moved here.

The thing is, there should have been absolutely no drama attached to this. Polls are decreasingly accurate these days, but every poll I saw in the run-up to the Alberta vote said the support for separation among Albertans did not get higher than some 20-odd percent. Such polls would have to be way way off for there to be any legitimate drama about the outcome of that vote. What I kept hearing is that those who supported not having a referendum were most worried about those lopsided polls keeping people on their side from even bothering to vote.

Well, this time the polls were pretty much right on. According to Elections Alberta, below is the unofficial count from the referendum, with – they insist – 100% of the polls in. (The ‘official’ tally is due next week, whatever that means, but I’m thinking it will not be significantly different from what you see below.)

Concentrating for now on just the headline separation issue, EA says that 2.058m votes were cast for that proposition [or, if you like zeros, about 2,058,000 votes], with 1.545m ticking the box that said Option 1: Canada should remain a province in Canada

That means that 75.1% of those who voted on this issue chose Option 1.

There are some interesting aspects of this anti-climactic result worth noting, I think. The first is that it was anti-climactic. Nothing that happened in the run-up to this election suggested it was going to be at all close, and it was not. All the breathless coverage of this was largely, I think, an effort by the media to get clicks and eyeballs. That, by the way, included US media, who covered it to a greater extent than they do almost anything else that happens up here. Drama sells. The WSJ wrote an article with ‘Deep divisions’ in the headline. jeez.

The second interesting thing about this was the voter turnout. As always, Elections Alberta has no interest in this, nor do any of the media, so I did my own homework to figure it out as best I can. Here are my numbers, and I will just swear on a stack of cigars that the figures all come from reliable sources.

Alberta has a total population of about 5.1m, and of that, about 1m are under 19 years of age, leaving a ‘voting age population’ of 4.1m. On top of that, there appear to be some 300k non-citizen residents in Alberta, which leaves a voting-eligible population of 3.8m, and that tells us finally that 2.058/3.8 = 54% of those eligible to vote in Alberta came out and did so for that proposition.

That is way higher than one gets for most municipal elections in North America, but that is not a very useful comparison. Elections Canada tells us that the turnout at the last federal election in Canada across the country was 69%, but since that is the percentage of registered voters who turned out, it is also not a useful comparison. (It is also true that turnout varies a lot across the country, so it is not a useful comparison to the turnout in this Alberta election.)

My readers should never think I am not dedicated to this blog. Since I could find nothing that told me what was the turnout of eligible voters in Alberta in the last federal election, which would be a useful comparison, I went to the actual riding results in Alberta from 2025 and, yes, folks, I added ‘em all up. All 34 ridings.

Tedious, but rewarding. So far as I can calculate (no, I have no Research Assistant on which to blame any mistakes) some 2.036m Albertans voted in the 2025 federal election, making the turnout a hair different only from what we saw for the referendum question: 53.5%.

One superficial conclusion from this could be that there is a certain percentage of any population that is politically engaged, and they show up for elections, while the rest do not. That’s a bit of a leap, since we don’t know that the same folks voted in the two elections, of course.

If you look at the other nine issues on which Albertans were asked to vote this past week, the vote totals are all slightly less than for the separation proposal. Political pundits call that ‘roll off’, and it is usually a thing in the USA, where most elections involve a ballot with many offices being decided. It is common for voters in those cases to vote for the office at the top of the ballot, like President, then maybe for Senator, and then skip recording any vote for lower offices; those voters just ‘roll off’ the ballot.

This is not a Canadian thing, because Canadian federal elections ask you to vote on one question– who will represent your riding in Parliament? With ten different issues, this Alberta ballot was a different animal, and there was some roll off.

I have little to say about the other nine issues. The results, which varied a lot, are in no way binding on anyone. A lot of foofaraw for nothing, it seems to me. An opinion poll financed by Alberta taxpayers. Hoo-rah.

One last thing on the separation proposition, however.

I subscribe to Juno News. It is not expensive, and godluvem they cover things that the Globe won’t even consider. Juno has an editorial position, too – call it a bias, if you wish. As to Alberta separation, it was absolutely clear that they were rooting for Albertans to say Goodbye to Canada.

That of course did not happen, but here is the headline I saw on Juno News the day after the results were clear.

‘Nearly 1 in 4 Albertans vote against staying in Canada’

Ok, folks, that’s one way to spin it, but if we are being accurate, as journalists should strive to be, that headline is wrong. The Option Two that’ nearly 1 in 4 Albertans’ picked said this:

Option 2: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada

By checking option 2 they were just voting to have a referendum, not to ‘leave Canada’. And, it is not hard to imagine some Albertans checking that option with the thought – ‘Dammit, let’s have the referendum so those stupid separatists can get their asses kicked and maybe then they will shut up and leave the rest of us alone.’

Just sayin’.

It is very odd, in my geeky opinion, that the two options did not match up. If the above was option 2, then option 1 should have read ‘The Government of Alberta should not commence…..etc’.

The other nine propositions on the ballot were at least more logical. They all said ‘Do you support etc…’ and the voter just picked Yes or No. Logical, easy to understand.

Guess that is why I am not a politician. I like logic.