Separatists Took Water and Oil to the State Department. Ottawa Has Not Said What It Asked Washington.

Keenan Hutka October 7, 2026 2 minutes read

OTTAWA – October 7, 2026 – A Globe and Mail investigation published over the weekend says Alberta separatist leaders sat down with U.S. State Department officials last year and put a list on the table: fresh water, farmland, forestry, mining, a strip of land for a railway to Alaska, and a Pacific oil line through Washington State, with royalties on the crude offered as payment. They also floated converting Alberta’s dollars to U.S. currency, paid for the same way.

Dennis Modry, a former heart surgeon and co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, told the Globe the ideas were in a document discussed at those meetings. A separate strand of the reporting says Republican operatives were in Alberta this year to help the campaign, and that David Parker, a long-time provincial operative, set up an invitation-only meeting near the Calgary airport in January where strategists from Michigan walked through voter-targeting software. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had already talked in January about Alberta’s resources being “trapped” by opposition to a Pacific pipeline.

Dane Lloyd, the Conservative MP Poilievre put in charge of the party’s response to the referendum, said he was concerned. Heather McPherson, Alberta’s only NDP MP, asked for an emergency debate. The Globe asked the offices of Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc whether anyone had raised the American role with Washington. The paper did not report an answer.

Albertans vote later this month on whether to stay in Canada or move to a second, binding separation ballot. Former prime minister Stephen Harper wrote Friday that even a protest vote would bring no benefit. The document Modry described is not a government offer. It is a group of people who want out, telling a foreign capital what the province’s water and oil might be worth if they get their way. The federal response, so far, is that the ministers’ offices were asked and have not said what they did with it.