Split Takes: Lloyd v. Lennox

“They don’t have a problem with Canada. They have a problem with Ottawa, so let’s not talk about separation and breaking our country apart. Let’s talk about fixing the actual issues in Ottawa…We need to ask ourselves, what has gone so wrong in our country that there are patriotic Canadians who are thinking about the idea of separation. We need to bring these patriotic Canadians back in the fold,”
— Alberta MP Dane Lloyd (Con.—Parkland), quoted in The Toronto Star, Sept. 24, 2026.

Treason is an ancient, awful word. It draws urgent attention to a grave, unsettling threat from within. It sounds an alarm and initiates a people’s defence against an internal threat through its collective identification. To use the word in a country like Canada, a country that prides itself on civility and toleration, will make many uncomfortable. But these, it must be conceded, are not normal times. And what’s happening in Alberta is, in fact, an aberration which must be named if it is to be meaningfully mitigated…
No, the Alberta separatist movement is not a grievance movement seeking to make our society more tolerant, more accepting of difference, more egalitarian. They are not seeking a renewed federalism. The separatists seek not to make Canada a better place, but to tear it apart and to transform the province of Alberta into an untaxed, unregulated, “faith, family, and freedom” libertarian fantasyland.
Many of the leaders of the separatist movement are from the same cast of characters we first met during the “Freedom Convoy.” They failed to topple the federal government then but are engaged in a similar exercise now. What they are seeking is a coup by other means. This separatist movement is a guerrilla faction of the global far right which is attacking open societies across the world.
— Patrick Lennox, “We must call Alberta separation what it is,” Globe and Mail, Sept. 28.