Good points in your post. Canada's tariff response and immigration policies are both alarming, and your reference to American/Chinese production highlights the current situation nicely.
For clarity, I didn't mean to imply that the USA has to save Canada/Canadians from themselves, just that the USA ignoring the rot would be a mistake. The USA ensuring its own security and prosperity is more important to them than the preservation of Canada/Canadians.
If Canada is the problem, then it is in the USA's best interest to address the problem peaceably or otherwise (pending severity).
Understandable that separatists tend to prefer independence rather than to join an existing country where possible.
I'm hearing more about what Alberta wishes they had than how they plan to get there so where it gets a bit cloudy, for me anyways, is how much autonomy and stability Alberta (or other western provinces) can realistically muster to first separate from Canada and then also maintain their independence as their own country going forward.
Time will tell I guess, and thanks for the reply.
Alberta has been quietly building the framework for independence for over 20 years, really accelerating in the last five once the bar for invoking the Notwithstanding Clause of the Constitution was lowered by Doug Ford's fight to reform Toronto's city council. There are currently committees writing a Criminal Code and a Firearms Act for Alberta, so a lot of the basics are in prep already, even if formal separation wasn't openly talked about.
The biggest thing people outside Alberta are unaware of, as shown by some idiots' reactions to my posts about Alberta independence, is that a lot of the things Jean Chretien put into federal law in 1995 to scare Quebec before their last referendum actually benefit Alberta in secession.
A province leaving confederation would have to balance the books with the feds for the last ten years of federal funding. No problem, Alberta has never been a net recipient of federal funds, we are a massive net donor, and the feds would, according to their own laws, be required to pay us hundreds of billions of dollars when we leave.
Native reserves would remain, and basically whether to continue the apartheid of the Indian Act or not would be negotiated with each band. The assumed plan here would be to give full ownership of the lands to the bands and let them decide how to share it out among their people.
National Parks would be handed over to the province, so all the tax revenue generated by Banff and Jasper would go to Alberta instead of the feds, and Banff generates a shitload of money.
The Alberta Trade Mission in Washington D.C. was founded in the early 2000s by Ralph Klein, to essentially give Alberta an embassy to negotiate with the US and establish diplomatic ties without Ottawa in the middle, so we already have established a close relationship on that front.
Alberta leaving Canada would instantly put Canada in huge financial jeopardy, and people out here have been fed up with having no say federally for a long time. The conditions that lead to secession are far more present here than they have ever been in Quebec, and Alberta has the means and the will to act, especially with a Trudeau lackey and WEF stooge like Carney as PM.
