Letter: How does owing $500B to U.S. mean freedom?

By Letter to the Editor on February 3, 2026.

Dear editor,

Recently, separatists operating under the name “Alberta Prosperity Project” held three meetings in the U.S. with officials in the Trump administration. The separatists were trying to obtain a $500 billion loan so as to fund their desired independent Alberta.

Literature and advertising used by these separatists promise a greatly richer Alberta after their desired independence. Why would a greatly richer independent Alberta need to borrow any money, much less half a trillion dollars?

Do these separatists not have secession and independence fully planned, or are they flying by the seat of their pants? Additionally, how much more can they want, considering Alberta ranks first among Canadian provinces in gross domestic product per capita? For them, it seems, just as with Donald Trump, too much is never enough.

Also, one of these separatists’ promises is “freedom” for Alberta. How is being beholden to a malevolent mobster-in-chief and his malignant MAGA minions an enhancement of “freedom”? You can kiss freedom goodbye when that bunch calls the loan, because they are desperate for money. Never borrow from an impecunious lender!

Consider the size of their national debt, which they have blithely ignored for decades, living on credit. They can’t even regularly fund their national government.

Leave aside, for the moment, possible treason in the separatists’ conspiring with agents of a foreign government for aid in dismembering our country. Why do these separatists wish to connect Alberta more strongly with an unreliable laughing-stock, a failing democracy which, in its decline, is unable to provide justice and health care to its people and whose reputation among allies is ruined from self-inflicted wounds?

The great lie of populists such as these separatists is that all they desire is uncomplicated and easy to achieve, regardless of facts.

P.T. Barnum said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public.”

That is true in Alberta, too. The “Black Hat Gang” should be re-named the blackguard gang.

Yours truly,

Gregory R. Côté

Irvine Alberta

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