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On May 15, the federal and Alberta governments reached an implementation agreement that sets out a plan to achieve important elements of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) on carbon pricing and pipelines they signed in November 2025 — an MOU that the Alberta government has labelled a landmark agreement. Six days later, in an address to Albertans, Premier Danielle Smith announced that she would pose a question to voters in her province this October, asking them whether they want to hold a referendum on independence.

There was something striking in the juxtaposition of what appears to have been substantive positive policy movement on the one hand and, on the other, grievances so deep that the premier felt the need to call a vote on an option for secession.   

Poll after poll has shown support for an independent Alberta hovering around 30 per cent. In our Confederation of Tomorrow survey, conducted in February and March, we find a similar level of support (25 per cent). We have been asking a series of questions annually for several years, with results showing no surge in support for separation (See Figure 1). In fact, as shown in Figure 2, the proportion of Albertans who are strongly or somewhat in favour of independence is little changed from what it was in 2003.

UCP voters versus the rest of Alberta

Still, reporting overall levels of support for independence obscures an underlying dynamic: the polarization between United Conservative Party (UCP) voters and those in the rest of the province. What looks like an Alberta problem is, more precisely, a UCP problem.

This distinction changes everything about how the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney chooses to respond and to which group of voters it targets future policy changes.

Our resentment index combines a series of questions that capture different aspects of how people see their province’s place in the federation — whether the province is getting the respect it deserves, whether it is contributing its fair share to the country, whether it is receiving its fair share of federal funding and so on.

Since we first began tracking the index in 2022, Alberta has consistently been among the provinces with the highest resentment scores.  But, here again, the average — a single number representing the whole province — obscures the real story. This is not a case of a widely shared grievance, but one of a cleavage within the province that is widening over time, as one group pulls steadily away from the other.

Figure 3 shows the distribution of UCP supporters on the index compared with voters in the rest of Alberta over the five years we have tracked it. Each curve shows where respondents cluster on the index, from low resentment on the left to high resentment on the right — the higher the curve, the more people score at that point. The dots mark each group’s average.

Notably, resentment among one group (UCP supporters) has barely budged; but the other group (the rest of the province) has shown a steady improvement in its view of how Alberta is treated in the federation.

Contrasts between two aggrieved party bases

To better understand what is going on in Alberta, we can use the resentment index to contrast two of the most aggrieved provincial political parties in the federation: the UCP in Alberta and the Parti Québécois (PQ) in Quebec. As shown in Figure 4, PQ voters are far less resentful of their province’s place in Canada than UCP voters are of Alberta’s. What’s more, they do not differ as much from the provincial average. PQ voters are not far removed from the average voter in their province when it comes to views on Quebec’s place in the federation.

In contrast, UCP voters in Alberta are highly resentful of their province’s place in the federation, are further from the provincial average and are even more distanced from the other large group of Albertans forming the low-resentment bump on the left-hand side of the chart.

These patterns point to a key difference in referendum politics between the two provinces. The Quebec sovereignty movement historically drew on grievances that are widely shared across the provincial electorate. Although most Quebecers are opposed to holding a third referendum on sovereignty, they are unlikely to view the Parti Québécois’s ideology as extremist.

In contrast, support for Alberta separatism does not appear to have spread beyond a subgroup of UCP voters and is not representative of resentment that’s widely distributed in the province. The referendum threat, in that sense, is less a democratic instrument designed to give expression to the popular will, than it is a tool for managing the UCP’s raucous base.

A problem with no (policy) solution?

The extent and persistence of resentment among UCP supporters poses a dilemma for Carney. There is evidence that his arrival on the scene in 2025 brought about some improvement in attitudes toward federalism and the federal government in Alberta as a whole — but this is evident only among those who do not support the UCP. Among UCP supporters, there has been no change: federal policy has, to date, not dampened regional discontent within this group or changed its assessment of federalism. This pattern is captured both by the resentment index (Figure 3), and by other survey questions about federalism and the federal government (Figures 5 and 6).

Our latest survey results are from March and do not measure possible reactions to the recent implementation deal. But as all the figures above show, there was little movement among UCP supporters on the survey’s measures, both following Justin Trudeau’s departure and in the wake of the MOU.

Given this, it is doubtful the recent implementation deal will be enough to prompt a significant reversal in their attitudes. That is a bind for both Carney and Smith: there does not appear to be any single policy change or proposal that could pull UCP voters back from the precipice. Meanwhile, the rest of the province has grown less resentful and has warmed to the federation, especially after the change of prime ministers and the subsequent election of the current Carney government.

Where to go from here?

There appear to be two options for the federal government: welcome the fact that many Albertans have become less resentful of their province’s treatment in the federation (whether in response to new federal policies or as a backlash to the actions of the UCP premier), or propose additional new policies in an attempt to appease the UCP base whose opinions have not budged, even at the risk of losing the support of other people in the process.

Five years of flat resentment index scores among these UCP supporters — despite changes to carbon pricing, renewed pipeline planning and intergovernmental agreements — suggests that the grievance is not transactional. It does not respond to federal offers because it is not, at its core, about that.

For Carney, the more productive path may be the first option: not settling for the status quo but focusing policy changes on the rest of Albertans whose opinions have moved, without worrying about bringing the UCP base along. For Smith, the problem runs the other way. A referendum that reveals her base isn’t that close to the median voter in the province risks weakening, not strengthening, her hand — at least outside her party.

Methodology: The 2026 study consists of a survey of 5,696 adults, conducted between February 14 and March 28, 2026 (92 per cent of the responses were collected between February 19 and March 7); 91 per cent of the responses were collected online. The remaining responses were collected by telephone (both landline and cell phone) from respondents living in the North or on First Nations reserves, or from francophone respondents in New Brunswick.

The Confederation of Tomorrow surveys are conducted annually by an association of the country’s leading public policy and socio-economic research organizations: The Environics Institute for Survey Research, the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, The School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, the Centre D’Analyse Politique – Constitution et Fédéralisme, the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government and the First Nations Financial Management Board.