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Chris couldn’t serve diners in his café. 

Mitch couldn’t sell hockey sticks or rifles.

Nick couldn’t ride bulls.

Bonnie couldn’t walk without a cane, and blamed “the jab.”

Art couldn’t help but recall his dad’s Second World War persecution.

The COVID-19 pandemic had myriad social, economic and political effects around the world. But Alberta may be the only place it helped spawn a separatist movement.

For many independence activists, from leaders to adherents, their entrée to activism was in their profound responses to public health restrictions or vaccines.

Proverbially, it was the same radioactive spider bite that powered so many ordinary Albertans into becoming fighters for a cause.

Sure, there’s a long history of separatism that stretches back to Alberta’s founding in 1905, got inflamed anew by Ottawa energy policy of the 1980s, and then again by climate action more recently.

The timeline of western alienation may be long, but for so many Alberta separatists their trajectories really began in 2020 and 2021.

Polling ahead of the Oct. 19 referendum suggests the separatist cohort is a minority of residents now, just as the COVID policy critics and the vaccine-wary were in the minority then.

But they’re just as riled up and disgusted by the mainstream Canadian status quo as they were five or six years ago, converting their personal disgust into political action.  

“Most people are like that,” reasons Chris Scott, leader of the sovereignist group Let’s Talk Alberta. “They ignore things around them until it affects them personally, until they have a reason to get involved.”

Scott’s COVID origin story might be the best known. He defied indoor dining restrictions at his Whistle Stop Café in Mirror, Alta., then ignored a 2021 closure order, then got arrested after leading a protest outside his restaurant. Then, he fought a lengthy and successful court case against his charges.

Before all that, Scott said his only political activity was casually talking smack online against progressives. But he was jolted into doing more after the public health rules he didn’t believe in. “It kind of shattered my illusion of what I thought a free Canada was,” he told CBC News in a recent interview.

Images from the 2021 protest show glimpses of the separatist leader Scott would become. A blue Alberta flag flapped on the pole outside his restaurant, where a maple leaf might typically fly. Around the protest hung banners saying “Alberta strong and free.”

Before long, he became a key figure in Alberta Prosperity Project, the group behind the 300,000-signature petition that helped push Premier Danielle Smith to schedule this month’s referendum on holding a binding separatism vote in the future.

Here is Scott’s logical bridge from his restaurant having to close to wanting an independent Alberta: “If Alberta was fully sovereign, and the federal government wasn’t interfering, we could make sure that we have the rights and freedom that we thought we had before.”

It was, however, the provincial policies of then-premier Jason Kenney that forced restrictions on the Whistle Stop, albeit based on federal public health recommendations. Among APP’s founders is Dennis Modry, the retired Edmonton surgeon who’d emerged in the COVID skeptic community with a prominent and contentious open letter in 2020 to Jason Kenney.

Scott took his Let’s Talk Alberta RV tour in mid-September to a banquet hall in northeast Calgary, where Bonnie Meikle worked the registration and pro-independence pamphlet desk, as she often does. 

She used to work in foodservice at a Ponoka medical centre, and Alberta Health Service’s COVID mandate forced her to get a vaccine she didn’t trust, or lose her job.

Meikle got what she derisively calls “the jab,” and lost her job anyway — because she says she soon lost much of the cartilage in her knees.

She attributes that, and co-workers dying, to vaccines. 

“Of course, you can’t necessarily prove anything, but I was seeing these things happen around me,” Meikle said.

She supported 2022’s COVID-related convoy protests in Ottawa and Coutts, Alta., but said the law-enforcement response to it “broke” her. 

“I learned that the Canada I lived in wasn’t the country that I thought it was,” she said.

Separatist messages are tougher sells in big cities. Organizers at Scott’s Calgary event on a Tuesday night last month put out banquet chairs for 200 people, but around 50 showed up. By show of hands more people told Scott they’d been to a dozen or more independence events than were there for the first time.

Nick Klinck, a heavy equipment operator, was impressed enough that when Scott sent donation buckets around, he pulled a $100 bill out of his wallet. He sported a Trump-style “Make Alberta Great Again” blue hat, and explained he likes the conversations it provokes.

He also perked up politically during the pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He watched friends lose their jobs and have vehicles repossessed, while rodeo shutdowns meant he lost most of two competitive bull-riding seasons.

“I don’t like the way Canada is going — not proud of the direction,” he said.

Pandemic protesters are a blend of two groups — the anti-vaccine people and the anti-government populists “that were mostly on the far right,” according to Jean-Christophe Boucher, a University of Calgary political scientist who has tracked post-pandemic activism. 

“COVID created conditions to create a political movement without parties necessarily being the main drivers,” he said.

What coalesced to protest the vaccine mandates galvanized during the 2022 trucker convoy, and has also had overlap with protests against gender-identity policies in schools and furore over an ostrich cull in B.C. last year.

In Alberta, activism has largely migrated to trying to take the province out of Canada, Boucher said.

“This is kind of a movement that has been working with each other for almost more than six years now and has kind of like systematically developed their networks, built their funding bases, built their online followership.”

But as they were with public health rules, separatists are fighting against a near-consensus among the institutional establishment, and almost every politician you can name. Online and in person, they try to persuade more Albertans to see it their way.

‘Anyone here vaccinated?’

About an hour’s drive south of Calgary, small-town separatist organizers for APP gather in a former car-repair shop in the town of Vulcan.

In a 90-minute group interview with CBC News, the pandemic repeatedly comes into the conversation. Many distrust the scientific consensus that vaccines were safe and effective, and reckon COVID was a scam or a “psy-op.”

“Is anyone here vaccinated?” asks Leanne Sparks from the nearby village of Champion. Others in the room shake their heads, or grimace knowingly. For people who did get COVID shots, “it has changed their attitudes,” said Cindy Leader from Vulcan, explaining the hostility independence activists have faced locally.

APP leader Mitch Sylvestre views federalists as the sort that complied without protest to social distancing rules and mask recommendations. “They obviously don’t view COVID the way I see it.”

Sylvestre is the separatist petition’s frontman and a major UCP power broker, but admits he was politically clueless until the pandemic.

“I did not know left from right,” he said.

In spring 2020, provincial health authorities shuttered Sylvestre’s gun and sporting goods store in Bonnyville, along with other “non-essential businesses.” It infuriated him that Canadian Tire and Walmart in his northeast Alberta town were deemed essential, allowing them to keep flogging similar items that he was barred from selling.

“COVID was the clear example of how bad it could get,” he told CBC News.

Before plotting a split from Canada, he and others worked on making Kenney part ways from power in Alberta. Sylvestre joined Take Back Alberta, the grassroots organization launched by David Parker — a preacher’s son offended at pandemic crackdowns on pastors, and doubtful of vaccines.

Take Back tapped into unrest about COVID rules, particularly in rural areas and conservative online communities, and Parker called Kenney a “tyrant.”

With a flood of new members voting in a leadership review, United Conservatives pushed out the party’s first premier, and replaced him with a politician and ex-broadcaster who compared vaccine requirements to post-Holocaust conventions on human experimentation, and gave special airtime to what she called the pandemic’s “deplatformed doctors” (including Modry).

As premier, Danielle Smith further pleased her new political base — she fired top public health official Deena Hinshaw, and called the unvaccinated “the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”

A fellow traveller on pandemic issues, she’s met activists partway on their new issue of focus. She’s a declared federalist, but she’s touted her own version of “Alberta sovereignty within a united Canada,” and loosened citizen initiative rules to make it easier for separatists to get the issue onto a provincial ballot.

Kenney has been far more vocal than his successor against separatists, which he told CBC Radio’s The House in August is a “marginal movement” like the one that rose up against him.

“I think it got hypercharged by people with a variety of grievances coming together and getting organized around COVID,” Kenney said.

“This whole thing has become the new right wing uni-cause. If your number-one issue is vaccine skepticism or chemtrails or … or globalism — whatever it is, separatism is a convenient umbrella for these preoccupations.”

While most Alberta separatists appear to have latched onto the issue since the pandemic — largely since the federal Liberals won re-election last year, and the citizen’s petition gave the cause a political vehicle — some in the movement have held the view for longer.

Cory Morgan’s separatism activity goes back to his 2001 leadership of the Alberta Independence Party, long before anyone outside microbiology circles knew what a coronavirus was.

But the leader of the third-party advertiser Pathway to Independence gets how COVID strikes an effective nerve in a pro-independence crowd. 

“We’re one more sneeze away from being locked down over some fake pandemic,” Morgan told the July 1 “Albertans’ Day” rally outside Chris Scott’s restaurant in Mirror.

“You know, we can make the case about equalization and our oilfield and things like that, but the scariest stuff of all is our freedoms … people often don’t realize that they don’t have them until they’ve lost them.”

Several years removed from mask and vaccine rules, the issues don’t come up constantly at separatist lectures. But it’s front-of-mind enough that one speaker at APP’s big legislature rally in August focused his speech on an Ontario Conservative MP Dean Allison’s independent hearings on vaccine injuries. (About 11,702 serious adverse events were reported among the 105 million COVID immunization doses administered through 2023, according to Health Canada.) 

Jason Lavigne, a popular pro-independence online broadcaster, took a week off in the referendum campaign’s stretch drive to be in Ottawa, to live-stream what Conservatives called the Allison Inquiry, eight hours a day for four days.

The pandemic also brought into the separatist movement some activists who may have never otherwise been accessible to what some analysts consider a hard-right cause.

Art’s journey

Art Matsui is one such figure.

The retired IT worker celebrated with his wife at the NDP’s Calgary headquarters the night Rachel Notley was elected premier in 2015; he joined Naheed Nenshi’s mayoral election victory party in 2010, donning a fuzzy fedora in Nenshi’s signature purple. “Lefties” through and through, he said in an interview.

When the pandemic shuttered businesses and ushered in universal masking, Matsui was immediately skeptical of the science behind such decisions. They’d been similarly doubtful of the public health benefits of adding fluoride to the public water supply, but the health interventions in COVID-19 were so much broader.

His wife was raised in a quasi-religious cult and had broken free, but preserved her distrust of governments. For Matsui, inspiration to resist came from his father’s imprisonment in Canada’s Japanese internment camps in the 1940s.

“Rights is the main driving force in my journey,” he said. “Because we had been stripped of all our rights during the Second World War … my family lost everything.”

He became a regular at Calgary’s pandemic protests and marches. He began bringing his father’s internment camp papers to show what happens in extreme rights crackdowns.

Matsui got turned off by Nenshi when the mayor called them “thinly veiled white nationalist supremacist anti-government protests.” He recalled swearing off Notley in late 2021 when she suggested a door-to-door campaign to address the few vaccine-hesitant Albertans. He backed the trucker convoy, and even attempted to drive along with them to Medicine Hat, until his vehicle got rear-ended leaving Calgary.

At one protest, Matsui met Take Back Alberta’s Parker, who encouraged him to try effecting change in the UCP. He became a party director in his home riding, and quickly supported Smith for premier, revering her public apology for the Alberta government’s treatment of the unvaccinated.

As he became more involved with Take Back Alberta and then Alberta Prosperity Project, Matsui became more convinced the federal government continued to crack down on rights post-pandemic, regarding the Liberals’ anti-hate legislation as a big threat to free speech

“In COVID, they were curtailing our freedoms, right?” Matsui said. “But now, we’re still on the same trajectory.”

Matsui gradually began to believe that moving toward Alberta independence was the only way to preserve freedoms, as so many fellow travellers have. He gathered names on the separatist petition, and became a frequent attendee and volunteer at pro-independence events. 

It’s all coming to a head on Oct. 19, the mission many independence activists have passionately been on for about 18 months, some longer.

Polls suggest they’re bound to lose the referendum by a wide margin. If they lose, and there’s no binding referendum campaign to wage, where will they take their anti-establishment, anti-government fight then? 

Feodor Snagovsky, a University of Alberta political scientist, has found in polling that one of the clearest predictors of separatism was support for the convoy. He wonders what cause the group might latch onto next.

“After Oct. 19, whether or not they continue with separatism I think is an open question,” Snagovsky said. 

“I don’t think separatist sentiment necessarily will go down, but the folks in this cohort will find other things to be interested in.”

After spending years on freedoms during the pandemic, and then separatism, the “need to create a political campaign” might spawn something different, said University of Calgary’s Boucher. 

Losing the referendum won’t likely change how they view Alberta’s place in Canada, he said.

But he expects them to carry the separatist beliefs and narrative with them in whatever might come next for the cohort.

“Losing now won’t change how they will feel about this issue.”

Most independence leaders, for their part, have vowed to keep up the fight, no matter what the referendum’s result is.

Several years removed from state-ordered business closures, or needing proof of a vaccine to fly, work in health care or dine indoors, policy-makers and much of the public may have moved on.

Many Alberta separatists haven’t, and don’t believe Big Government has, either.

To Mitch Sylvestre, COVID was a mere “dress rehearsal” for what those in power will impose next, if Alberta cannot free itself from overreach.

“The next one,” he said, “will be even more strict.”