As elections in Alberta and Quebec loom, we have to ask how much of the conflict they bring within the nation is a sign of what’s to come in Canadian politics post-Brexit.
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” (Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business, 1970)
In the shadow of a trade war….
Conflicts once had edges; a trade war started here and ended there. An election was a race punctuated by events and quotes down a timeline. A referendum is a single, momentous question put to a single, discrete public. But that model, if it truly ever was one- at least the illusion of it, let’s say- has come crashing down. What’s unfolding across Canada right now- a trade dispute with Washington, a referendum threshold quietly rewritten in Alberta, a language law reshaping who gets voting information in Quebec- aren’t three separate stories that happen to be occurring at the same time. They are one story, and the fact that the ink of a trade war bleeds into where a referendum begins, or where the referendum ends and the newly written language law begins, is itself the point. As McLuhan argued as early as 1970, this war was already being fought, not with divisions between military and civilian, but as information, unrecognizable to what we’ve traditionally deemed war. Modern conflict doesn’t respect the categories we’ve built to contain it.
John Arquilla, who, with David Ronfeldt, coined the concept of winning “the battle of the story” in their netwar scholarship, put it this way: victory may sometimes depend not on whose army wins but on whose story wins.1 Netwar theory’s deeper claim isn’t just that narrative matters. It’s that conflict in the information age is distributed and non-linear, fought by loosely coupled actors across domains that used to be kept separate: economic, electoral, diplomatic. A trade negotiation and a referendum petition becoming entangled isn’t a coincidence to be explained away. It’s what this kind of conflict looks like structurally. If we come to understand that much of our global economic system was designed to displace violent political conflict through non-violent means rather than resolve it, it becomes easier to accept that the economy and the democratic machinery beneath it have become the new arena for that war.
In the Brexit case, this pattern became visible at scale, and it’s the clearest historical case for what happens when the edges disappear. Political norms begin to dissolve as long-standing acceptances are brought into question. New rules, irregularities, and exceptions suddenly become justifiable. Polarizing arguments are shifting public discourse. Is it simply the effect of foreign influence, new political tactics, or one taking advantage of another? In the shadow of a trade war, Alberta and Quebec are just two current Canadian examples.
We can’t be sure that all of the procedural irregularities that follow are the result of foreign interference, but we should be investigating that angle. What we can say with greater confidence is that there’s a pattern forming in the trend of electoral procedural irregularities by incumbent parties: changes that, whether by design or by consequence, destabilize democracy and democratic norms. These changes are disguised as laws, but in effect they operate as something closer to a silent coup.
Brexit
Brexit wasn’t a political vote in isolation. It was a political issue emphasized during the 2015 general election, in which then-Prime Minister David Cameron had agreed to hold the referendum if elected. The goal, as critics have argued since, was to undermine Europe, or at minimum, to undermine the cohesion that kept Britain bound to it.
Brexit was, in many ways, the Trojan horse issue of the 2015 election. A political fringe that influences the balance of power can hold an incumbent in check with the promise of a single issue. Cameron included the Brexit referendum in the Conservative manifesto to neutralize UKIP’s threat to his right flank and quiet his own party’s Eurosceptic backbenchers: a concession to a minority that the majority never asked for.
The referendum then became a condition of confidence for Cameron once he’d decisively won the election and had the authority to fulfill his promise. The promise to force the vote was not itself binding, and the number of voters needed to make the result binding was lower than any historically comparable referendum.
Not only did Brexit pass, chaotically, but Cameron was forced to resign, setting off one of the most turbulent periods in modern British history, with five government changes in a decade.
Play the math on the threshold, and the picture gets worse. The Leave campaign only needed 37.4% of all eligible voters. That means 62.4% of eligible voters either voted Remain or didn’t vote at all. A non-vote under this system essentially gives more relative weight to whoever shows up. When the bar is a share of eligible voters rather than a share of votes cast, apathy and turnout suppression work in the same direction as an active Leave vote: every eligible voter who stays home makes it easier to clear the threshold.
The only historically comparable British vote, the 1979 referendum on Scottish devolution, required at least 40% of the total electorate to vote in favor for the result to be binding. Brexit cleared its bar at less than that with room to spare.
Alberta
Both the Alberta and Quebec elections are unfolding amid a multi-front trade war between the US and Canada: the renegotiation of CUSMA, global tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, and the renegotiation of terms for the Gordie Howe Bridge, which connects the US and Canada via Michigan to ease cross-border trade.
Alberta doesn’t have a general election until October 18, 2027. But Premier Danielle Smith has said a referendum could come as early as 2026, and that’s close enough upstream of the 2027 election that the outcome of one bleeds into the other, creating a polarized atmosphere heading into the next campaign. Brexit fused referendum and election into a single event; Alberta staggers them close enough that they still fuse in effect. A separation vote, won, lost, or won on thin turnout, becomes the defining issue of the campaign that follows it, the same way Brexit reshaped every UK election after 2016.
Like with Cameron, political insiders claim the referendum push is a concession to fringe elements within Smith’s own party. These elements could undermine her premiership and leadership from the outset if left unaddressed.
Playing with thresholds: Bill 54, the Election Statutes Amendment Act, was tabled April 29, 2025, one day after Mark Carney’s Liberals won the federal election.2 In effect since July 2025, it lowered the bar for citizen-initiated referendums from 20% of all eligible voters, collected in person, across two-thirds of ridings, to 10% of votes cast in the previous general election, collected over an extended 120-day window, with mail-in signatures now permitted and the riding-distribution requirement dropped entirely.3 That’s a drop from roughly 590,000 required signatures to about 177,000, close to a 70% reduction in difficulty.3
The group behind the current separation petition, the Alberta Prosperity Project, has done more than court sympathy from afar. Its leaders, including co-founder Dennis Modry and attorney Jeffrey Rath, say they’ve held three separate meetings with U.S. State Department officials since last spring, on April 22, September 29, and December 16, with a fourth planned.4 According to Modry, the group has been told at each meeting that the Trump administration is supportive of Alberta becoming a sovereign country.4 The group has also floated seeking a $500 billion line of credit from the U.S. Treasury to fund what it calls a “seamless departure” from Canada,5 and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly described Alberta as a “natural” U.S. partner.6 The White House and State Department have both denied making any commitments, saying only that officials “meet with several civil society groups.”5 Worth noting: the petition’s own leadership disputes the statehood framing. Mitch Sylvestre, who is leading the referendum petition, has told CBC the movement wants “sovereignty independent of the U.S.,” not absorption into it, a distinction that complicates but doesn’t erase the question of how close that sovereignty is being negotiated with Washington in the meantime.7
When the Alberta courts ruled the proposal unconstitutional because it didn’t address Charter and Treaty rights, the government’s response wasn’t to fix the underlying proposal. It was to strip the constitutional-compatibility requirement from the law.
Quebec
Rules affecting voter accessibility were changed again, this time on language rather than thresholds. For the 2026 general election now underway, Élections Québec is mailing voter information in French only for the first time in a provincial election, citing Bill 96 (2022), the law that made French the sole language of communication for public institutions.8 The provincial election guide and notice of entry are reaching every address by the week of September 14, with a French-only reminder card following the week of September 28.9 Each mailer carries a QR code directing voters to an English version on Élections Québec’s website. But the exemption for anyone who wants a physical English document is narrow by design: only Indigenous voters and people legally eligible to receive instruction in English can request one directly, and Élections Québec has said it cannot mail physical English documents to anyone else, even on request, because the election period is too short.10
Élections Québec itself asked the government for an exemption to send bilingual mailers during the election period. The request has been denied so far. The agency is now running its own targeted ads to English-speaking voters on other platforms to compensate, and spokesperson Julie St-Arnaud-Drolet has said plainly that the agency is “concerned about this change.”10 TALQ, an English-language advocacy organization, has formally called on Élections Québec to reverse the decision and written to Chief Electoral Officer Jean-François Blanchet directly.11 In western Quebec, where some ridings are majority English-first-language, local officials are warning the change will suppress turnout in their communities specifically. Jane Toller, warden of MRC Pontiac, a region she says is roughly 70% English-first-language, called the lack of English mailers “extremely disappointing.”12
Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette has defended the policy: “No one is being denied access to information. No one is being denied the right to vote either. The information remains available in English.”12 That defense rests entirely on the QR code and the online option being functionally equivalent to a mailed document, for exactly the voters least likely to have an easy digital workaround on hand.
Conclusion
I can’t claim to have proved coordination, which has a high threshold. But a part of the point is that I don’t need to. A trade dispute, a lowered referendum threshold, and a language-compliance mailer each look like ordinary legislative housekeeping in isolation. That’s the edgeless quality doing its work: none of it looks like a coup because none of it has to stand alone. Brexit taught us what it looks like once the edges are already gone: chaos, resignation, five governments in a decade, and a country still arguing about what actually happened. Alberta and Quebec are earlier in that same story, not two stories, one. Whether it’s a coincidence, domestic political convenience, or the specter of something being encouraged from outside remains the angle that still needs investigating. What’s no longer in question is whether the trade war, the referendum, and the language law are three stories or one. They’re one story. We just haven’t learned to read it that way yet.
Footnotes
- John Arquilla, as cited in Joseph S. Nye Jr., “The Information Revolution and Soft Power,” Harvard DASH, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstreams/7312037c-f2c2-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/download; the “battle of the story” concept is developed jointly with David Ronfeldt in their netwar scholarship, including Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND Corporation, 2001). ↩
- Policy Options, “How the UCP is reframing Alberta’s separatist gambit,” https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2025/06/alberta-separatism/ ↩
- Policy Options, “How the UCP is reframing Alberta’s separatist gambit,” https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2025/06/alberta-separatism/; Agora Institute, “Summary of Bill-54, The Election Statutes Amendment Act, 2025,” https://agorainstitute.ca/articles/bill54Contents ↩ ↩2
- NBC News, “Canadian separatists optimistic after meetings with Trump officials,” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/canadian-separatists-alberta-meetings-trump-officials-rcna258230 ↩ ↩2
- Axios, “Albertan separatists court Trump while he feuds with Canada,” https://www.axios.com/2026/01/29/canada-separatists-alberta-trump-what-to-know ↩ ↩2
- CNN, “A separatist group is asking for Trump’s help to split from Canada. Here’s what we know,” https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/americas/alberta-independence-trump-canada-intl-hnk ↩
- Mitch Sylvestre’s quote as reported by CBC, cited in Axios, “Albertan separatists court Trump while he feuds with Canada,” https://www.axios.com/2026/01/29/canada-separatists-alberta-trump-what-to-know ↩
- CBC News, “Quebec won’t reverse course on French-only voter info mailout ahead of election,” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-election-french-only-voter-info-frechette-9.7331040 ↩
- Élections Québec, “2026 provincial election: information documents will be sent in French only,” news release, September 1, 2026, https://www.electionsquebec.qc.ca/en/pressreleases/2026-provincial-election-information-documents-will-be-sent-in-french-only/ ↩
- CBC News, “Élections Québec to mail voter information in French only for 1st time in a provincial election,” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/elections-quebec-information-french-only-9.7327799 ↩ ↩2
- Pulse Newsroom, “TALQ urges Élections Québec to restore bilingual election mailings,” September 2, 2026, https://publisherpt.substack.com/p/talq-urges-elections-quebec-to-restore ↩
- CBC News, “Western Quebec officials concerned French-only election mailouts will affect turnout,” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/quebec-2026-election-french-only-mail-information-9.7331125 ↩ ↩2