On October 19, 2026, Albertans will vote on whether their province should secede from Canada. Except that isn’t quite right. Albertans will vote on whether the province should “commence legal proceedings” in order to hold a binding referendum on whether the province should leave Canada.
In other words, Alberta will hold a referendum on whether to hold another referendum on whether the province should secede from Canada. The farcical nature of the referendum aside, the prospect of Albertan independence raises the question of what might happen should Alberta decide to leave.
Although Alberta has never previously voted on whether to secede from Canada, other provinces, notably Québec, have held sovereignty referendums. The sovereignty question has long dominated provincial politics in Québec, with political philosophers weighing in on the ethics of separatism.
One longstanding argument in the debate over Québec separatism concerns how the province could be partitioned upon leaving Canada. Opponents of separatism have said that if the Québécois have the right to national self-determination, then other apparent national communities in Québec would have the same right to secede from a sovereign Québec, which would lead to it being partitioned.
This regress argument against the principle of national self-determination begins by asking one to assume the validity of the principle. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that nations are entitled to demand that the borders of the political state that governs their members align with the boundaries of their nation. This entitlement entails the right for national minorities within a state to secede or separate from that state at any time by just withdrawing their consent to be governed.
Now, suppose that a national minority elects to exercise this right and secede from the state to which they belong. After conducting a successful referendum, the territorially concentrated national minority secedes from the original polity. However, upon achieving its independence, the new state is confronted by a group who constitutes a national minority in the new state, and who also demand their independence.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau—fifteenth Prime Minister of Canada and political theorist in his own right—offered the following presentation of the regress argument:
To insist that a particular nationality must have complete sovereign power is to pursue a self-destructive end. Because every national minority will find, at the very moment of its liberation, a new minority within its bosom which in turn must be allowed the right to demand its freedom. And on and on would stretch the train of revolutions, until the last-born of the nation-states turned to violence to put an end to the very principle that gave it birth.
Thus, the conclusion of this regress argument is that the consistent application of the principle of national self-determination results in a level of political instability that renders states nonviable. In the least, the argument is a reductio ad absurdum, as the practical implications are unacceptable. Moreover, the argument could also be understood to demonstrate that national self-determination is self-defeating, if its end goal is understood to be the creation of an independent nation-state. The instability that results from this principle would make forming a cohesive nation-state impossible.
In 1995, the Canadian province of Québec held a referendum on whether to become an independent country. This sovereignty referendum was the culmination of a long historical process that reached back to before Canadian Confederation. Québec is the only province in Canada with a francophone majority, although significant francophone minorities are found in the English-majority provinces.
The 1995 Québec sovereignty referendum narrowly failed by a margin of 50.58 to 49.42 percent. The results of the referendum are helpful in this discussion because they illustrate how the province might be partitioned were Québec to gain independence. The leftmost map in the above illustration depicts the entirety of the province, and it is immediately striking that the majority of the people in the northern Ungava region opposed separatism, because this region has two-thirds of the province’s landmass.
Opposition to separatism in northern Québec was driven by Indigenous communities, such as the James Bay Cree and Inuit. The maps on the right side of the illustration depict metropolitan centers and areas along Québec’s border with other provinces. In South Québec, Hull, and Montreal, there are significant anglophone populations who also overwhelmingly opposed Québec sovereignty. These groups are thus plausible candidates for national minorities that would exist in a sovereign Québec.
If the principle of national self-determination were consistently applied, presumably these national minorities could vote to secede from a sovereign Québec. Some contemporary Québec separatists, such as provincial political party Québec solidaire, do concede that other groups in Québec possess this right to national self-determination.
The most salient difference between the cases of Alberta and Québec is that the former is not often conceived of as a distinct nation. If being a national community is a prerequisite for having the right to national self-determination, then it is not clear that Alberta would possess such a right. Instead, Albertan separatists typically claim that Alberta’s moral right to self-determination is grounded in purely democratic terms. Regardless of whether a province constitutes a distinct nation, its citizens have a right to vote to secede from Canada.
However, if Alberta is understood to have a right to self-determination that is not based on a claim to nationhood, then the regress argument has even more power. In the Québec case, the James Bay Cree and anglophone minorities have been raised as presumptive national minorities with the right to self-determination, but if nationhood is not a prerequisite, any given group of people could elect to secede. In other words, if the right to self-determination is purely democratic—simply a matter of a territorially concentrated group of people voting to leave—why cannot Edmonton, Lethbridge, or Red Deer simply vote to secede from Alberta? Denying those cities that right would be arbitrary.
Pierre Trudeau once observed: “Si le Canada est divisible, le Québec doit être aussi divisible” (“If Canada is divisible, Québec must also be divisible”). Given the principle of self-determination being invoked in debates over Albertan separatism, this is even truer for Alberta than for Québec. Should Albertans one day choose to secede from Canada, we should expect the province to be partitioned.
Eric Wilkinson
Eric Wilkinson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia and series editor for the APA's Law & Philosophy series. He is the guest editor of the special issue of the journal Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, entitled “Envisioning Canada,” and author of “A Brief History of Canadian Political Philosophy.” His interests include metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy.
