A policy document is only as significant as the people behind it, and this is where the story moves from the abstract to the concrete. The lead author of the Free Alberta Strategy is a man named Rob Anderson.
Anderson is not a fringe figure. He is a former Wildrose MLA, a lawyer by training, and a long-time fixture on the hard-right flank of Alberta conservative politics. He has spent years inside the province’s political machinery, building relationships, honing arguments, and positioning himself at the intersection of policy and power.
The path from the publication of the Free Alberta Strategy in 2021 to Anderson’s current role reads like a political operative’s dream sequence. In 2022, he chaired Danielle Smith’s campaign for the leadership of the United Conservative Party. When she won, he chaired her transition team — the group responsible for shaping the new government’s structure, priorities, and personnel. And then, in the move that completes the circle, he became the chief of staff in the Premier’s office.
Follow the arc: a man co-writes a detailed strategy for prying Alberta out of Confederation. He then runs the leadership campaign of the woman who becomes Premier. He then takes over her office. The person who authored the separation playbook now holds the pen at the highest level of provincial power.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of public record. Anderson’s role in Smith’s orbit has never been hidden. On her own podcast, recorded before she became Premier, Smith sat with Anderson and talked enthusiastically through the Free Alberta Strategy he had co-written. She called him one of the smartest policy minds in Alberta. She was not tricked into an agenda. She embraced it openly.
Trump Team Secretly Met With Group That Wants to Separate From Canada
January 29, 2026/11:14 a.m.
Senior Trump administration officials have held meetings with the Alberta Prosperity Project, a fringe separatist group that seeks to split the province away from Canada.
The Financial Timesreports that State Department officials have met representatives from the group in Washington, D.C., three times in the last nine months. The group’s counsel, Jeff Rath, told the publication, “We’re meeting very, very senior people leaving our meetings to go directly to the Oval Office.
“The U.S. is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Rath said.
The Times, citing unnamed sources, said that the group was hoping for another meeting in February to request $500 billion in credit to prop up the province if an independence referendum, which has not yet been called, were to pass. The State Department confirmed the meetings to the publication but said, “No commitments were made,” and a White House official added that “no such support, or any other commitments, was conveyed.”
Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent played up Albertan independence, calling the oil-rich province “a natural partner for the U.S.”
“They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people. Rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” Bessent said to right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec.
Podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon discussed Alberta breaking away from Canada in an episode in November, saying that President Trump sees Canada like Ukraine.
“The Chinese and the Russians are up there and they see the undefended northern territories of Canada, they’re going to take a bite,” Bannon said. His guest, right-wing commentator Brandon Weichert, expounded further.
“I know a lot of the people in charge of the Alberta separatist movement,” Weichert said. “The Albertans are ready to vote in the next six months. They’re going to get out of the Canadian union. They’re going to become an independent country. We’re going to recognize them, and that’s going to put them on the pathway to becoming the fifty-first state.”
In reality, polls show that the majority of Albertans would prefer to stay in Canada. Canadian leaders have denounced the APP’s meetings, with British Columbia Premier David Eby calling them “treason” and Ontario Premier Doug Ford saying that “going behind Canada’s back and negotiating is unacceptable.”
The U.S. is growing increasingly unpopular in Canada, thanks to Trump’s threats to make them the “fifty-first state.” The idea that his team would try to engineer a breakup of the country will only worsen the relationship, especially considering that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is already seeking to make Canada financially independent from the U.S.
In the end of July 2018, Steve Bannon made headlines when he announced “to boost populist parties enough to create a right-wing ‘supergroup’ following EU Parliamentary elections next May.”1 As the official vehicle for the project an already existing private foundation called “The Movement / Le Movement” was chosen, founded on January 9, 2017, by the Belgian far-right politician and lawyer Mischaël Modrikamen, his wife Yasmine Dehaene-Modrikamen and Laure Ferrari, an aide to Nigel Farage.2 The Brussels-based organization is to be staffed with 10 full-time employees in the forthcoming months, who will preliminarily focus on data analyses and surveys.3 According to Bannon the number might grow to 25, depending on the outcome of the 2019 European parliamentary elections.“4
“Bannon told Reuters The Movement will serve as a ‘clearing house’ in Brussels, at the heart of the EU, for the ‘populist, nationalist movement in Europe’, with the objective of boosting the anti-EU presence in the European Parliament…”5
The populist bloc could gather up to a third of the 705 deputies’ seats in the European Parliament in next year’s European election.4 “‘Everybody agrees that next May is hugely important, that this is the real first continent-wide face-off between populism and the party of Davos,’ he said, referring to the yearly economic summit of heads of state and business in the Swiss mountain resort.”1 “Right-wing populist nationalism is what will happen. That’s what will govern,” he told the Daily Beast. “You’re going to have individual nation states with their own identities, their own borders.”
That Bannon has made the right alliances to form such an EU parliamentary supergroup can be seen on the attached network map. Bannon has strong ties to Nigel Farage, co-leader of the right-wing, Euro-sceptic European parliamentary group Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD), of which politicians of UKIP, AfD, Débout la France, and the Five Star Movement are members. AfD’s Beatrix von Storch became a member of the EFDD in April 2016, forestalling her imminent expulsion from the European Conservatives and Reformists group, and remained active in the EFDD until her entry into the Bundestag in September 2017.
Bannon’s contact to Matteo Salvini constitutes a direct link to another important right-wing European parliamentary group, Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), which gathers MEPs from Rassemblement National, FPÖ, The League, and FPÖ. Via his DHI network, Bannon should have also access to contacts in the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM), such as Nirj Deva.
According to his description the organisation was founded in the beginning of last year as a side-project of the Belgian Parti Populaire to “unite the populist forces in Europe.” “Its goals, stated in a constitution lodged with Belgian authorities, were ‘to promote the rule of law, free enterprise, national sovereignty, effective national borders, popular consultation, the fight against radical Islam, a scientific and not dogmatic approach to climatic phenomena and the defense of Israel as a sovereign state on its historic land.’”7 But instead of embarking on these challenging goals, the project with an initial capital of a mere 2500 Euro, and registered at Modrikamen’s home address, was subsequently “put on ice”. Modrikamen stated, at the time he had sent a memo to likeminded parties in Europe and the United States, but it was not until sometime in July 2018 that Bannon got back in touch.5 The contact had been established by Nigel Farage, who told Modrikamen that Bannon would like to meet him. At a luncheon in London on July 15,5 Modrikamen stated it “clicked”, that they “absolutely shared the same convictions […] to give back to the whole world the sovereignty of the people and to be the voice of their voice, such as Trump is the voice of the ordinary man in the United States…”
. . . For more than 40 years, Canada has been a wellhead of Koch’s burgeoning fortune in oil, refineries, pipelines, petroleum products and financial trading as well as an expanding list of diverse interests — producing an estimated $115 billion in revenues last year, according to Forbes.
In Canada, Koch presides over an interlocking empire of interests, from the Alberta oil sands to fibre and fuel-additive producer INVISTA in Ontario and building products distributor Georgia-Pacific in Quebec. It employs, by its own account, 2,000 people, donates to charitable causes and supports the influential pro-oil Fraser Institute.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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