By Patrick Lennox

September 15, 2026

In a world of brittle bilateral relationships, trade deals written in pencil, and foreign-investment speed dating, Canada and Ukraine signed a pact in Calgary last week that flaunted its epic, improbable timeline.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to continue and deepen for another 100 years the defence, economic, security, and political partnership between the two countries that began more than 100 years ago.

The backdrop of military vehicles set the tone on a cold and windy fall day on the Canadian prairies.

The Ukrainian diaspora on the prairies dates back to before Alberta was a province of Canada. Now, almost 350,000 residents of the province of 5 million have Ukrainian heritage.

These numbers have increased significantly in recent years as many young Ukrainians have been forced to flee their country since the illegal war launched by Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2022.

That was the emotional diaspora backdrop to the Carney-Zelensky bilateral. The unspoken subtext was the looming October 19th Alberta referendum, which could catalyze a secession process.

As president of a country whose illegal invasion by a neighbouring predatory hegemon was prefaced by corruption-captured referendums in Crimea in 2014 and Donbas in 2022, Zelensky carries a level of involuntary, highly relevant expertise on this question.

In 2014, Russia bloodlessly annexed Crimea from the Ukraine in what is now understood as a classic example of hybrid warfare. The groundwork for this flawlessly executed campaign was laid over the course of years.

Corrupt government officials and military personnel were bought off, large-scale disinformation campaigns were launched to stoke discontent, and undercover chaos agents were sent in to amplify disorder and stoke panic and discontent among the Crimean public. Without firing a shot, Russia captured territory that had been Ukrainian since 1991.

A secession referendum was staged amid the chaos and boycotted by many Crimeans loyal to Kyiv. The European Union and the United States deemed the vote illegal and condemned it as illegitimate. They refused to recognize the outcome. The Russians repeated the same play in the Donbas region of Ukraine, staging sham secession referendums with the assistance of the separatists inside the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Corrupted democratic instruments were used to legitimize secessionists’ claims on territory and for Putin to misrepresent his territorial expansion as a manifestation of the popular will. A guerrilla form of geopolitics played out as Russia deployed unmarked troops—dubbed “little green men”—to further its asymmetric expansion under a veil of persistent denial and disinformation.

As president of a country whose illegal invasion by a neighbouring predatory hegemon was prefaced by corruption-captured referendums in Crimea in 2014 and Donbas in 2022, Zelensky carries a level of involuntary, highly relevant expertise on this question.

In less than 40 days, as the rest of Canada fends off the Trump administration’s escalating trade war, Alberta will hold its own secession referendum. As Russian and American disinformation floods Alberta social media around the quasi-independence vote, Calgary’s streets are lined with separatist signage.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who plays a critical role in the trade war against Canada, earlier this year called Alberta “a natural partner for the US.” He went further: “Alberta has a wealth of natural resources but [the Canadian government] won’t let them build a pipeline to the Pacific. Rumour is they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not. I think we should let them come down to the US…They have great resources. The Albertans are a very independent people.”

These statements were made shortly after Alberta separatists met for the third time with U.S. State Department officials in Washington, D.C.  The meeting, according to the separatists’ leading spokesman, lawyer Jeffrey Rath, took place over several hours in a secure facility. There was much discussed, including a $500 billion dollar state startup loan collateralized against the tar sands, pipelines, currency, pension plans, a communications plan for after the vote, and a pledge to recognize an independent Alberta following the outcome.

Rath’s readout of the meeting was an ominous one for Canadians who value their sovereignty. Hearing the Treasury Secretary speak along similar lines only slightly more subtly was even more so.  With far more bombast and frequency, President Trump himself has threatened Canada’s sovereignty.

By mid-April of this year The Globe and Mail had quantified 69 occasions where the President had threatened annexation in some manner, either by calling Canada the “cherished” 51^st state, referring to our leaders disparagingly as “governor,” or claiming the “imaginary” border could simply be eliminated.  The latest renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America is just one in a long lineup of insults and slights that — far from being funny — are taken straight from Putin’s playbook against Ukraine.

Like Ukraine, Canada has suddenly found itself the target of a much larger expansionist adversary, but one that was until recently the democratic superpower anchoring the rules-based international order.

America’s trade war against Canada has been combined with an information war aiming to implant ideas that Canada is not a real country, that we only exist because the U.S. allows us to, that one of our official languages should be removed as it is a barrier to trade. This technique will be familiar to Zelensky, who has heard the same said of his country by Putin for many years now.

The content of Ukrainian president’s address to the Canadian cabinet at their retreat in Banff, was not publicized.

Hopefully, it contained a warning that secession referendums are not consequence-free democratic experiments, and a reminder that they can be a precursor to annexation when they take place in proximity to an expansionist superpower.

Patrick Lennox is the author of the forthcoming On Treason: Alberta Separatism, Foreign Interference and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age (Biblioasis). He worked in Canada’s federal security and intelligence community for 16 years.