Alberta Premier Danielle Smith on Thursday set the date for a referendum deciding whether the province will move to separate from Canada.The provincial vote is scheduled to take place on Oct. 19, and will mark the first time in Canadian history that a province other than Quebec has put the question of separation to the public. If residents greenlight the measure, it will trigger the legal process for Canada’s fourth most populous province to hold a second binding vote on separation at a later date.“It’s time to have a vote, understand the will of Albertans on this subject, and move on,” Smith said during a televised address.
The development comes after separatist group Stay Free Alberta said that they’d collected more than 301,000 signatures in support of their campaign. That’s a fraction of Alberta’s total population, which sits at 5 million people as of January.
Many in the western Canadian province feel they’re neglected by Ottawa, as it is by far the largest net contributor to the federal government, yet gets little direct funding in return. The Canadian federal government disperses more funding to provinces and territories that don’t have as significant an income of their own in a process called equalization. The process addresses “fiscal disparities among provinces,” according to the government.
