Separatists in Alberta, Canada, are ramping up efforts to trigger an independence vote. According to a Reuters report yesterday, canvassers are hoping to collect 177,732 signatures by May 2—the 10 percent registered voters threshold required for a citizen-led referendum.

• Opinion polls indicate that roughly 1 in 5 Albertans want to leave Canada, so obtaining the required signatures should be easy and Albertans will then likely vote in an independence referendum later this year.

U.S. interest: Jeff Rath, the spokesman for the Alberta Prosperity Project group, has confirmed that he and other activists met with U.S. State Department officials in Washington to get a sense of how the U.S. administration would respond to an independent Alberta.

• Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has weighed in on the separatist movement, saying the western Canadian province is a “natural partner for the U.S.”

Strategy: Bessent and other officials in the Trump administration know Alberta has almost no chance of seceding from Canada this year. Canada’s national legislature in Ottawa must rule that a clear majority of Albertans want independence before negotiations can even begin.

• Yet the mere existence of a provincial independence movement is an opportunity for President Donald Trump to employ divide-and-conquer strategies in his negotiations with Canada over tariffs and other trade issues.

Alberta’s trade is heavily oriented toward the United States; so heavily oriented, in fact, that it exports to and imports from the U.S. significantly more than with the rest of Canada.

• As international trade becomes more combative, it is in Alberta’s best interest to side with Washington over Ottawa.

Prophecy says: This is significant considering Bible prophecies about economic sieges and civil unrest in the end-time nations of Israel (primarily the U.S. and British Commonwealth nations). In his book Ezekiel—The End-Time Prophet, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains Bible prophecies that these nations will descend into civil war as an alliance of Asian, European and South American nations cut them out of world trade.

We can already see the fault lines of this civil war developing as liberal and conservative regions of both the U.S. and Canada start aligning against adversaries within their own nations.