Should Alberta Leave Canada?
For more than a century, the Prairie West has powered Canada's economy while wrestling with a persistent question: who truly governs the federation?
In this deeply researched and analytically rigorous work, Elias Trent examines the structural foundations of Canada's political architecture - from the absorption of Rupert's Land and the Red River Resistance to modern equalization formulas, Senate imbalance, carbon pricing battles, and demographic divergence.
This is not a book of slogans.
It is a structural audit.
Drawing on constitutional law, fiscal data, demographic trends, and comparative federal systems in the United States, Germany, and Australia, Power, Sovereignty, and the Future of Confederation asks difficult questions:
• Were Alberta and Saskatchewan integrated as equal partners - or incorporated on unequal terms?
• Does the current structure of federal taxation and representation adequately reflect Prairie contribution and growth?
• Can meaningful decentralization occur within Confederation?
• What would independence actually cost - in debt, trade, currency, and geopolitical risk?
• Could U.S. statehood ever be viable?
• And how do treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty reshape every version of this debate?
Rather than offering romantic nationalism or reflex federalism, Trent models three pathways forward: structural reform, negotiated independence, or continental realignment. Each is evaluated through hard institutional analysis - not grievance rhetoric.
At stake is more than Western alienation. The Prairie question exposes deeper tensions within a federation built in the nineteenth century and tested in the twenty-first: demographic imbalance, fiscal redistribution, energy transition, and constitutional rigidity.
Canada stands at a crossroads.
Whether it adapts - or fractures - will depend on whether its institutions can withstand honest scrutiny.
This book invites that scrutiny.
