Good morning, everyone.

Jeffrey Rath, the most strident leader of Alberta’s independence movement, has been saying for weeks that he had met with U.S. government officials to discuss his plans to cleave the province from Canada.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail a week ago, he said that he and his colleagues have twice met with U.S. State Department officials and that they’re planning a February meeting with the U.S. Treasury.

While Rath said as a private citizen he had no obligation to share any details of what was discussed or who specifically he met, he hinted that it was high up the food chain.

“When I’m saying we’re meeting at the highest level of the U.S. government, we are meeting at the highest levels of the U.S. government,” Rath told The Globe last Friday.

But this week, after not commenting when previously asked, the U.S. State Department confirmed the meetings in a statement attributed to a senior official who was not named:

“The Department regularly meets with civil society types. As is typical in routine meetings such as these, no commitments were made,” they wrote.

Rath has been publicly talking about a US$500-billion line of credit to help get an independent Alberta on its feet, but said that has been purely exploratory.

And as for joining the U.S., he said that’s a no-go.

He said State Department officials told him U.S. statehood is an “impossibility” because the U.S. Senate would never vote in favour of it.

“It’s not going to happen. We had a conversation about that. It was very frank. There’s no agreement because we are private citizens. We do not have the authority to agree to anything,” he said.

It was these meetings with U.S. officials that set the news cycle on fire on Thursday.

B.C. Premier David Eby got things going when on his way into meetings in Ottawa with Canada’s premiers and Prime Minister Mark Carney he weighed in on Rath and his cadre of separatists.

“To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there’s an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is ‘treason,’” he said.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith responded in the postmeeting press conference saying she hoped that the U.S. government would respect Canada’s sovereignty.

She couched those remarks in saying that many Albertans have felt their province was “relentlessly attacked” over the last decade under the Justin Trudeau government and that polls show that as many as 30 per cent of Albertans have “lost hope.”

“I’m not going to demonize or marginalize a million of my fellow citizens when they’ve got legitimate grievances,” Smith said.

The Premier, who met with the U.S. ambassador during her Ottawa visit, later said she would have her representative in Washington discuss the matter of sovereignty with U.S. officials.

Albertans may be asked to make a decision on independence later this year if separatist group Stay Free Alberta can collect the nearly 178,000 signatures required to force a vote on the issue.

Concerns have been raised about foreign interference in that process, especially after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent weighed in on Alberta separatism last week, calling the Western province “a natural partner for the U.S.”

Elections Alberta, which is responsible for ensuring the integrity of any provincial referendum, believes it can handle any issues, particularly when it comes to foreign funding.

“We believe the team is correctly funded and staffed and, as a result, able to address any potential uptick in complaint and/or investigative activity,” Steve Kaye, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said in a statement to The Globe last week.

This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.