Treaty 6, Treaty 7, and Treaty 8 cover virtually all of Alberta. These are agreements with the Crown of Canada, not with the Province of Alberta.
Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms aboriginal and treaty rights. These cannot be extinguished without consent.
Independence advocates point to Alberta's high GDP and net contributor status. But what would the economics actually look like?
Mount Rushmore is many things simultaneously:
Spend time on both sides of the Saskatchewan-Dakota border, and you'll notice something: it's hard to tell you've crossed a line. The accents are similar. The landscape is identical. The concerns—weather, crops, hockey, local news—overlap considerably.
And yet, 150+ years of different governance have created real differences. This forum explores both the similarities and the distinctions.
Prairie Identity:
The same weather systems sweep across Saskatchewan and the Dakotas. The same droughts parch the land. The same floods overwhelm the same watersheds. Climate change is already affecting the northern plains, and its impacts don't stop at the 49th parallel.
Temperature:
Sports matter to prairie identity, perhaps more than in more populated regions. When your province or state is small, a team's success feels personal. And nothing illustrates the current divide quite like the different sports cultures on either side of the border.
Saskatchewan:
Today, getting from Fargo to Regina requires either:
The route crosses the border at Portal-North Portal, one of the quieter crossings on the Canada-US border. The infrastructure is adequate for current demand, but it wasn't built for integration.
Highway Infrastructure:
Education in Saskatchewan and the Dakotas serves similar populations facing similar challenges: rural school viability, teacher recruitment, preparing students for both local careers and global opportunities. But the systems have developed differently under different governance structures.
Integrating the Dakotas with Saskatchewan would require more than changing flags. It would mean transitioning from one governance system to another—from American federalism to Canadian federalism, from state government to provincial government, from one set of rights and responsibilities to another.
Saskatchewan:
Healthcare in North Dakota and South Dakota follows the American model: a mix of employer-provided insurance, individual market plans, Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for some low-income residents, and a significant uninsured population.
By the Numbers: