joyfuldinos

Twerking Dinos! On Saturday, June 27 at noon: The Joyful Dinos spoke and danced at the “Albertans for a United Canada” rally at the Alberta Legislature. There was a parallel demonstration in Calgary. The non-partisan, family-oriented rally was organized to protest separatist agendas in the province and to reaffirm support for Canada and Indigenous Treaties 6, 7 & 8.

“Let’s show Canada that Albertans are Canadians First, and that we all stand united behind Section 35 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Indigenous Treaty Rights.”

The Joyful Dinos began with a tribute to Indigenous traditional territory of Treaty 6 and the Metis Nation of Alberta Region 4. Our Manifesto was tailored to the occasion. Issued by the Ancient & Honourable Order of Inflatable Dinosaurs — Edmonton Chapter

— Land Acknowledgement —

We gather on the traditional territory of Treaty 6 and Métis Nation of Alberta Region 4, in Amiskwacîwâskahikan — Beaver Hills House — Edmonton.

The treaties were not signed with an independent Alberta. They were not signed with the United States. They were sacred covenants between First Nations and the Crown — made to last, in the words spoken at every negotiation, as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows.

Read that again. As long as the rivers flow.

The Métis were here before Alberta existed. Alberta’s borders were drawn on their homeland. The First Nations of Treaties Six, Seven, and Eight have cared for this land — its waters, its animals, its fish, its medicines — since long before this province existed. The Otipemisiwak Métis Government said it plainly in May 2026: “We were here before Canada existed.”

When settlers arrived, they became new relatives through treaty. Not conquerors. Not owners. Relatives — with rights, yes, but also with responsibilities. The responsibility to share the land. To protect the water. To leave the rivers flowing and the grass growing for the generations to come.

Every single one of us who lives on this land — Indigenous and settler alike — entered that relationship the moment we arrived, or were born here. You may not have known it. You may never have been told. But the land knew.

We Are All Treaty People.

— We Are Very Old —

We, the Joyful Dinos, are very old. We have seen ice ages, mass extinctions, and continental drift. We have watched oceans rise and mountains crumble. We have outlasted every king, emperor, pharaoh, and monarch who ever drew breath on this planet. Every single one. So we know what it looks like when someone thinks they cannot fall.

We did not survive 165 million years to watch a provincial government contaminate the water, strip the mountains for coal, starve the universities and schools, ban the books, abandon the sick, exile the trans kids, gerrymander the boundaries, cancel disability benefits, roll back reproductive rights, and blame the whole mess on the people who just got here.

We show up in joy — not because the stakes are low, but because joy is how movements breathe. Joy is the refusal to let what is being done to us define how we resist it. We believe that dancing absurdly in the face of a serious crisis is not a failure to understand the stakes. It is a refusal to let them take that from us too. If we can’t dance, we don’t want to be part of your revolution.

— On Separation —

We are dinosaurs. We know a manufactured crisis when we see one. The referendum is real — October 19, 2026 — but the movement behind it is not what it claims to be. Support for separation has fallen from twenty-eight percent in January 2026 to eighteen percent in June 2026. Sixty percent of Albertans would vote No to the official referendum question. Sixty-seven percent would choose to stay in Canada when asked simply: leave or stay.

This is not a movement. It is manufactured frustration — and someone is manufacturing it deliberately.

We know who. Preston Manning — the godfather of this movement — said it himself in 2021: the threat of separation is a lever. Not a destination. A lever to extract concessions, accumulate power, and reshape Canada into a neoliberal replica of the United States. What does that mean in plain language? Lower wages and no collective bargaining. Private healthcare you pay for yourself. Your pension managed for profit rather than people. The gutting of every public institution that stands between you and the market. The 51st state — not in name, but in everything that matters.

Premier Smith herself has now admitted the cost of separation would be at least four hundred billion dollars. The separatist movement had been promising thirty-seven billion. That is not a rounding error. That is a lie.

Separation will not save Alberta. It will make us a small, land-locked jurisdiction dependent on a very large country to the south that is currently eating its own institutions for breakfast and wouldn’t notice Alberta in the wreckage.

The shark does not need to chase you. It just needs to wait at the cave entrance.

The question is not whether you can live entirely outside the system you are critiquing. Nobody can. The question is whether your presence inside it gives you more power to change it — or less.

Separation is a rupture from the federal system of government. The moment you leave, you lose your seat at the table where the decisions are made. You lose the courts that have protected your rights. You lose the pension that survived every recession. You lose the currency, the treaties, the trade agreements, and the constitutional protections you have taken for granted your whole life.

If you want to be powerless, separate.

And when the separation petition moved forward without consulting First Nations or Métis peoples at all, the government went to court — and lost. Justice Shaina Leonard quashed the petition in May 2026, finding that the Government of Alberta had a duty to consult and failed to discharge it. You cannot separate from a relationship you never honoured in the first place.

The leader of the Bloc Québécois — a man who knows something about separation — looked at Alberta and said: to separate, you need a culture of your own. “I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies.”

We are dinosaurs. We have a suggestion.

Alberta’s culture is not oil. It is Corb Lund singing This Is My Prairie because he means every word. It is k.d. lang from Consort making the whole world stop. It is Jordan Abel winning the Governor General’s Award for poetry that tears open language to find what colonialism buried inside it. It is Suzette Mayr winning the Giller Prize for a novel about a queer Black man on a train stalled in the Rocky Mountains, invisible and alive and dreaming. It is the Métis fiddle and the round dance and ceremonies that have been happening on this land since long before Alberta had a name. It is jazz and orchestras and street murals and manifestos read aloud by inflatable dinosaurs in the rain.

That is Alberta’s culture. It did not come from a pipeline. It will not leave with one.

Separation is not Alberta’s declaration of independence. It is the alibi for its surrender.

UCP DESTROYS what Albertans build — schools, hospitals, pensions, courts, watersheds, and the trust of newcomers.
ALBERTA BUILDS. We are here to say so.