Issued by the Ancient & Honourable Order of Inflatable Dinosaurs — Edmonton Chapter
Versions of this manifesto were delivered at:
- No Kings (or Queens) · Alberta Legislature, Edmonton, March 2026
- Earth Day Celebration, Little Italy, Edmonton, April 2026
- AFL Fight Back Rally, Edmonton, May 29, 2026
- Say No to Alberta Separation, Alberta Legislature, June 25, 2026
— Land Acknowledgement —
We Are All Treaty People.
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 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.
— What We Know —
UCP DESTROYSwhat Albertans build — schools, hospitals, pensions, courts, watersheds, and the trust of newcomers.
ALBERTA BUILDS. We are here to say so.
We are dinosaurs. We know a scapegoat when we see one.
We are dinosaurs. We know what happens when you build your whole world on one thing and refuse to evolve. We know what fossil fuel dependence looks like from the inside.
We are dinosaurs. We know what happens when you defund, fragment, and privatize a healthcare system. We have seen the corruption. We have seen the contracts. We have seen who profits and who waits.
We are dinosaurs. We know that when a government bans books, it is not protecting children. It is protecting itself from questions children might ask. “A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004
We are dinosaurs. We know that trans kids are not a threat to Alberta. They are Albertans. And the Notwithstanding Clause is not a tool for governance. It is a weapon — pointed, right now, at the most vulnerable.
We are dinosaurs, and we know they are quietly making women’s control of our bodies meaningless by removing access. A right you cannot reach is not a right. It is a risk.
We are dinosaurs, and even we know that Danielle Smith accepting a free private jet from Saudi Arabia while rolling back women’s rights at home is not a coincidence. It is a value system.
We are dinosaurs, and even we know that flying to Florida to pose with MAGA figureheads while invoking the Notwithstanding Clause at home is not leadership. It is audition.
We are dinosaurs, and even we know that a referendum question designed to confuse — a referendum about whether to hold a referendum, at the cost of more than three million dollars to the taxpayer, with an anti-immigration question attached like an anchor — is not democracy. It is a trap.
We are dinosaurs: separatism will not save you. Separatism is not sovereignty. It is surrender with better branding. No kings. No queens. We predate every one of them. They don’t end well.
— The Will of Albertans —
We are dinosaurs. We know what it looks like when a government stops listening to the people it serves.
Fifty-five percent of Albertans oppose withdrawing from the Canada Pension Plan. Opposition is strongest among women — eighty-one percent — and those over fifty-five — sixty-six percent. The people who depend on it most.
They want to replace the RCMP with a provincial police force answerable only to them — will this be ICE North? They want to withdraw from the CPP and hand your retirement to the same government that dismantled Alberta Health Services, defunded Legal Aid, and cut disability benefits. They want to redraw the electoral map through a UCP-dominated committee with no public hearings, so that the votes of Albertans count a little less next time.
We are dinosaurs. We have watched governments mistake power for permission before. It never ends well.
— The Land Remembers —
We are dinosaurs. We are, quite literally, the land. Our bodies — and the bodies of every creature that lived and died in this ecosystem across hundreds of millions of years — became the oil beneath your feet. Alberta’s entire economic identity is built on compressed ancient life. We are not a resource. We are a relationship — between the land, the water, the creatures, and the long slow time it takes to make something irreplaceable.
It took the earth three hundred million years to make the oil. You will burn through it in one century. We are dinosaurs. We have done the math.
Now someone is proposing to disappear our water.
Three quarters of the proposed AI data centres in Alberta are planned in regions already facing extreme water stress. Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley near Grande Prairie — touted as the world’s largest AI data centre — has been approved to withdraw six million cubic metres of water per year from the Smoky River to cool its servers. That is the amount that flows over Niagara Falls every thirty-five minutes. Gone. Every year.
In Olds, Alberta, a $10 billion data centre proposal was rejected — not on its merits, but on paperwork. The company will reapply.
These centres run on natural gas. Alberta sits on one of the deepest natural gas reserves on earth. The plan is to burn through that too — as fast as possible, with as little review as possible. One data centre site alone would produce enough emissions to erase every gain Alberta made by phasing out coal-fired electricity. Every single gain. Gone.
A report from the United Nations University (June 3, 2026) puts the global picture in stark terms: by 2030, AI data centres are projected to consume 9.3 trillion litres of water annually — enough to meet the basic drinking water needs of 1.3 billion people for more than a year. The UN University rector put it plainly: “Though often described as weightless and virtual, the reality of AI is profoundly physical. Behind every prompt, image or video lies a growing infrastructure of energy systems, water withdrawals, land use, mineral extraction and electronic waste.”
We went through the oil in a century. Will we go through the water in a decade?
The UCP has renewed coal mining leases in the Rocky Mountain headwaters — the same mountains that feed the rivers flowing into the prairies, into Saskatchewan, into communities downstream who depend on that water to live. They have stripped environmental review from both the coal leases and the Wonder Valley water licence. They dismissed the appeal of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation — the people who have lived beside the Smoky River since long before the treaties — without meaningful consultation.
The treaties promised the rivers would keep flowing. This government is treating that promise as a bureaucratic inconvenience.
We are dinosaurs. We know what it looks like when a species decides the land exists to be consumed rather than cared for. We have seen how that story ends. We are the ending. Extinct.
— For Everyone Who Loves This Land —
We are dinosaurs. We do not care whether you live in Strathcona or Nanton. We do not care whether you voted UCP or NDP or have never voted at all. We care about the water.
The ranchers of the Oldman River headwaters know what we know. They have been saying it for years, to packed community halls, to courts, to anyone who will listen: open-pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountain headwaters is not a plan for Alberta’s future. It is a plan to poison the water that feeds the cattle, the crops, the communities, and the people downstream — all the way to Saskatchewan.
“Once they destroy that, we can never get it back,” said Mac Blades of the Rocking P Ranch near Nanton. “There is no reclaiming an open-pit mine.”
Corb Lund — rancher, Albertan, the man who wrote “This Is My Prairie” because he meant it — delivered an estimated 200,000 signatures to Elections Alberta in June 2026 to force the province to act on coal in the Rockies. Rural and urban. Boots and bike lanes. Cowboys and librarians. All of them saying the same thing: not the headwaters. Not the mountains. Not the water.
That is not a left-wing position. That is not a right-wing position. That is the position of anyone who has ever stood in a river, drunk from a well, watered a field or garden, or watched a child swim in a lake and thought: this is not theirs to sell.
The UCP is not protecting Alberta’s economy. It is selling Alberta’s future — to foreign coal companies, to American data billionaires, to anyone willing to pay for the right to extract and leave.
Urban and rural. Indigenous and settler. Farmer and teacher. Rancher and librarian. Trucker and nurse. Union member and gig worker. Student and elder. Cowboy and cyclist. Every body and ability. Every neighbour. Every family. We are all downstream.
The question is whether we figure that out before the rivers stop flowing.
— 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.
— What Did Not Destroy Us —
We did not go extinct because of immigrants.
We did not go extinct because of trans kids.
We did not go extinct because of books.
We did not go extinct because of women who make their own decisions.
We did not go extinct because of people who came here from somewhere else and loved this place.
We did not go extinct because of democracy.
We did not go extinct because we stood together.
We went extinct because the conditions for life were destroyed — and nobody did anything about it. Separation is the asteroid.
— Today —
To everyone here: you built this province. Teachers and nurses, farmers and neighbours, newcomers and people whose families have been here for generations. Your labour, your care, your presence is in every hospital, every school, every library, every river that still runs clean. Every book they ban, someone here has read to a child. Every cut they make, someone here absorbs it. We see you. We see what you are carrying.
To the Forever Canadians here: Alberta is Canada. It always has been. We are not leaving.
You are not the 51st state. You are the fourth province. You have courts, and a Charter, and a legislature, and a vote, and each other. You have teachers who know how children learn. You have nurses who stayed anyway. You have newcomers who chose this place on purpose. You have First Nations peoples whose Treaty rights are Canadian rights — rights that were never surrendered to Canada to be handed to Washington.
Alberta: you still have time. Don’t be us.
The UCP destroys. Alberta builds. We are enormous and joyful, and we are not going anywhere.
Defenders of Water, Mountains, Libraries, Women, Newcomers, Teachers, Nurses, Trans Kids, People with Disabilities, Electoral Integrity, the Earth, Alberta, Canada, and the Generally Liveable
— The Joyful Dinos, Edmonton Chapter, 2026
🦕 🦕 🦕
We outlasted the asteroid. We can outlast the UCP.
Joy is how we fight back. Truth is what we carry.
Facts don’t go extinct.
Text 780-710-2675 · #JoyfulDinos · #AlbertaIsCanada · #NoKings · #WaterIsLife · #yeg · #abpolitics · #ForeverCanadian
🦕 🦕 🦕
Sources & References
Polling & Referendum
Angus Reid Institute. “Three-in-five say they’d vote in October to stay, but half say the question is confusing.” May 25, 2026. angusreid.org
Ipsos / Global News. “Alberta separatism support drops sharply from early 2026.” June 2026. globalnews.ca
Léger poll. “73 per cent of Albertans say Alberta should remain part of Canada.” May–June 2026.
Abacus Data / CBC News. “Rock solid majority opposed to Alberta independence.” March 6, 2026. cbc.ca
Angus Reid Institute. Alberta CPP polling: 55% oppose APP; 81% of women oppose; 66% of those 55+ oppose.
Danielle Smith on separation cost. CBC News, June 2, 2026: Smith admitted cost of separation would be at least $400 billion, compared to $37 billion claimed by separatist groups.
Referendum Structure & Dangers
Climenhaga, David. “Preston Manning’s Not-So-Secret Game Plan.” The Tyee, June 8, 2026. thetyee.ca
Climenhaga, David. “Albertans Want to Stay. But Smith’s Referendum Is Still Dangerous.” The Tyee, June 11, 2026. thetyee.ca
Elections Alberta voters list breach: data of 2.9 million Albertans compromised; list reported in hands of U.S.-based, MAGA-affiliated actors. Reported widely, 2025–2026.
Blanchet, Yves-François (Bloc Québécois leader). “I am not certain that oil and gas qualifies to define a culture.” iPolitics, May 2025.
Legal Decisions & Indigenous Sources
Otipemisiwak Métis Government. Statement on separation petition court decision. May 13, 2026. albertametis.com
Justice Shaina Leonard. Court of King’s Bench of Alberta. Decision quashing the separation petition for failure to consult Indigenous peoples. May 13, 2026.
First Nations Chiefs — Treaties 6, 7, 8. Joint statements on separation and Treaty rights. 2025–2026.
Treaty language: “as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows” — standard formulation from Treaties 6, 7, and 8 negotiations, 1870s–1900s.
Epp, Roger. We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008.
KAIROS Canada. Treaty people framing and responsibilities. kairosweb.ca
Canada’s History magazine. “Gakina Gidagwi’igoomin Anishinaabewiyang: We Are All Treaty People.” April 2018.
AI Data Centres & Water
United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). “The Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints.” June 3, 2026. unu.edu/inweh. Reported by AP, Time, PBS NewsHour, BNN Bloomberg.
Canada’s National Observer. Investigation into Alberta data centres and water stress. March 2026.
Wonder Valley / AER water licence. Smoky River withdrawal: 6 million cubic metres per year. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation appeal dismissed. Grande Prairie, Alberta.
Olds, Alberta data centre ($10 billion proposal): AUC application rejected on procedural grounds. Developer eligible to reapply. 2025–2026.
Coal Mining & Rancher Sources
CBC News / Global News. “Corb Lund delivers Water Not Coal petition — estimated 200,000 signatures — to Elections Alberta.” June 2026.
Mac Blades, Rocking P Ranch, Nanton, Alberta. Quoted in The Western Producer, “Alberta ranchers resist plans to ease coal mining rules.”
Rancher Laura Laing. Quoted in The Tyee, January 2025. thetyee.ca
Canada’s National Observer. Town hall coverage, Alberta coal policy. June 2025.
Alberta Culture — Writers Referenced
Abel, Jordan. Queer Nisga’a poet and novelist. Associate Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta. Winner: Griffin Poetry Prize (Injun); Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (The Place of Scraps); Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, 2024 (Empty Spaces).
Mayr, Suzette. Novelist, Professor of Creative Writing, Department of English, University of Calgary. Winner: Giller Prize, 2022 (The Sleeping Car Porter); Georges Bugnet Award; City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Fellow, Royal Society of Canada.
Lund, Corb. Country musician and rancher, southern Alberta. “This Is My Prairie.” Founder, Water Not Coal campaign.
lang, k.d. Singer, born in Consort, Alberta.
Quoted Works
Le Guin, Ursula K. “A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.” The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala Publications, 2004, p. 197.
Note on Statistics
Separation polling figures are moving rapidly as Alberta approaches the October 19, 2026 referendum. All polling numbers cited here reflect data available as of June 12, 2026. Figures should be verified before each public use of this document.
JoyfulDinos_Manifesto_Consolidated · Joyful Dinos, Edmonton Chapter
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