Meet Canada’s Wild West secessionists

Scott Russell doesn’t much look like a revolutionary. A 40-something dad, he’s dressed like he’s headed to work. I meet him on a bridge overlooking an Edmonton freeway. Beneath us, drivers in 18-wheeler trucks zoom by, blasting their horns in support like motorised tubas. Russell waves an Alberta flag, alongside about a dozen other protesters doing the same. Like him, they seem less like rebels and more like archetypal working-class Albertans, with loose-fitting jeans, gritty ballcaps and pragmatic phrases like “git‘r’done”. Yet Russell tells me that, when the day comes, he’ll vote for his province to leave Canada. “I have sworn eternal resistance upon all forms of tyranny against men,” he says, “and the federal government is tyrannical.”