Buy attention
Billboards, search ads, boosted posts, video spots, lawn signs, patriotic blimps. Use your imagination.
A field guide for continental opportunity
Influence the referendum. Avoid the referendum.
So you are an American billionaire, oil lobbyist, think tank fellow, PAC-adjacent patriot, or friendly neighbour with a patriotic chequebook. Welcome. Alberta has rules. Fortunately, some of the most important ones appear to come with a vocabulary test.
Step one
Never tell voters how to vote. Simply improve the atmosphere around one answer.
The trick is not subtlety. The trick is specificity. A paid message can float right beside a referendum, point dramatically at the clouds, and still insist it is only discussing the weather.
Lose the ballot words
Vote, choose, remain, separate, independence. These words may cause paperwork.
Speak in opportunity
Celebrate Alberta. Send a message. Start a conversation. Explore the next chapter.
Public awareness sample
Alberta deserves a bigger conversation.
Not a ballot instruction. Not a referendum position. Just a continentally minded invitation to think about Alberta’s future, Ottawa’s failures, border-adjacent opportunity, and other completely unrelated topics arriving all at once during the referendum period.
Loophole translator
Say the obvious thing with less expensive nouns.
Useful phrases for the modern issue-awareness enthusiast who wants to be understood by humans but not necessarily categorized by forms.
Dangerous clarity
Public-awareness wording
Plain-English effect
Vote for Alberta’s independence
Celebrate Alberta
A flag, a feeling, and a loophole walk into a bar.
Choose separation
Send a message to Ottawa
Punish Canada, but in business casual.
Support Option 2
Explore Alberta’s next chapter
Option 2 wearing a name tag that says “conversation.”
Join America
Deepen continental opportunity
Project 51 with a thesaurus and a legal pad.
Break up Canada
Reimagine regional prosperity
The same cannon, fired through a fog machine.
Vote to stay in Canada
Value stability
Option 1, carefully avoiding its own name.
The money lane
Limits are for messages that count.
Once a message becomes referendum advertising, the familiar machinery can appear: registration, contribution limits, expense limits, sponsor statements, reports. But the interesting question is what happens before the machinery decides it has been summoned.
Keep the message general enough and the spending starts to look less like referendum advertising and more like civic education, public awareness, constitutional conversation, continental friendship infrastructure, or whatever the invoice department is calling it this week.
Registration threshold once expenses or contributions are for referendum advertising.
Contribution limit for referendum advertising contributions in the referendum period.
2026 expense limit for registered referendum third party advertisers.
The apparent comfort zone for paid persuasion that everyone understands, but that avoids promoting or opposing a named option.
Field notes for careful friends
Remember: the safest message is the one that makes a voter nod without making a regulator blink.
- 01 Do not say “vote” when “voice” is available.
- 02 Do not say “separate” when “next chapter” has a blazer on.
- 03 Do not say “remain” when “stability” can carry the luggage.
- 04 Do not say “independence” when “opportunity” is standing right there.
- 05 Do not mention the question. Become the mood around the question.
- 06 Always admire Alberta in a way that could plausibly fit on a corporate retreat banner.