Lesson from Venezuela: Carney Must Make 2026 the Year of Real Security

Day 3 of the new year and we already knew the mission, even before Trump bombed Caracas. Canada stood strong against annexation in 2025. In 2026, sovereignty and climate progress must go hand in hand.

Caracas, Venezuela, January 3, 2026, MeidasTouch Network/Bluesky

I hope you’ve had a chance to rest up, catch your breath, and enjoy a break from the non-stop tumult of 2025.

Because it’s already starting up again. Less than 48 hours into the new year, we could see the scene being set for another year of 51st state fantasies and global economic chaos brought on by Donald Trump’s catastrophic narcissism. And that was before we woke up to this morning’s news that the United States had launched a “large-scale strike” on Venezuela and kidnapped its president and his wife to stand trial in New York.

The last 12 months were tough enough. In 2026, expect all of that to shift into overdrive…because it already is.

The news still unfolding in Venezuela is just the most obvious evidence, after Trump spent a good part of last year extending his influence across South and Central America. The wider context is a new national security strategy in which a politically weakened, likely literally demented Trump telegraphs his plan to assert dominance across the entire Western Hemisphere, Canada included.

Making matters worse, his treacherous allies in Alberta’s extremist fringe are all set to support him, manufacturing a likely separation referendum this year with the help of a provincial government that tilted the scales and changed the laws to make it easier for them to organize.

And in the end—from Venezuela, to Alberta, to Ukraine’s Donbas region—it’s all about oil, and Donald Trump’s delusional “energy dominance” agenda.

For the rest of us, the challenge of the year will be to confront the real-life threats we face—in climate change, the cost of living, housing, health care, nature protection, and more—while standing together to protect Canada itself as Trump’s annexation threats escalate. Through it all, in contrast to the energy and resource superpower strategy we’ve seen from federal and provincial governments, we’ll hold ourselves, each other, and our country together with practical, front-line solutions.

Solutions that build real security, while pushing down emissions and building resilient communities along the way.

The World’s Enforcer

The U.S. president has been, well, trumping up charges against now-deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, since his first term in the White House, when his government issued an indictment against Maduro in New York State in 2020. In his home country, Maduro hasn’t done much to build his own electoral credibility. As author and veteran journalist Anne Applebaum pointed out this morning on Bluesky, “there is a legitimately elected president of Venezuela: Edmundo González. He won the election in 2024.”

But that doesn’t mean anyone elected Trump the world’s enforcer, except in his own most deluded fantasy, or that anyone in their right mind would want to. (He was barely elected U.S. president, with only about 115,000 voters deciding the result for a country of 340 million, and then only with lavish donations from the oil and gas industry that now calls his tune.) Maduro was Venezuela’s problem to solve, not Trump’s. And as commenters pointed out on Applebaum’s Bluesky feed, it creates a deeply dangerous new precedent if we’re now saying a head of state can be summarily abducted to stand trial in a more powerful country, just because that other country says so.

And let’s not pretend the U.S. action is about protecting any shred of democracy, in Venezuela or anywhere else. Within hours, Trump declared that U.S. companies will now be “very strongly involved” in the country’s oil industry. Or as he said in mid-December:

They took our oil rights—we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.

Veteran U.S. climate hawk, author, and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben is out with a chart this afternoon that shows the countries of the world with the biggest supplies of oil, with Venezuela in the lead. France 24 writes that Venezuela:

…holds the world’s largest oil reserves—about 303 billion barrels, or 17% of global reserves—surpassing OPEC+ leader Saudi Arabia, according to the London-based Energy Institute. Most of its reserves are heavy oil in the Orinoco Belt, making production costly, though technically straightforward, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Which means that, in the name of “energy dominance” through an industry that is quickly entering its sunset, “Trump is declaring war on the United Nations,” former MP and Canadian Resistance leader Charlie Angus wrote this morning.

“One of the founding principles of the UN is that it is illegal to use force against another nation without UN Security Council authorization,” Angus stated. “Over the decades, the United States skirted these obligations while carefully avoiding directly challenging the legitimacy of international law and institutions.”

Now, “with the attack on Venezuela, he has upped the ante through invasion and kidnapping. Venezuela puts the world on notice, and Canada must be ready.”

‘Faith, Family, Freedom’

Yet this is the utterly corrupt regime that Alberta separatists want to bring to Canada—all in the name, dontcha know, of faith, family, and freedom.

The leading edge of the separatist effort is the self-styled Alberta Prosperity Project, which reportedly launched in 2021 and drew vocal support from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith a year later, back when she was running for the United Conservative Party leadership. DeSmog Canada documents the climate denial and conspiracy mindset that has guided APP thinking from the start.

In October, 2024, the APP bragged about “the successful completion of its second strategic visit to Washington, D.C., where the Alberta Prosperity delegation met with senior Trump administration officials to advance Alberta’s path toward full independence.” A week ago, the APP said it had “undertaken several strategic trips to Washington, D.C., to foster discussions on Alberta’s potential as an independent nation… building partnerships with our closest neighbour and largest trading partner—the United States.”

“Alberta independence meetings are happening at the highest levels in Washington with the U.S. State Department,” trumpeted one unsubstantiated social media post, amplified on the APP website. “The U.S. views a free and independent Alberta as aligned with its national security interests.” The post claimed the Trump administration was offering recognition of a supposedly sovereign Alberta, a westbound pipeline via the U.S., pension stability measures, and a $500-million line of credit to support a transition to independence.

“If this is true, which is no sure thing, then we should start to think of Alberta as Donbas,” responded veteran journalist Stephen Maher, referring to the resource-rich region of Ukraine that has been seen as the biggest geopolitical prize in the brutal invasion that Vladimir Putin launched in 2022.

With the APP’s separation petition now officially approved, “Albertans should brace themselves, because what comes next will not be a good-faith debate about economics or constitutional reality,” writes self-described democracy advocate Cole Bennett. “It will be a coordinated propaganda campaign, designed to make Alberta independence sound painless, profitable, and inevitable.” A foreseeable “flood of content” in the weeks ahead will promise 0% income tax, “instant wealth and prosperity”, “total political freedom”, and a stronger economy overnight, he says. However:

The most honest way to imagine Alberta independence is far simpler, and far more sobering:

Take your life as it exists today.
Now imagine no Canadian passport.
Imagine border checks to visit family in B.C. or Manitoba.
Imagine your pension, health care, trade agreements, currency, and mobility all thrown into uncertainty, overnight.

That is the reality the APP avoids discussing.

And yet, the APP is galivanting off to Washington and now Latin America in search of support, behaving “as if they were elected representatives of this province,” Bennett says. “They are not. In many countries, private citizens negotiating international recognition on behalf of a region would face serious legal consequences.” But in Alberta in 2026, they’re just the early expression of a looming propaganda war that “isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening.”

With friends like that in his back pocket, Trump won’t see the need to impose the Caracas treatment on Calgary, knowing that he has so many allies embedded in the provincial government and the fringe groups it actively enables. The last year has shown Canadians that economic aggression can be just as effective in its own way as outright regime change by military force. (It’s also shown us that we know how to protect ourselves.) With Smith and the Republican Party of Alberta both gleefully stepping up as a fifth column for annexation, it’s hard to see how the separatist agenda won’t be a lead priority—and through a climate lens, a lead distraction—in 2026.

Next Stop: Donbas

Maher had it right when he compared the Alberta Prosperity Project’s future vision to what Ukraine’s Donbas region is living through today.

• The Donbas was Ukraine’s economic powerhouse before Russia’s first invasion, Euronews and Al Jazeera report, home to the country’s biggest industries—including coal and other minerals, shale gas, chemicals, and farming. It accounted for 15.7% of its economic activity and 14.7% of its population before Moscow occupied the territory, triggering €80 billion in annual GDP losses from 2014 to 2021.

• With the port at Mariopol providing access to the Black Sea, the region is also a strategic and geopolitical prize, a potential launchpad for Putin to “goad the West and create havoc” if he assumed permanent control, Muskingum University political scientist Richard Arnold told Al Jazeera.

The parallels certainly aren’t precise, not with the Donbas in the middle of a bloody, years-long shooting war. But the similarities are still a bit stunning.

In each case, a more powerful country seeking to dominate a neighbour, each led by a dictator with no restraint and an apparently insatiable taste for violence.

A region with fossil fuels and other resources, ripe for taking.

A location that creates powerful geopolitical advantage—by intimidating Europe via the Black Sea, or fragmenting Canada through Alberta separation.

And in Alberta, a group of lavishly-funded turncoats looking to hand over the keys with a smile.

After its October visit to Washington, the Alberta Prosperity Project claimed that “Alberta joining the U.S. is a non-starter for the U.S. and for Alberta, which was mutually agreed.” But even if that means they aren’t actively committing treason, they’re still fools—if they believe anyone can take Trump or his minions at their word, and if they think the U.S. would need to actively acquire Alberta to deeply weaken Canada.

Making Canada Secure in 2026

Last year, Prime Minister Mark Carney took office with one job, just one job on his agenda: to safeguard Canada from Trump’s existential threat. We can and should support that motivation while loudly disagreeing with the (almost certainly doomed) fossil and resource megaproject strategy that Carney and his team have adopted in response.

After delivering the CBC Massey Lectures in 2023, Canadian-American filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician Astra Taylor republished her work in The Age of Insecurity, a book I finally had a chance to dig into over the holiday (with thanks to the colleague who recommended it—you know who you are). “What material security entails precisely is something ordinary people should have the opportunity to decide democratically,” Taylor writes. So while she was working on the book, she says she “took to asking people what security meant to them,” and this is what they came up with:

Safety

Safety nets

Having basic needs met

Food

Universal health care

Having health care

Mental health services

Community

Family

Friends

Money

$25 million, to which someone else said that only $50 million would suffice

Delusion, said a person who studies propaganda for a living

Illusion, said a former war correspondent who spent years reporting in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq

Not living in a war zone, said a Syrian refugee now residing in Montreal

Knowing someone will be there to help me if my wheelchair breaks, said my disabled sister

Housing

Having a home with no landlord

Not worrying about rent

Freedom from rent

Freedom from fear

Peace of mind

A state of being that enables creativity.

In the hours after Trump’s bombing, Taylor’s extraordinary list is a common thread that the vast majority of us share in common, whether we’re in Caracas or Calgary, Donbas or Ottawa. Almost without exception, each item on the wish list is reinforced and strengthened by a faster energy transition, foreclosed by a cascading climate emergency.

All of which tells us what we already know: that to achieve the national sovereignty goal that is still forcing itself to the top of Canada’s agenda, 2026 will have to be a year when we do more than one thing at once. In the weeks ahead, The Weekender will continue digging into what real, front-line security means in Canada in 2026, and why Carney will need all the tools in a climate solutions toolbox to sustain us against the monstrous, orange threat he’s trying to confront and contain.

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Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.

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Chart of the Week

World Visualized via McKibben/The Crucial Years

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