Calgary lawyer Donna Purcell, KC, has spent recent weeks using LinkedIn to argue that Alberta separatism deserves an open public debate — and to report that she cannot find anyone willing to have one with her.
Purcell is the founder of Donna Purcell QC Law, which has offices across Alberta. Her circulated biography describes her as a legal-technology advocate who has pushed for two decades to move the justice system online, a 2021 graduate of Harvard’s Business Analytics Program, a Top 25 Most Influential Lawyer selection by Canadian Lawyer Magazine in 2021, and a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal in 2025.
I can barely find a single person to be the face of this movement.
In one post, she asks Canadians to “wake up and consider” why the country and Alberta’s separatist movement “should not get along.” She writes that she has “asked endless people” on behalf of separatists for a response and received none. Her prescription is “global rule of law and diplomacy, local focus,” and she questions whether “people in power read the news.” The framing treats separatism less as a settled political position than as a diplomatic failure — a conversation that has not happened rather than an argument that has been lost.
A second post sets that case against a list of pressures she says Canada cannot ignore: tariffs, “global warming,” a change to international-student policy she says takes effect January 1, and a shortage of health-care workers. She adds the “AI Revolution and AI data centres” to the list, casting the technology as another source of public stress rather than a remedy for it. She also refers to “300,000 votes” found “in normal times,” without specifying an election or jurisdiction.
Running through both posts is the same frustration. Purcell writes that she “can barely find a single person to be the face of this movement” willing to debate the issue publicly. “It is so unwise that we can’t all just get along,” she writes.
That absence is the substance of her argument. Alberta separatist sentiment recurs reliably in provincial politics, but Purcell’s account describes it as something asserted more often than defended — a position with supporters but, by her experience, no spokesperson prepared to take questions on it.
Purcell has not named the officials or separatist figures she approached, and has not identified the election behind the vote figure she cites. Whether the debate she wants would change any minds is an open question. Her argument is that it has not yet been attempted.