Skip to content 
Listen to this article
Estimated 3 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Misunderstandings may occur. We work with our partners to continuously review and improve results.
Alberta’s referendum question on secession drew more interest from voters than the province’s last general election, according to official results released Thursday.
The final count of the referendum vote has been released, 10 days after the vote.
More than 2.2 million ballots were cast for the secession question, representing a 70.4 percent voter turnout — nearly 10 percentage points higher than for the 2023 provincial election.
Albertans rejected the proposal to hold a second, binding referendum on secession, with 74.9 percent voting against the proposal, while narrowly voting on the five immigration questions and the four constitutional questions.
Alberta voters overwhelmingly voted to “remain in Canada” in the Oct. 19 referendum. CBC’s Helen Pike maps the ridings that favored Option 2 to explore separation, and the results may surprise you.
A total of 22.1 million votes were cast on the 10 questions, including rejected and rejected ballots. The turnout for all questions was around 70 percent. (Voters could choose which questions they wanted to vote on.)
The turnout for the other nine questions came as a surprise to Mount Royal University political scientist Lori Williams.
“I think there was a sense that there might be a big difference between the separation question participation rate and the responses to the other nine questions,” Williams said.
“Even though these questions were complex, those who showed up and didn’t leave the line-up, who came through the trouble of actually doing the mail-in or the primaries or voting on referendum day, almost all of them went through these questions.”
But with that high turnout came slim majorities for the five questions that passed.
The immigration question passed with between 51.7 and 58 percent support. Williams says these results are “not really a strong mandate” for Premier Danielle Smith.
“It didn’t give the government the authority to take the fight to Ottawa in the way they had hoped,” Williams said.
Mount Royal University political scientist Lori Williams on October 29, 2026.(Chelsey Mutter/CBC)
The other 4 questions about the constitutional reform failed, between 42.4 and 47.2 percent voted for it.
Williams said internal polls and focus groups have led the province to expect a much higher success rate on the questions, and the province “may be more reluctant to go ahead with a referendum” in the future because the results look so different than expected.
“That has to be a bit of a cautionary note,” she said.
Elections Alberta to review how the referendum went
The official numbers vary by less than one percentage point from the unofficial results that have been available since Sunday.
Counting all those ballots by hand took about five days, with unofficial results finalized well beyond the 48-hour deadline set in Alberta’s referendum legislation.
The CBC’s Jason Markusoff on what led to votes being counted by hand instead of tabulators.
An Elections Alberta spokesperson told CBC News that the provincial agency is not yet ready to discuss the lessons from the tumultuous process, and that it will “do reviews, debriefs, data analysis and data entry” in the coming months.
The agency said the referendum has the highest number of ballots to be counted by hand in any Canadian election event, to its knowledge.
