Fact File: No evidence Carney threatened emergency powers against Alberta separatists

“I just received a call from a Stelco employee in Hamilton, Ontario,” reads an April 14 X post from Jeffrey Rath, a prominent figure in the Alberta separatist movement.

Rath claimed the Stelco employee told him that Carney visited the steel plant on March 29 and was asked what he would do in response to an Alberta independence vote. Rath said he was told that Carney replied: “There will be no Alberta independence because I’ll invoke the Emergencies Act.”

The Emergencies Act is a law that gives the federal government extra powers for a limited amount of time during a “national emergency.” The Liberal government under Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, invoked the Emergencies Act in February 2022 to quell protests in Ottawa and at key border points.

Videos shared online following Rath’s claim show Carney speaking to steelworkers. In one video shared on X, someone is heard asking, “What about the Alberta independence referendum?”

Carney seemingly replies, “Something that my government is going to do is to use the emergency powers of the federal government.”

Another clip shared to X from a different angle appears to show Carney saying the same thing, before changing topic and saying, “I just want to reflect for a minute why the challenges we have with the Americans, uh, that have made it more acute.”

THE FACTS
 

A keyword search of “Carney,” “steel,” and “Hamilton” on Google shows the prime minister attended a March 29 event at Hamilton steel fabricator ArcelorMittal Dofasco, not Stelco. 

An Instagram post from Dofasco confirmed Carney’s visit. The man standing next to Carney in some photos is Dofasco CEO Ron Bedard. The Canadian Press attended and took photos and recorded video of the event.

In the full video, Carney does not make the comments attributed to him in the clip, nor does he discuss Alberta separatism at any point.

The keyword search also brought up a March 29 Instagram post from Liberal MP Aslam Rana, featuring a clip of Carney addressing the workers with a microphone in hand. The video is identical to one of the clips that include Carney’s supposed comment about the Emergencies Act. But in Rana’s clip, which appears to be the original, the audio is different. In Rana’s video, Carney speaks of his admiration for the company. 

A Google search of the exact quotation Carney is alleged to have made in Hamilton brings up a video posted to Facebook last year by Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, where she says Carney talked about using emergency powers to force resource projects through. A caption on Lantsman’s video reads “Kelowna, February 12, 2025.”

A video posted by Castanet News to YouTube shows Carney made the comments about “emergency powers” during a Feb. 12, 2025 Liberal leadership campaign event in Kelowna B.C., not the March 29 event in Hamilton. 

In the original video, Carney says: “Something that my government is going to do is to use all the powers of the federal government, including the emergency powers of the federal government, to accelerate the major projects that we need in order to build this economy.”

The clips from the steel plant replace the authentic audio with Carney’s comments from Kelowna more than a year earlier, splicing the clip to delete the words “all the powers of the federal government, including.” 

When Carney says “I just want to reflect for a minute why the challenges we have with the Americans that have made it more acute,” that audio is also spliced from the Kelowna event. 

Though Carney received criticism from Conservatives for his comments about emergency powers, they were not made in response to a question about the Alberta separatist movement, and there is no evidence Carney made such comments at a Hamilton steel plant. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 20, 2026.