I'd love for you to explain the substantive difference between the real and unreal manipulation. In what way is the specific lobbying campaign by fossil fuels in Alberta distinct from any lobbying for extraction in Canada? There is no disentangling fossil fuel lobbying in Alberta from settler-colonialism within the federal state of Canada or Canadian culture because these are all elements in a commonly imperialistic, capitalistic, and colonial system. You have misunderstood my criticism of capitalism as something oriented around individual capitalists as though I am talking about some especially naughty people and not recognizing that property-owners share fundamental interests because of what this system is and how it reproduces. In what way are Albertans "fooled" but Canadians who defend property ownership for mining corporations, tech corporations, food distributors, and landlords are not? Neoliberalism was dominant in Canada for decades before Trump even ran the first time (no, before 2016). Even further, why is this presumption made that the literal wealth that these companies have at their disposal is itself unrelated to the Canadian state or its interests? Quite literally, the wealth that it controls is both dependent on and contributive to the resources that these companies have access to in the first place when it is widely invested in this among every other extractive industry. Canada harbours half of the world's mining corporations, and you think that's what, unrelated to the separatist movement? Not in the interest of US hegemony? Why?

It has been intensely frustrating to have Canadians realize for the first time in their lives that they're in an empire, and to have their response be reactionary nationalism rooted in neoliberal politics. You have any idea how many Canadians who did not give a shit about how they related to US imperialism until Trump was reelected have mansplained my own country to me in the past year? Tell me about the "real world differences and history," then.

(This is also, btw, not my argument. I'm applying basic understandings of feminist, structuralist and decolonial scholarship on capitalism and settler-colonialism that you'd see in other work that is derived from arguments formed by scholars like Patrick Wolfe and Ann Laura Stoler. This is how people who analyze this system with the desire for change make sense of developments like Albertan seperatism.)