In November 2019, under Premier John Horgan’s leadership, the B.C. legislature voted unanimously to make the province the first jurisdiction in Canada to write the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law. The act obligates the government to “take all measures necessary to ensure the laws of British Columbia are consistent with the Declaration.”

The Declaration says that Indigenous peoples have the right “to the improvement of their economic and social conditions,” including health, and Indigenous individuals have “an equal right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” Introducing the bill, Horgan promised British Columbians, “healthy communities that include everyone.” By the standard that the province wrote into its own statute, British Columbians may judge the decade by one question: Have Indigenous people come to live healthier and longer lives?

Horgan’s attorney general, David Eby, carried much of the follow-through. In October 2019, Eby introduced the bill that directs 7 percent of the B.C. Lottery Corporation’s net income to First Nations. The government valued this income stream at about $3 billion over 25 years. In March 2020, as Attorney General Eby signed a First Nations Justice Strategy that called for a network of 15 regional justice centers. In November 2021, Eby introduced two bills on the same day. One requires every provincial act and regulation to be read consistently with the UN Declaration. The other added Indigenous identity as a protected ground in the Human Rights Code.

The rest of the BC government kept pace. Since 2023-24, provincial high school students have had to complete Indigenous-focused coursework to graduate. Provincial bodies such as the Public Guardian and Trustee have pushed for and won approval to hire Indigenous applicants on a “preferential and exclusive” basis.

As premier, Eby went further. His government proposed Land Act changes that would have allowed shared decision-making with First Nations over Crown land, but withdrew them in February 2024 after public objections. Two months later, it recognized Aboriginal title over all of Haida Gwaii. “For the first time in Canadian history,” Eby declared, “Aboriginal title is being recognized, and it’s happening here in British Columbia.”

By these measures, the Horgan-Eby governments can fairly claim to be the most Indigenous-friendly ever to hold office in Canada.

Competing for the title, and leading the effort, was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous Peoples,” he wrote in the mandate letters that he gave his ministers in November 2015. A month later, he pledged to “fully implement” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. By March 2025, the month he left office, CBC’s tracker counted 14 of the 94 as complete. That translates into a 15 per cent completion rate. But Ottawa prefers its own arithmetic: “More than 85% of the 76 calls requiring the federal government’s sole or shared leadership,” it reports, “have been completed or are well underway.” In Trudeau’s performative style of government, “fully” came to mean “well underway.”

Trudeau’s words did translate into increased budget spending. Tom Flanagan and Nathaniel Li examined the Public Accounts for the Fraser Institute and found that federal Indigenous spending rose from $7.8 billion in 2015–16 to $39.2 billion in 2024–25, the fiscal year Justin Trudeau left office.

Their count mainly covers the two Indigenous affairs departments and excludes settlements and lawsuits. Adjusted for inflation, spending nearly quadrupled. It increased 297.7%, compared with 42.0% growth in overall federal program spending excluding debt interest. Settlements and lawsuits added $36.7 billion over those ten fiscal years, bringing the nominal total covered by the study to about $245 billion.

For 2024–25, Flanagan and Li estimate British Columbia’s share at $6.3 billion, or about $20,300 per Indigenous person, by allocating national spending according to population shares. Those figures include administrative overhead and do not represent payments received by individuals.

After all that bluster and generous spending, one would expect Indigenous British Columbians to be living better and longer. Wealth and longevity are the standard markers of prosperity. The United Nations ranks countries on its Human Development Index, based on three measures: life expectancy at birth, schooling, and income per person. The first and the last travel together. Statistics Canada finds that a 25-year-old man in the lowest income quintile can expect to live 7.7 fewer years than one in the highest. Money that raises incomes should, in time, lengthen lives.

Incomes did rise. Census figures show the median income of Status First Nations people living on reserve in British Columbia climbing from about $17,200 in 2015 to $22,400 in 2019 and $26,800 in 2020, when pandemic benefits supplied about an eighth of it. Off reserve, the median rose from about $23,700 to $30,600, then to $35,200. The median for all British Columbians rose more slowly, from about $33,000 to $40,800, so the gap narrowed. If money lengthens lives, these years should have shown it. Some will answer that health responds slowly to money. Slowly, perhaps, but it should not run backwards.

Yet First Nations people’s lives grew shorter. The First Nations Health Authority reports that life expectancy for status First Nations people in British Columbia fell from 73.3 years in 2017, Horgan’s first year in office, to 67.2 years in 2021. Six years of life expectancy vanished in four. You read that last sentence right, and it gets worse. Over the same period, Statistics Canada’s figure for the province as a whole slipped from 82.05 to 81.34 years, a loss of less than one year. The gap between indigenous people and the provincial average widened from under nine years to more than 14.

The decline did not begin with these governments. Life expectancy among First Nations people had already slipped from 75.9 years in 2011 to about 73 in 2017. After 2017, the pace of loss more than tripled. The health authority attributes the losses to toxic drugs and COVID-19. Those causes explain how people died. They do not explain why a decade of an incessantly declared priority for Indigenous welfare and swelling budgets failed to protect them.

The health authority adds that First Nations people “continue to be disproportionately [affected] due to the ongoing and intergenerational effects of colonialism.” Those effects are real, and they are old. They explain why First Nations people were more exposed; they cannot explain why a decade devoted by two levels of government to repairing them ended with shorter lives.

Toxic drugs point to a choice both governments made. In March 2020, Victoria endorsed clinical guidance for doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical opioids and stimulants to drug users, and in 2021 it made this “safer supply” provincial policy. Ottawa then exempted British Columbia from the federal ban on toxic drug possession, so that from January 2023 adults could carry up to 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine or MDMA without being charged.

Not surprisingly, deaths from toxic drugs among First Nations people peaked that year, just like they did across the province. Victoria let the exemption lapse in January 2026, its health minister conceding that the pilot “has not delivered the results we hoped for.” They could have chosen to stop it sooner, but did not. Coincidence in time proves no cause. Pretending it away would be foolish.

Alberta offers a test. Thanks to progressive myth, Alberta is supposedly a land unfriendly to immigrants and Indigenous peoples. In January 2026, for example, Alberta NDP Leader Naheeed Nenshi declared that “Danielle Smith and her separatist UCP government do not respect Treaty rights.” After Alberta’s treaty chiefs allied with the NDP to pass a vote of nonconfidence in her government in February, Nenshi told the legislature that Eby “didn’t face a vote of nonconfidence by First Nations. Only this Premier did.” Thus, on progressive logic, a government that disregards First Nations should preside over far worse results than British Columbia’s.

Yet the pattern in Alberta is very similar. A 2025 study in a Lancet journal, drawing on Alberta Health records, found that life expectancy among First Nations people in the province fell 7.3 years between 2019 and 2021, from 70.4 to 63.1. Other Albertans lost 1.4 years. The figure recovered slightly, to 64.2, in 2022. Figures from Alberta Health, reported in early 2025, put it at 62.8 years in 2023, against 81.9 for other Albertans. The two provinces identify First Nations people differently, so their life-expectancy levels are not strictly comparable. The direction of change can still be compared.

I could find no life expectancy figure for First Nations people in British Columbia for any year after 2021. Canada’s national death records once noted racial origin, but the practice faded after the 1970s as provinces dropped the question from their forms, and Statistics Canada’s death database now records no Indigenous identity. British Columbia’s figures therefore depend on linking death records to the federal Indian Register, and the health authority’s next update is projected for 2026-27. Its counts of toxic drug deaths offer the closest guide to the years since. Deaths among First Nations people rose from 361 in 2021 to 458 in 2023, then fell to a preliminary 289 in 2025, still 5.4 times the rate of other residents.

(Strictly for reference: In 2021, Bolivian life expectancy was 62.6 years with an income of CDN $2700; Honduras, the second poorest country in this hemisphere, had a life expectancy of 69.5 years and a median income of CDN $4118).

A government accused of hostility and a government that proclaimed to the four winds and wrote its goodwill into law presided over comparable collapses. Whatever drove the decline, the warmth of official progressive declarations and truckloads of money did not stop it. There are deeper issues at play here.

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I have my own theories about why the numbers look the way they do. Those can wait. Anyone who funded, designed, or voted for the past decade's policies should measure the distance between what they intended and the outcomes they produced. Policymakers and voters alike should at the very least suspend the common assumption that lavishly pouring public money into Indigenous communities will, by itself, improve their lives, at least until someone explains why it has not done so.

Where is the money going if it is not improving the lives of real people in Indigenous communities, one has to ask? One need not begrudge the significant increase in allocations to Indigenous people to ask accountability questions, especially when the results show the opposite of what one would expect.

Ottawa’s budget watchdog saw the pattern early. In May 2022, the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that the rise in federal spending on Indigenous services “did not result in a commensurate increase in the ability of the organizations to achieve the targets that they had set for themselves.” Three years later, Auditor General Karen Hogan found that Indigenous Services Canada had made “unsatisfactory progress” on 53 per cent of 34 recommendations from six audits completed between 2015 and 2022.

On June 5, 2020, Justin Trudeau took a knee at the anti-Black racism protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, eleven days after George Floyd’s killing. Floyd was not Canadian and was not Indigenous. There was no reaction from Justin Trudeau after the 2022 Budget Officer’s Report cited above; not eleven days later, not ever. Thousands of Indigenous lives affected by his policies did not merit a knee, did not matter as much.

In Victoria, the auditor general found in 2015 that the education ministry had not evaluated whether its targeted funding for Indigenous students was closing gaps in outcomes, and in 2019 that it still had not. I know of no comparable provincial reckoning of Indigenous health spending against outcomes.

Elected governments and their officials need to get to the bottom of this. Legislators in Victoria and Ottawa should commission an independent inquiry into why First Nations people's lives grew shorter during the most generous decade on record, with full access to health, coroners’, and spending data. Victoria should begin by publishing life expectancy for First Nations people every year; the linked records that make it possible are rebuilt annually. Investigators should take their time, and the rest of us should partially suspend judgment until they fully report.

Between now and the Oct. 24 vote, Premier Eby will make even greater promises to British Columbians, some of them to Indigenous communities. Voters should hold each one against the past decade’s record.

I am not suggesting or implying that all of the above is Eby’s fault, but he sat at the cabinet table, and then at its head, for most of the decade the record describes.

Announcements and good intentions are never enough. The last decade has once again supplied the evidence.

Whose land lies along the only road running north along the east side of Lake Winnipeg and past Bloodvein First Nation?

It is provincial Crown land, administered by Manitoba for the public, subject to treaty and other legal rights. Bloodvein Chief Lisa Young has acted as though it were hers to close. For a second hunting season, her checkstop on this important provincial road, 20 kilometres south of the reserve, has turned back licensed hunters bound for unoccupied Crown land. The Manitoba Wildlife Federation has five such reports this season.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has praised the measure as responsible governance. Last year Grand Chief Kyra Wilson went further and told the province it had no right to issue hunting licences in First Nations’ traditional territories.

That claim sits at the heart of the dispute, and the law does not support it.

Bloodvein is a Treaty 5 nation, and the treaty contains a hunting promise. The 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreement reshaped that promise province-wide: First Nations people may hunt for food at all seasons on unoccupied Crown land, while provincial game laws otherwise apply. The Supreme Court examined that language in Badger (1996). The right is constitutionally protected, and it is a right to harvest, conferring no control over passage or land use.

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The court has drawn that line repeatedly. Sparrow (1990) gives Aboriginal harvesting priority after conservation, with the Crown remaining the regulator. Grassy Narrows (2014) confirms that a province may take up and manage treaty lands, subject to its duty to consult. A right to exclude others flows from Aboriginal title, and title must be proven. Bloodvein has proven no title along Rice River Road.

Nor did last year’s court case give it one. In November 2025, the Court of King’s Bench dismissed the wildlife federation’s application to halt the checkstop. Bloodvein said the stop intercepted drugs and alcohol, and Chief Young, through counsel, undertook to let licensed hunters pass if they complied. The court let the checkstop stand on that footing and granted no right to exclude hunters. This season’s refusals break the undertaking it heard.

Premier Wab Kinew put it plainly on Friday: treaties are about sharing the land. The province sent Bloodvein a cease-and-desist letter on Sept. 19.

None of this dismisses the worries of a people who hunt to eat. Bloodvein’s traditional territory reaches across the lake into the Interlake, where the province’s 2024 survey found moose critically low in game hunting areas 21 and 21A. In nearby game hunting area 17A, the same survey estimated 462 moose, with a 90 per cent confidence interval of 359 to 673, and found the population stable since 2000.

The lawful remedy exists, and Manitoba has used it. Bloodvein can press the province for better surveys and tighter licence allocations, and can challenge decisions that infringe its protected harvesting rights. Last season the province restricted licensed hunting within 500-metre buffers along the road and the river; it did not close the road to travel. Other northern nations have simply asked hunters to stay away. Persuasion is governance; a roadblock asserts a jurisdiction its builders do not possess.

The precedent extends beyond moose. Trappers, anglers and outfitters use that road, and so do members of other First Nations, whose right to hunt for food on unoccupied Crown land does not end at a checkpoint Bloodvein has chosen to staff. If a band council can close a public road on land it does not own, what stops other groups? A checkstop that decides who may pass makes its operators the arbiters of everyone’s rights, answerable to none of them.

Premier Kinew warned that the checkstop risks a backlash against Indigenous people who had nothing to do with it. He is right to worry. The surest way to prevent it is to restore the principle before resentment fills the vacuum: open the road, count the moose, and let the authority that answers to every Manitoban allocate the harvest under expert assessment and law.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the vice-president of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

This piece was written for the Winnipeg Sun.

And Naheeed Nenshi has made a video to ease the burden of such an onerous task for you.

Forty seconds. That is the runtime. Forty seconds to save Canada, which is about the time it takes to microwave a jumbo burrito. Nenshi opens with “We’ve been working hard on saving Canada.” Working hard. On saving Canada. In 1995 it meant a rally in Montreal with a hundred thousand people and a flag the size of a hockey rink. In 2026 it means a ring light, a fleece, and forty seconds before the algorithm loses interest. The man has a website called Save Canada, the sort of name you give a thing when you want to be thanked for it later.

Saving Canada is a phrase with a résumé. Isaac Brock saved Canada and got a monument fifty-six metres tall on Queenston Heights and a university with his name on the diplomas. Tecumseh saved Canada and got a town, a monument, a landlocked ship, and a line in every textbook the future professor Nenshi might have learned in school. Laura Secord saved Canada by walking thirty-two kilometres through the bush to warn a lieutenant, and got a monument, a school, and a box of chocolates at every airport in the country. Nenshi walked from a desk to a ring light or to a box of chocolates. Nobody is naming a university after that. Nobody is carving it in granite.

Then he tells you that “a lot of Albertans don’t know” there are nine other questions on the ballot. Maybe. And then, having identified the problem as ignorance, he spends the remaining thirty-five seconds protecting it. He does not read a single question in the video. Not one. He does not tell you what the questions say. He tells you what they are, which is different, and it is different the way a used-car sales listing is different from the car.

Naheeed says five of them are “broadly anti-immigration.” Broadly. That word is doing the lifting equivalent of three Nenshis. Question 5 asks whether you should show proof of citizenship, a passport or a birth certificate, to vote in an Alberta provincial election. Who has a passport? Citizens. Who is asked to show it? Citizens. Nenshi has found an anti-immigrant passport. This is a breakthrough. Somewhere in a drawer in Red Deer, a little blue book with a maple leaf on it quietly hates newcomers, and nobody knows but Naheeed.

Then Question 1, which asks whether Alberta should have more control over immigration. Anti-immigration, Nenshi says. Here is a fun fact for the man who has been running a province’s second party for two years. Quebec has controlled the selection of its own economic immigrants since 1991. Ottawa signed it. Ottawa pays for it. It is called the Canada-Quebec Accord, and it has been in force for thirty-five years without anyone in the Nenshi household calling the federal police. Alberta asks for the same thing, and it is a plot (But not just any plot).

An evil plot. Evil. Say it out loud and listen to yourself. Who talks like that? Cartoon characters talk like that, and the villain toons who fight them. Televangelists talk like that, right before they drop the toll-free number. Professional wrestlers talk like that, loudly into a microphone, wearing tights.

This is a country where the strongest word a politician will use about an opponent is “disappointed.” We have “concerning.” We have “not the direction I would have chosen.” We have “I think Albertans deserve better,” said with the head annoyingly tilted to one side. Evil qualified like that is a foreign import, and it did not come through the Canada-Quebec Accord. It is not easy to take someone who talks like that seriously. Villains used to have lairs. This one has a website with the actual questions.

Which brings us to the four questions Nenshi calls “blatantly unconstitutional.” Blatantly. Not subtly. Not arguably. Blatantly, as in, a child could see it. So let us not be the children he wishes us to be for a minute and look.

Question 8 asks whether Alberta should be able to opt out of federal programs in provincial jurisdiction without losing the money. Sounds radical. Sounds like something you would need a bunker for. Yet, it is the Meech Lake Accord. Word for word, practically. Nineteen eighty-seven vintage. Every premier in Canada signed it, including Alberta’s. Brian Mulroney signed it. The federal Liberals under John Turner backed it. The federal NDP, under Ed Broadbent, backed it. And Quebec didn't wait for anyone to sign anything. Quebec opted out of the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and built its own. Quebec took tax points instead of federal programs for sixty years. Quebec got its own side deal on health care in 2004 and on childcare after that.

The principle is so unconstitutional that it is in the Constitution: section 40 says a province that opts out of specific amendments gets compensated. Alberta asks for what Quebec has, and a former professor of public policy at Mount Royal University looks into the camera and says the courts will turn it back. Which courts? The ones that have been watching Quebec do it since the Beatles were together?

Question 6: give provinces a say in picking judges. Meech gave the provinces the lists for the Supreme Court. Question 7: abolish the Senate. Unanimity required, the Supreme Court said in 2014, which is the Court telling you how to do it lawfully, which is a strange thing for an unconstitutional idea to come with. Also, and this is particularly illustrative of the ignorance at play, abolishing the Senate was federal NDP policy for a decade. Jack Layton ran on it. Was he evil? Tom Mulcair ran on it. Was he evil? No credible politician would suggest such things. It was constitutional the whole time Nenshi’s party wanted it, but it magically became blatantly unconstitutional the moment Danielle Smith wrote it down? Legal doctrines do not do that. Mood rings do that. Here, Nenshi seems to be wearing more of those than Comrade Rosario Murillo.

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The mechanics of what is happening here are beautiful. A man with two degrees, a professorship, three terms as mayor of a city of a million and a half people, and a briefing staff, stands in front of a camera and tells you that Quebec’s standing arrangements are the equivalent of an evil plot against Canada. Meech Lake happened in 1987. It was on the news every night for three years. It was in the textbooks. So we are left with two possibilities. Either the whole thing slipped past a future professor of public policy, in which case the province should be told, gently, and someone should check on the textbook. Or it did not slip past him, in which case the video is about you.

Because that is the whole play. Naheeed does not need you to agree with him. He needs you not to look. The video is forty seconds long because forty seconds is shorter than the ballot. If you read the ballot, the video stops working. If you read the ballot, you might ask questions. That is why it does not read the ballot to you. It is a video against reading, made by a man who has probably read a great deal, for people he hopes have not.

And then the sentence that gives the game away. “So I’m gonna make it easy for you.” Easy. For you. Listen to the tone. That is the voice of a man loosening the lid on a jar because he decided you cannot. That is the fellow at the restaurant who orders for the whole table and then asks if everybody is happy. It’s Nenshi mansplaining at its best. Ten questions was too many. You might strain something. So he's boiled the ballot down to one word: No, and he would like you to say it nine times, like a man teaching a parrot.

Vote Option 1 on Question 10, and then, on the other nine, “just vote a straight no.” Just. Do not trouble yourself. The Alberta Neo-Democrat grown-ups have looked at it. Nine questions, nine No’s, off you go, here is a sticker. This is what a leader thinks of you: that you are a person who can be told how to fill in a form by a man who will not tell you what is on the form. Leaders do not do that. Hall monitors do that, and this one has a political party.

Notice what you have not heard in forty seconds. You have not heard whether he thinks immigration is too high. Whether people here on a temporary permit should pay something for the hospital. Who should pick the judges. Whether the Senate should exist. Whether Ottawa should be running programs in provincial jurisdiction. Nothing. Zero policy. He has a position on one thing: you should have no positions on nine things. Try it at home. Next budget, do not read it; vote No on every line. See how the roads do.

Then there is the existential part; Camus would be proud. The part that got the whole production its title. Question 10. Alberta in or Alberta out. Nenshi says Option 1, stay. Danielle Smith says she is campaigning to stay. The one he calls evil agrees with him. She is on the same side. The premier, the officious opposition, and seventy per cent of the province all seem to agree, but a man has made a video to tell them, urgently, to save them, as if they were about to drive off a cliff they've already parked beside. A lifeguard does a swan dive into the wading pool. The supposedly existential question (about whether to have a referendum) has no opponent in the room. So he borrows its weight and hangs it on the other nine, the ones he will not describe, and calls the package “saving Canada.”

What kind of a person do you need to be to present yourself as a saviour; what kind of a person do you need to be to believe he is?

Canada will be there on the morning of October 20, whichever box you tick. Even the Senate, should you read Question 7, will still be there! He would rather you did not.

And, it is worth repeating, the premier who supposedly hatched the evil plot is on the same side as him on the only question he says matters. Think about that. The villain and the saviour agree on the ending. They disagree about whether you should be allowed to read the middle. He is uniting the province by explaining that half of it is in on something, and he is saving Canada from a country that has already voted to keep itself. That’s a 21st-century woke saviour.

So here is your instruction from this publication, and it is the only one you will get. Be a radical. Subvert the promotion of ignorance. Read the ballot. Read all ten questions. Takes five minutes, longer than the video, which is the point.

Then, be more subversive still and vote however you like. If you read them, you will have done more research than the Nenshi video, and you will have done it in a school gym with a pencil in your hand.

Nobody will call you evil. Nobody will call you at all. That is what a secret ballot is for, and it is the one thing on October 19 that Nenshi has made no video about.

Canada has consistently failed to make progress that is commensurate with so many lofty pronouncements and expectations on the Indigenous file. By statistics alone, it is a national shame that most Indigenous Canadians in reservations live far below acceptable socio-economic standards. Money is not the problem. By 2022, the federal budget allocations to Aboriginals will have doubled since 2016 to nearly $25 billion.

Symbolic gestures like the new ritual acknowledgements when standing on Indigenous land improve nothing. The culture of pronouncements, symbolic nods, confessions of privilege, apologies and promises that governments have developed are virtue-signaling political gimmicks. Similarly, engaging in Truth and Reconciliation is in principle a good thing, but the engagement has been partially derailed away from both truth and from reconciliation. The reporting coverage and reactions to the 215 graves in Kamloops are a case in point.

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None of these observations are meant to deny documented abuses or the grief and pain that the news evokes in individuals. It is precisely in respect to the painful experiences of victims and their families that the reporting and reactions have failed. 

Our intellectual and political classes keep failing miserably. There has been no shortage of public officials, organizations and private citizens rushing to exhibit pain as well as anger and indignation. But for a few opinion-makers, the rush to express these sentiments, real or affected, has trampled on truth and on reconciliation.  

The trampling on truth is most evident in the descriptions of what was found in Kamloops. Take the reporting of “mass graves,” for instance. This formulation is inflammatory and callous when we consider victims’ relatives. Saying “mass graves” evokes the murderous intention of killing machinery at work, like the trenches in the Balkans where the victims of ethnic hatred were dumped by the thousands. Jagmeet Singh has alluded to such places in making references to “genocide.” Here and abroad Reuters, The Guardian, BBC, and The New York Times have parroted the false formulation. While calling for prayers in “truth and reconciliation,” a University of Toronto scholar friend of mine affirms that Indigenous children were “wantonly murdered and dumped in a mass grave.” [I reached out to him several times to warn him about what he was saying and its implications, but I never received a response. Now that he is back in Alberta, I have invited him to meet, to no avail. This is a small indication of the state of the current intellectual class in Canada].

There is more at play here than semantics. The graves, unmarked at the time of finding, are individual graves located inside the perimeter of an institution that operated for over 8 decades. They are not a mass grave.

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Allowing for the future possibility, even if remote, that foul play was involved in every case, there is no evidence that warrants such conclusions while the remains are still buried. No one has yet been exhumed, no investigation has commenced. As Peter Stockland recently pointed out, it is also impossible to determine the age of buried remains using the methods employed in finding the graves. In this sense, truth has been sacrificed in the rush to display sympathy and outrage, to the point of mainly serving condescension and falsehood. The political co-opting of the pain of others is particularly offensive; the misreporting is injurious and irresponsible.  

Such careless liberties in the reporting, whether honestly expressed, rooted in sophistry, or seeking sensation, re-open wounds and rub poisonous salts. They subject relatives to imagining atrocities unlived and victims to remembering, for no benefit, nightmares lived. They erect real obstacles to national reconciliation. Reconciling requires forgiveness. Presenting monstrous untruths as facts obfuscates reason and enflames anger that impairs forgiveness.

People who care about Indigenous Canadians, especially the press, have the greater responsibility to report accurately and truthfully, mindful of the consternation and the renewed suffering they stir.

Moral character has never been exclusively measured in words but in deeds. For generations now, successive federal governments have made promises without delivering. For all the inflated rhetoric, even the present federal government has been incapable of permanently delivering potable water to so many Indigenous children. Worse still, not that long ago, Prime Minister Trudeau openly mocked Aboriginal women at a Liberal Party fundraiser in Toronto when the women demanded clean water for their children. Expressions of solidarity, vacuous electoral promises and virtue-signaling schemes will not deliver the outcomes that Indigenous Canadians need, just as handing out large amounts of unaccountable monies over decades has failed.

If politicians and the press begin with truth instead of grand schemes, we might pave the way to reconciliation. Similarly, modest, effective development, and targeted action lead to meaningful solidarity.  Otherwise, cheap talk offers no solutions. Cheap talk invites more self-congratulatory attitudes. Cheap talk snuffs opportunity. Cheap talk is a formidable obstacle to moving on from past injustice.

Other related essays:
1. Rustad’s Claims Are False: Former BC Conservative leader John Rustad’s claim about residential school deaths, arguing that politicians conflate deaths at schools with deaths recorded elsewhere or later in life. The piece calls for accurate records and transparent public debate.
2. Symbol Without Substance: Mary Simon’s Vice-Regal Years: Mary Simon’s tenure as governor general elevated reconciliation symbolism while leaving Indigenous conditions unchanged. He criticizes her residential school rhetoric, treatment of skeptics, lack of French, and silence over church fires.
3. Trudeau’s small gestures speak louder than his deeds: Plutarch’s test of character contrasts with Justin Trudeau’s reconciliation promises, his Tofino trip on Truth and Reconciliation Day, and his sarcastic response to Grassy Narrows protesters, raising questions about his sincerity toward Indigenous Canadians.
4. Seven senators and a thought crime: Parliament’s 2022 residential school genocide motion outran the evidence, while a proposed Senate amendment threatened open inquiry. He urges MPs to revisit the declaration and distinguish coercive assimilation from deliberate mass murder.
5. CBC helped drive the Kamloops narrative, and still won’t come clean: Challenging Rosemary Barton’s statement about recovered children’s remains and CBC coverage of the Kamloops announcement. He calls for corrections, disclosure of any advance access to the story, and stricter verification of consequential claims.
6. Stop pretending campus mobs are an accident: The University of Lethbridge used safety claims and trespass powers to silence Frances Widdowson. Her cafeteria arrest prompts a call for Alberta legislation enforcing campus free expression with meaningful institutional penalties.

Yet Canada’s most practical Atlantic LNG opportunity was not among the projects showcased.

It sits in Saint John, New Brunswick, where Repsol owns Canada’s first LNG receiving and regasification terminal. The shale revolution erased the import market it was built to serve, leaving valuable infrastructure operating far below its potential. Canada should examine converting it into a bidirectional terminal capable of exporting North American gas to Europe.

The idea is not new. Repsol studied an export conversion and shelved it in 2023 because moving Western Canadian gas across the continent cost more than the project could bear. What has changed is the answer to the problem that defeated that study and every earlier East Coast proposal: feedgas.

The cost of starting from scratch is instructive. Nova Scotia’s 10‑million‑tonne Goldboro LNG project carried estimates of $9‑billion to $13‑billion before it was shelved in 2021. The Summit prospectus now includes Kino Aski LNG, a $23‑billion, pre‑application proposal that would move Western gas to Baie‑Comeau, Quebec, through roughly 1,000 kilometres of new pipeline to floating liquefaction plants on the St. Lawrence. Both illustrate the burden any project that begins with a transcontinental pipeline carries.

Saint John invites a different question: why transport gas across Canada when the Marcellus basin—one of the world’s largest and lowest‑cost natural‑gas resources—lies much closer to the south?

Much of the required corridor already exists. Marcellus gas moves into New England, the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline carries it to New Brunswick, and the Brunswick Pipeline links that system to Saint John. Enbridge called its last corridor expansion, completed in 2021, Atlantic Bridge; the name suits the larger project. These pipelines were not configured to provide firm export feedgas. Additional capacity, compression, interconnections and bidirectional flow would have to be engineered and contracted. That is significant, but fundamentally different from building a new transcontinental supply chain.

The terminal is the project’s central advantage. Saint John already has LNG storage, a deep‑water berth, regasification facilities, an industrial site and a pipeline connection. It also holds a 25‑year export licence, which the Canada Energy Regulator amended in 2023 to require exports to begin by May 20, 2032. The groundwork exists, but the opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

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A sensible first phase would be modest by global standards: roughly 300 million cubic feet per day of feedgas supporting about two million tonnes a year of LNG, the scale Repsol itself contemplated. Liquefaction, gas treatment and compression would require substantial investment, with costs tested through engineering. Reusing a functioning terminal avoids much of the cost, time and risk associated with a greenfield port, jetty and storage complex.

Geography strengthens the case. Saint John is roughly a week’s sailing from Northwest Europe, a shorter route than the U.S. Gulf Coast offers, and unlike LNG from Canada’s Pacific coast, it points directly to the market Atlantic LNG is intended to serve.

Europe’s need is structural. It has reduced Russian pipeline imports but not its dependence on imported gas. Norway, the United States and Qatar will remain essential suppliers; what Europe seeks is diversification across reliable jurisdictions and routes. LNG from a Canadian terminal, using traceable North American gas that meets Europe’s evolving methane standards, could contribute to that objective.

Critics will note that much of the feedgas would originate in the United States. But the same logic already operates in reverse: Western Canadian gas flows into the U.S. pipeline network that supplies Gulf Coast export terminals. Atlantic Bridge would move U.S.‑sourced gas north, add value in Canada and deliver it to a NATO ally. Economic sovereignty does not require every molecule to originate inside our borders; it requires Canada to hold a meaningful place in the value chain.

Nor should Ottawa pick commercial winners. Producers, marketers or European buyers could contract the pipeline and liquefaction capacity. Government’s first step is not a subsidy or a final investment decision. It is a feasibility process: can firm gas reach Saint John, and at what toll? Which terminal assets can be reused? Will European buyers sign contracts long enough to support financing? These questions are answerable at a fraction of the project’s cost.

The Summit was meant to connect capital with productive assets. Few fit that description better than an underused Canadian energy facility that could become the closest major North American LNG gateway to Northwest Europe.

Canada has spent years debating Atlantic LNG as though its only options were an uneconomic cross‑country pipeline or another greenfield megaproject. The terminal is in Saint John. The gas is to the south. The pipeline corridor exists in skeleton form. Europe needs secure diversification, and the export licence has a clock.

The question is no longer whether Canada possesses an Atlantic LNG opportunity. It is whether we are prepared to test the most practical one while time remains.

David A. McLellan spent more than 30 years in energy and finance. He is a Senior Fellow at the Haultain Research Institute and a member of the boards of Blackhawk Oil & Gas, FX Energy and Ascent Energy Ventures.

Twenty-five days before Albertans vote on ten referendum questions, Ken Boessenkool posted a two-sentence note on Substack. “Direct democracy is for losers,” he wrote, adding that Alberta had been demonstrating as much “in spades.” The note promoted an essay he co-wrote with Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta, which The Line published on September 24 under the heading “Direct democracy was better in theory than practice.” The Line ran it as part of a partnership with Lead Not Leave, a campaign wishing to keep Alberta in Canada. The essay argues that Alberta should reverse its recent moves toward referendums, recall and citizen initiatives, and return discretion to legislators, officials and party insiders.

Who, exactly, are the losers?

Boessenkool’s note answers more candidly than the essay does. Read charitably, he means that direct democracy is the recourse of those who lose in the legislature. Read plainly, he means that those who use it are losers. Either reading exposes the premise on which the whole essay rests: citizens who turn to the ballot between general elections are a problem for democracy to manage, not participants in it.

A realistic grasp of Alberta political culture is missing in so much pundit commentary and formal scholarship.

Wesley and Boessenkool rest their case on three objections to direct democracy: scale, complexity and stability. The first holds that governments make thousands of decisions a day, too many for voters to weigh without gridlock or fatigue. The second holds that subjects such as cybersecurity regulation and monetary policy demand expertise no ordinary voter possesses. The third holds that referendums invite majority tyranny and force polarizing binary choices.

Applying these objections to Alberta, the authors argue that the five immigration and election questions deny nuance and marginalize those affected, that the four constitutional questions are redundant because the government already holds a mandate and cannot amend the Constitution alone, that recall campaigns have produced only theatre, and that none of the ten questions arose from a properly conducted citizen initiative. Their remedies are higher thresholds for initiatives, narrower or repealed recall, referendums confined to matters within provincial authority or already commanding broad national consensus, stricter rules on who may run for and choose party leaders, delegated leadership conventions, and more resources for MLAs. A return to smoky backrooms, they add, would arguably improve on present practice.

The first visible difficulty lies in the argument’s structure. The authors concede that nobody has proposed Alberta abandon representative government for direct democracy, yet their three objections apply only to such a replacement. Ten questions on one ballot hardly strain voters' attention, so the scale objection misses its target. The complexity objection misses too, since it attacks the idea of voters administering monetary policy, which no question on the ballot asks them to do; each question asks whether the government should pursue a direction and leaves implementation to legislators and officials. In effect, the authors defend ground nobody contests and then claim ground they have not defended.

The complexity objection also proves too much. If voters cannot grasp how complex policies interact, they cannot judge a party platform either, and a platform bundles hundreds of such policies into a single choice every four years. The argument supplies no principle that stops before it reaches general elections. The stability objection suffers from a similar blind spot, because the majoritarian danger it describes lives at least as comfortably in the legislature the authors prefer.

A Westminster majority concentrates power far more than a referendum does, and whatever either one produces must still survive the Charter. As for the fear that majorities will turn on minorities at the ballot box, the research is mixed: Barbara Gamble found civil-rights restrictions passing at high rates in American initiatives, while Zoltan Hajnal, Elisabeth Gerber and Hugh Louch found California’s minorities on the winning side of ballot propositions about as often as white voters. The authors assert a harm that the evidence leaves unsettled.

When the authors turn from theory to Alberta, their argument begins to strain against itself. They write that the government made its intentions clear on most of the constitutional items during the last election campaign and therefore already holds a democratic mandate for them. They also write that the premier’s office came up with the ten questions on its own, without an electoral democratic mandate. Both statements don't apply to the constitutional questions on which the government campaigned, and the authors never say which questions they believe lack a mandate.

Their complaint that a referendum on immigration relieves government of its duty to engage those affected overlooks where the questions came from. The government-appointed Alberta Next Panel held town halls across the province through 2025, and the questions drew largely on its recommendations. One may judge that consultation inadequate, but one cannot say it did not occur.

The same habit of assertion appears in their claim that none of the ten questions resulted from a properly conducted citizen initiative, a claim that rests entirely on the word “properly.” Elections Alberta verified Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition, asking whether Alberta should remain in Canada, in December 2025 with 404,293 signatures after statistical sampling, well above the 293,976 required. When the legislative committee recommended a referendum, government members pointed to Lukaszuk’s own application, which selected that route, and the first option on the tenth question tracks his petition. A rival separatist petition had 222,597 verified signatures in July 2026, with further steps stayed pending an appeal. Their qualifier thus excludes every counterexample in advance.

Recall receives the same treatment. The authors cite the failure of more than a dozen recall campaigns as proof that the mechanism is flawed. The record, however, supports the opposite conclusion. Since 2025, a recall petition must gather signatures equal to 60 per cent of the votes cast in the MLA’s riding at the last election. The campaign against Indigenous Relations Minister Rajan Sawhney gathered roughly 3,400 of the nearly 15,000 signatures it needed, and most petitions targeted government members, the premier among them. A threshold that screens out campaigns lacking broad support is a safeguard working as designed.

Two further moves rely on labels. The authors write that the first five questions target immigrants, yet one of the five concerns proof of citizenship to vote. The first asks whether Alberta should take greater control of immigration to reduce it to more sustainable levels, prioritize economic migrants and give Albertans priority for new jobs. On that point the authors stand apart from their fellow citizens, since most Canadians now tell pollsters that the country admits too many immigrants.

Calling the question’s supporters anti-immigrant substitutes a characterization for an argument, as I have argued at greater length in An Immigrant Reads the Immigration Questions and Name It Accurately, and the Binary Dissolves. The authors then suggest that voters drawn out by these questions will also vote on the tenth, on separation, and leave it to readers “to interpret the alignment of such voters.” The sentence makes an accusation while declining responsibility.

The authors do have a point buried beneath the labels. The first question bundles three distinct policies into a single yes or no, and a voter who favours one and opposes another has no way to say so. That defect argues for better question drafting. It gives no reason for fewer of them.

The constitutional objection reveals the largest gap. The authors note that Alberta cannot amend the Constitution alone. That is true, and beside the point. In the case of secession, the Court held that a clear majority on a clear question would oblige the other participants in Confederation to negotiate. More broadly, it found that each participant’s right to initiate constitutional change imposes a duty on the others to engage in constitutional discussions that address democratic expressions of a desire for change, and it recognized a referendum as a democratic way of ascertaining the electorate’s views.

Boessenkool knows this better than most. The 2001 firewall letter he co-signed with Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, Ted Morton, Rainer Knopff and Andy Crooks read the Court’s reasoning to mean that Ottawa and the provinces must seriously consider constitutional reform endorsed by a clear majority on a clear question in a provincial referendum, and it urged Premier Ralph Klein to use one to press Senate reform. Under the rule Wesley and Boessenkool now propose, confining referendums to constitutional matters already commanding broad national consensus, the referendum the firewall letter recommended would have been forbidden.

Boessenkool has at least been consistent in his scepticism of symbolic referendums. In 2023 he called Alberta’s equalization referendum dumb and argued it could only detract from the government’s mandate in dealing with Ottawa. Opposing a particular referendum as unwise is defensible. Proposing to foreclose the instrument is a different position, and he has not reconciled the two.

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Beneath these specific errors lies a misunderstanding of democracy and of Alberta’s political culture. Democracy is, in a precise sense, for losers. The political scientist Adam Przeworski defined it as a system in which parties lose elections. Comparative research on “losers’ consent,” led by Christopher Anderson and his colleagues, finds that a democracy’s stability depends less on how winners behave than on whether losers accept outcomes and believe they retain a lawful path to prevail later. Recall, initiative and referendum are such paths. Closing them leaves the losing side intact and informs it that its remaining channels lie outside the institutions.

The Boesessenkool and Wesley essay also confuses a theory of administration with a theory of legitimacy. Its objections from scale and complexity ask who is best equipped to make policy, a sound question for designing a public service. Democracy answers a prior question: by what right does anyone govern? Representative institutions borrow their authority from the governed.

That distinction explains why the model Wesley and Boessenkool describe owes more to Joseph Schumpeter than to Edmund Burke. Schumpeter held that voters choose their leaders and then leave political action to them; between elections, he wrote, voters “must refrain from instructing him about what he is to do.” Recall and initiative are precisely the instructions the authors want to curtail. Burke’s trustee, whom the authors invoke when they describe MLAs as trustees of the broader public good, held discretion because he held trust. Burke told his Bristol electors in 1774 that he owed them his judgment. They declined to return him in 1780. Trusteeship has always depended on voters keeping a remedy.

That remedy matters most when trust is scarce, and trust is scarce. Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey found that 28 per cent of Canadians reported high confidence in Parliament in the fall of 2023, and 37 per cent in the Canadian media. High confidence in the school system fell from about 51 per cent in 2022 to 45 per cent by the end of 2024, and by late 2024 four in 10 Canadians rated their confidence in Parliament at one or two out of five. Albertans led the decline before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Proof Strategies’ 2019 trust survey found Alberta driving a national drop in trust, which the firm’s chair attributed to Albertans watching their economic opportunity foiled by Ottawa.

Even these figures likely understate the problem. People who distrust institutions are less likely to answer surveys commissioned by those institutions or their allies, so measures of trust carry a built-in upward bias that grows as distrust grows. The decline shows through regardless: the federal board that certifies subsidized newsrooms acknowledges that trust in news continues to decline year after year. Conduct, however, is a sturdier witness than stated opinion, and conduct points the same way. Albertans put more than 626,000 verified signatures on two rival petitions about the province’s future, a count of signatures rather than of distinct people, since one person could sign both.

Why did trust fall? The legal philosopher Lon Fuller argued that law commands allegiance when the rules as announced match the conduct of those who administer them. Citizens withdraw trust when they watch that congruence fail, and the recent Canadian record has given them ample occasion.

The pandemic supplied the densest record. In Ingram v. Alberta, Justice Barbara Romaine found in 2023 that Alberta’s public health orders exceeded the authority of the Public Health Act because cabinet, rather than the Chief Medical Officer of Health, made the final decisions. The public had been told it was following medical expertise. The statute assigned the decision to an expert. Ministers took it. The same judgment upheld the infringements of Charter rights as reasonable limits, although the government produced no comprehensive study of lockdown harms. Courts across the country followed that pattern: they policed which official signed an order and rarely asked whether it should have been signed.

In January 2026 the Federal Court of Appeal confirmed that the federal government’s 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable, exceeded its legal authority and infringed the Charter. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government appealed to the Supreme Court in March. The Auditor General, meanwhile, found $4.6 billion in pandemic benefit overpayments to ineligible recipients and at least $27.4 billion more that warranted investigation, and could only estimate the cost of the ArriveCAN app at $59.5 million because the records were so poor.

Albertans also learned during those months what a public commitment was worth. In July 2021, Premier Jason Kenney declared that Alberta would neither facilitate nor accept vaccine passports, which he said would in principle contravene the province’s health-information and privacy laws. Several weeks later, his government introduced proof of vaccination under another name, the restrictions exemption program.

The incongruence reaches beyond emergencies. Governments across the country have written “gender identity” into human rights law. Governments across the country have joined in and often use the power of law to enforce the fantasy that a man can be a woman on utterance.

It is no wonder trust in elites and institutions is running low among the unwashed masses that Boessenkool and Wesley distrust.

Legislatures, the institutions the authors would strengthen, largely stepped aside. Parliament curtailed its sittings. The federal government’s first draft of its emergency spending bill in March 2020 would have allowed the executive to tax and spend without parliamentary approval until the end of 2021. The opposition parties forced the government to drop the taxing power and to shorten the spending authority to a matter of months, the clearest instance of representatives exercising the check they exist to provide. In Alberta, the Kenney government’s Bill 10 allowed ministers to amend legislation by ministerial order during the emergency, a power the legislature repealed a year later. The capacity for scrutiny existed. The will to use it against a governing party and a prevailing consensus rarely appeared.

The press, meant to check all three branches, now depends on the state it covers. The Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit refunds 35 per cent of qualifying newsroom salaries, up to $29,750 per journalist, and paid out about $71 million for just over 3,000 journalists in 2024.

In 2026, the federal government proposed extending it to broadcasters. Google’s $100 million a year under the Online News Act flows through a collective of news organizations, and eligibility for both measures depends on a designation the state confers. Combined, the two can cover about half a journalist’s salary.

Dependency does not prove editorial capture, and subsidized outlets still print some criticism of the government. Readers, however, trust the appearance of independence, and Ottawa has spent it. The Line advertises that it takes no federal subsidies, which shows that independence from Ottawa’s money has become a selling point. The Line also published this essay in partnership with a campaign, which shows that alignment with elite opinion requires no cheque.

Incongruence has continued under the present federal government. Carney told the April 2025 leaders’ debate that China was Canada’s biggest security threat. By January 2026 he was hailing a strategic partnership in Beijing, and in September Canadians learned from China’s defence ministry that the two militaries had resumed a formal dialogue after eight years. In July he described the Gordie Howe bridge deal as sharing revenue only after the bridge’s debt was serviced; the text released days later split half of net revenues with a fund controlled by the United States for 15 years. He said he should have been clearer.

Behind these episodes lies a structural change that defenders of representation rarely name: Canada’s representative model has narrowed significantly. Donald Savoie documented in Governing from the Centre how power migrated from cabinet to the Prime Minister’s Office. Jeffrey Simpson called the result The Friendly Dictatorship. Paul Martin campaigned against a “democratic deficit” before he became prime minister. From 1970 to 2015, the Canada Elections Act required a party leader’s signature on the nomination of every candidate who ran under the party’s name, giving the leader a legal veto over who reached the House of Commons. Michael Chong’s Reform Act, 2014 removed that requirement but left each party free to decide who signs, including the leader, and gave caucuses the power to review their leaders.

In May 2025, weeks after winning government, the Liberal caucus declined those powers for the fourth consecutive Parliament. Neil Nevitte charted The Decline of Deference in 1996, a generation before social media. Wesley and Boessenkool object that the premier’s office wrote the referendum questions. Their remedy leaves intact a system in which the leader’s office writes nearly everything else, and it would restore delegated conventions whose delegates the same party machinery would vet.

Duane Bratt of Mount Royal University supplied the sociology the Line essay assumes. In a July post, he argued that Alberta’s separatists and the opponents of pandemic restrictions are the same people pursuing the same ideas, offered four activists as his sample, and concluded that their shared worldview amounts to an organizing principle marked by distrust of experts, courts and legacy media. The post contains no survey data. It also misreads the correlation it describes.

Political scientists since David Easton have distinguished support for a government’s performance from attachment to the regime itself, and have shown that sustained performance failures erode the second. A citizen who watched Ottawa obstruct pipelines, divide citizens to gain advantage, impose draconian mandates and invoke emergency powers a court later found unlawful has three observations pointing the same way. Distrust that carries from one issue to the next is ordinary induction. Bratt himself notes that the NDP stood united for the restrictions and stands united against separation. By his own method, uniform trust across both issues would be an organizing principle too.

Premier Danielle Smith read that distrust more accurately than her critics. She rose on the grassroots revolt that ended Jason Kenney’s premiership. In May 2022, Kenney won 51.4 per cent of the 34,298 ballots in a leadership review driven largely by members’ anger over pandemic restrictions, and he resigned the same night, conceding the result was not adequate support to continue. Smith won the leadership that October and received 91.5 per cent in her own review in November 2024.

The referendum questions came out of the Alberta Next town halls. On separation, she folded the demands of two rival petitions into a single question with two options, framing it as an obligation to the hundreds of thousands of Albertans who had signed. Critics on both sides dislike the wording, and separatists within her own party now press for a leadership review. The pressure confirms the point: the grassroots check operates on a leader who owes her office to it. That’s democratic activity in Alberta.

Wesley and Boessenkool diagnose Alberta’s distrust as a malfunction produced by direct democracy. But the chronology runs the other way. Distrust came first, and recall, initiative, and referendum were among the responses. Removing the responses leaves the distrust in place, with fewer lawful outlets. Hannah Arendt observed that authority rests on recognition, and that where force must be used, authority has already failed. Institutions regain recognition by showing, over time, that they will check power when checking it is inconvenient: a press that holds its paymaster to account, courts that weigh rights as carefully as they weigh procedure, and legislators who scrutinize their own party in office. Until then, the ballot remains one of the few instruments Albertans hold.

Electoral democracy is for losers. Sure. It exists so those who lose can try again without breaking anything, and an elite that proposes narrowing their means of trying again has misunderstood the system it claims to defend. Instead, they set the table for things to be broken later.

I was happy to volunteer, so here is the text I prepared for Alberta and the West Assembly · Delivered September 19, 2026 · Marco Navarro-Génie · written version, revised September 21, 2026

— * — * —

Good morning. Thank you, co-chairs Preston Manning and Gordon Campbell, for the opportunity to contribute to this Assembly. Thank you also to the delegates and to those watching.

My task is a narrow one. I have been asked to present what the principal organizations opposed to Alberta separation say about Question 10. On what grounds they say it. And what, if anything, they propose that Alberta do inside Canada instead. The organizers put it as a question: remain, and do what?

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“Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil,” Roger Scruton once observed. “Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”

Scruton’s charity can be extended to David Eby, up to a point. The premier may be merely mistaken about what British Columbia needs. But his conduct this week reveals something harder. It shows a politician untroubled by striking an opponent at the moment it lies on the floor, and willing to call the blow a matter of principle. Ontario watched this kind of appetite at work once before.

In the summer of 1990, Madonna took her Blond Ambition tour around the world, and David Peterson took a 24-point lead to the voters of Ontario. The tour was a triumph. Peterson began the campaign ahead of the NDP by that margin in a June Environics poll, called an election he did not need, and lost his government and his own seat in London Centre. Ambition flaunted is a stage act. In politics, voters tend to read it as a questionable motive.

Premier David Eby has now tested that proposition. On September 22, two years into a mandate that British Columbia’s fixed-election law set to run until October 2028, he dissolved the legislature for a vote on October 24. He did so two days after Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as Conservative leader, following a summer of mass defections, damaging leaks and a possible RCMP bribery investigation. The NDP caucus met the Sunday night of her resignation to discuss an early vote. Cabinet minister Lana Popham announced her retirement the next day. The writ followed a day later.

The opponent who cannot answer

The premier’s public case rests on Washington. He called the trade war “an existential moment” and cast the vote as a “firebreak” against Trump’s economic attack and the Trump-style politics he uses to smear his opponents. Doug Ford made a similar argument in February 2025 and won again; Mark Carney rode it to a mandate in Ottawa that spring. There is much anti-Americanism in this country. Eby’s defenders add that a one-seat majority is a fragile instrument, resting on Garry Begg’s 22-vote recount win in Surrey-Guildford, and that a single death or defection could have ended it.

Running against a foreign president offers the convenience of an opponent who never answers back. Trump will not appear in a British Columbia leaders’ debate, rebut a platform or face a voter on a doorstep in Surrey. A premier who campaigns against him need not dwell on strained health care, affordability or record deficits, or on his government’s reversals over the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, all of which wore down NDP support earlier this year. Angus Reid found more British Columbians rating the government’s performance poor (47 per cent) than good (39 per cent). Choosing an adversary who cannot fight back is clever and requires little courage. The tactic has worked for Ford and for Carney, and it will keep working until voters recall that the name on the ballot is Eby’s and so is the record.

Yet the sequence of events speaks louder than the rationale. The tariffs predate Findlay’s leadership. What changed in September was the opposition’s condition. In the days before the call, the government paused an expansion of the provincial sales tax and reversed its halt to promised services at Burnaby Hospital.

Municipal leaders asked Eby not to schedule his vote a week after their own local elections. Jenna Stoner of the Union of BC Municipalities asked what difference four weeks could make. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim made the same request. The premier declined both. Asked why a majority government needed an election, he said that asking British Columbians what they think is never wrong. Presumably that holds even when the question is timed to the moment one’s opponent has no leader.

New Democrats have long presented themselves as the conscience of provincial politics: the party of fair play, of the underdog, of the scrupulous rule-follower. This call sits awkwardly with that self-portrait. The government watched its opponent lose a leader, counted the empty chairs across the aisle and sent voters to the polls before the Conservatives could choose a permanent successor. The compassion the party professes appears to stop at the opposition benches. Hard dealing is part of politics; preaching fair play while practising it is another matter.

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Lawful, but unfair

British Columbia was the first province to legislate fixed election dates, in 2001. A statute with no penalty binds only a premier who chooses to be bound. Eby broke no law. Voters can nevertheless tell the difference between what a statute permits and what fair dealing expects, and Ontario punished a similar liberty in 1990.

John Horgan chose to ignore the fixed date in 2020, sending British Columbians to the polls on October 24 of that year, the same date Eby has now chosen, and Eby sat at his cabinet table. His party took the lesson that early elections pay. The lesson it may be about to relearn is the one Peterson taught: an unnecessary election invites voters to judge the man who called it, and the verdict can arrive fast.

The accidental unifier

Here the irony starts. Eby’s calculation assumed the right would stay divided. The call itself removed the conditions that kept it divided.

Before the writ, reunification was an open question. Rustad described “high level” unity talks with the breakaway CentreBC and put their odds at 95 per cent, which is how politicians talk about deals that have not closed. The deadline closed it.

Lorne Doerkson, the Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA the party board chose as interim leader, readmitted five exiles, Rustad among them, on his first day. On the day of the call, he stood at CRAB Park with 13 caucus members, including former leadership rivals Caroline Elliott, Iain Black and Peter Milobar, who had been named CentreBC’s leader only the previous Friday. Doerkson told reporters Eby would “regret” giving voters a chance for change.

An election five weeks away concentrates the mind of every MLA who crossed the floor. The only party with a province-wide organization, a donor list and a recognizable brand is the one most of them left. The premier’s decision set their deadline. His rhetoric supplied their slogan. In a few days Eby accomplished what months of back-room negotiation had not.

The union remains incomplete. OneBC, led by Dallas Brodie, whom Rustad expelled from caucus in March 2025, still draws on the Conservatives’ right flank, and it picked up Findlay’s husband, Surrey South MLA Brent Chapman, the day the writ dropped. CentreBC, reduced to its leader, Elenore Sturko, has kept a slate of centrist candidates, including former Green leader Andrew Weaver.

At 4 per cent each in the latest Liaison Strategies poll, the two splinter parties could decide close Lower Mainland ridings under first-past-the-post. Doerkson begins the campaign largely unknown: 21 per cent view him favourably and 29 per cent unfavourably. Under his party’s constitution, an interim leader cannot seek permanent leadership, though Rustad insists there is a path for Doerkson to become premier. Voters are being asked to choose a government whose leader’s status is unsettled.

A lesson from the Chrétien years

Conservatives should take the warning. Their opponents will not wait while they settle internecine quarrels. The New Democrats play for keeps, and they will run down a divided opposition whenever it offers them the chance. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals taught the same lesson through the 1990s. With Reform and the Progressive Conservatives splitting the right, Chrétien won three consecutive majorities. He called the 1997 and 2000 elections early, the second barely three and a half years into his mandate and months after Stockwell Day took over a newly founded Canadian Alliance. The right reunited only in 2003, after a decade of defeats.

Politics has always been a craft of compromise. A coalition that cannot absorb disagreement cannot govern, and a party that expels its own members over doctrine writes the opposing party’s campaign for it. The Conservatives’ summer of purges handed Eby his opening and his slogan. Unless they learn to tolerate and deal with dissent in the ranks before the next leadership contest, they will offer him, or his successor, the same gift again.

The orphaned voter

The electorate has not reunited either. The NDP leads the Conservatives 41 per cent to 36 per cent, yet half of British Columbians say the province is on the wrong track, and the premier’s approval is split almost evenly, 42 to 43. Angus Reid found that 51 per cent feel like political orphans, a sentiment shared by 41 per cent of past NDP voters and 55 per cent of past Conservative voters. Those voters have yet to choose a party. Eby is betting that they will decide the Conservatives remain too chaotic to govern. The Conservatives need them to conclude that the chaos ended when the writ dropped, and that the one acting erratically now is the premier who called an election he promised by law to hold in 2028.

Peterson’s collapse shows how quickly a sour mood can find a punishing vehicle once voters sense opportunism. He announced his election at the end of July 1990, and by September 6, some five and a half weeks later, his government was finished. His standing as the best choice for premier fell from 39 per cent to 12 per cent in that span. Voters did not rally to Mike Harris, three months into his leadership, whose Conservatives won 20 seats.

They turned to a much worse punishing tool: Bob Rae, whose New Democrats took 74 of 130 seats with about 37 per cent of the vote and formed the first NDP government in Ontario’s history, while Peterson’s Liberals fell from 95 seats to 36. Eby has given himself a 32-day campaign, almost the same span. British Columbia’s anti-NDP vote now has a closer and larger vehicle than Ontario’s did in 1990, and the premier rebuilt it in a single week, hoping to profit from its collapse.

Ambition has its uses. It gives a politician the nerve to act while rivals hesitate. But ambition that times a vote to an opponent’s collapse gives that opponent a principled reason to reassemble and gives voters a reason to ask whose interest the timing serves.

British Columbians must now decide whether to reward a premier who chose the date for his own convenience, chose an opponent who cannot respond and chose not to run on his record. If the Conservatives win on October 24, the party may owe its revival less to Doerkson, Rustad or Milobar than to the premier who called the election and forced it back together.

The authority that a first minister exercises carries an obligation of dignity and composure, especially in adversity. It is not a question of style but of discipline.

That discipline matters most when a leader’s words carry consequences for the people he represents. Manitoba’s hard-working beekeepers are a prime example.

Manitoba beekeepers are among the most productive in the country. The province’s roughly 1,015 beekeepers ran about 119,000 colonies in 2025 and produced 17.85 million pounds of honey, second only to Alberta’s 34.2 million. Each colony averaged about 150 pounds of honey that year, among the best per-hive returns in the country.

The operations are typically family farms. Some started with four hives in a back field. It’s a hard business. Hives sit in wintering rooms for nearly six months, with winter losses running near 20 per cent on average. Spring and fall go to building colonies up and settling them down, leaving only about two full months for producing honey. That narrow window carries the income hopes for a whole year.

Manitoba’s honey industry is worth about $50 million, less than what the province’s civil servants spend in one afternoon. It is not a flashy, billion-dollar industry. But it ships nearly two-thirds of its production abroad and accounts, by volume, for 54.5 per cent of Canadian honey exports, compared with Alberta’s 20 per cent and Saskatchewan’s less than eight per cent.

Those shipments were worth $28.79 million to Manitoba last year. That is a genuine export success built on decades of patient, quiet work. Most of it goes south, which is why honey’s appearance on Washington’s list of goods facing 50 per cent tariffs is not an abstraction. It hits this industry directly.

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On Aug. 20, as Ottawa weighed concessions to smooth a deal, Premier Wab Kinew called President Trump “erratic,” “irresponsible” and “not to be trusted,” adding “you can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”

Two days later, once talks collapsed, Kinew backed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s walkout. He told Manitobans, “History will not be kind to Donald Trump,” and “we should never appease him, and we should fight back.” Such personal retaliation comes with consequences.

The premier is perfectly entitled to his opinion of President Trump, and plenty of Manitobans may share it. That is not the issue. The issue is prudence: a premier owes his province the discipline to know that livelihoods sit downstream of his words.

Washington’s list falls hardest on British Columbia and Quebec, whose premiers have gone further than Kinew, and lightest on Alberta and Saskatchewan, whose premiers exercised greater restraint. Manitoba can least afford to find out whether needless political provocation carries an economic price.

Federal subsidies are not the answer. This is a have-not province that already draws roughly $5 billion in equalization for 2026-27 and has run deficits in all but two of the last 17 years. A credit-rating agency has recently warned that trade turmoil could push this year’s shortfall toward $900 million, a hole that affects every Manitoban, beekeeper or not. With finances already this weak, Manitoba can hardly afford another economic blow. More subsidies only weaken Manitoba’s economic health.

Dealing with a tough trading counterpart in the U.S. administration is not easy. But dignity and discipline matter, especially when others may suffer for their absence. A premier’s words should shield the people he represents, not leave them paying for a fight they did not choose.

Manitoba’s beekeepers earned their export success through patience and hard work. Their premier owes every Manitoban the same discipline.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is vice-president of research and policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which will host Reclaiming the North in Winnipeg on Sept. 14 and 15, featuring retired lieutenant-general Michel Maisonneuve, former Norway House Cree Nation chief Ron Evans and Frontier president David Leis. Marco is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

How does a country become more sovereign by joining a union that makes rules but cannot vote on them? Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament this week that Canada will.

Ursula von der Leyen offered the title of “first associate member” the day before, and he welcomed it, then said at his press conference that the term was hers. But the term has no substance yet. No treaty article defines an associate member, no text sets out what Canada would take on or give up, and the two sides have agreed only to “define together” what the words mean. The sovereignty he promised rests, for now, on an aspiration with a name. The question is how it could ever work.

Start with what nobody disputes. Canada sells roughly seven of every ten export dollars to one customer, and that customer has spent almost two years proving it will use the fact against us. Albertans have been saying this since Quebec and BC blocked new pipelines to tidewater. Ottawa treated the complaint as a regional grievance, killed Northern Gateway, let Energy East die, and bought Trans Mountain only after its owner gave up. If the federal government has finally discovered that Canada needs more customers, the West welcomes the conversion, however late. Closer ties with Europe are part of any sensible answer; Europe is wealthy, democratic, and already bound to us by a trade agreement. Its future, however, is questionable.

The argument rests on emotional primacy and the claim that a closer embrace makes Canada freer.

Eight things about that claim do not add up.

The first is the use of the word sovereignty. Mark Carney used it six times in Strasbourg. He defined it as a country’s ability to make its own choices without being dictated to. Then he listed what he wants from Europe: common standards for artificial intelligence, pooled computing power, an integrated market for financial services, membership in European research and student programmes, alignment on energy and digital rules. How much of that requires Canada to follow rules made by institutions in which it has no seat and no vote? Members surrender powers and get a vote in return. A non-member who follows the rules gets the obligations without the empowering vote.

At Davos in January, Carney had a phrase for accommodating a hegemon. He called it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Everyone understood which hegemon he meant. The sentence today fits Brussels without changing a word.

The second is the title. Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the chance to become “the first associate member of the EU.” Carney said that the substance matters; the substance has a name. The Union’s treaty provides, in Article 217, for agreements “establishing an association” with outside countries. Turkey has had one since 1963 and is still in the antechamber; nobody with an association agreement is a member. The adjective in von der Leyen’s sentence is inaccurate. It describes an old arrangement.

The third is where the word associate comes from. Official Canada has spent a decade repudiating colonialism: the 2008 parliamentary apology, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justin Trudeau accepting the word genocide, a new citizenship oath, the Vimy Memorial removed from the passport, Canada Day cancelled in city halls, names changed, and statues pulled down.

Now the same official Canada seeks its independence in the embrace of a project founded by colonial powers, with the development of their colonies written into its birth certificate. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 devoted a whole chapter, Part Four, to “the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories,” meaning the colonies of France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, from the Congo to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, twenty-five kilometres off Newfoundland.

That chapter is where the word “association” enters the Union’s law. It survives as Articles 198 to 204, and its annex still lists Greenland and Saint-Pierre. Canada would be the third North American party to an association with Brussels; the other two hold the word under the colonial chapter.

On Sunday (September 20) the Prime Minister flies to Saint-Pierre, French colonial territory a short boat ride from the Burin Peninsula, to affirm sovereignty beside President Macron, whose country, let me remind you again, has not ratified CETA. Nobody in Ottawa seems to have looked up St.-Pierre’s address.

Ottawa claims to fight second-hand colonialism at home but embraces it in the splendour of colonial metropoleis.

The fourth is the absurdity of such company given their decolonizing rhetoric. The states that wrote Part Four and still carry it did not run gentle empires. Belgium’s King Leopold II secured recognition of his personal rule over the Congo in 1885, during the Berlin Conference, and ran it on rubber quotas enforced by the severed hand until Belgium took it over in 1908; the dead are counted in the millions.

France conquered Algeria in 1830, massacred thousands at Sétif on the day Europe celebrated victory in 1945, and fought an eight-year war of torture and reprisal before leaving in 1962. And let us not forget Saint-Domingue, France's abominable slave colony. Its slaves freed themselves and founded Haiti, the first republic of their kind. France then made them pay for that freedom: 150 million gold francs, demanded in 1825 under the guns of a French fleet and reduced to ninety million in 1838. Haiti borrowed the money from French banks and was still repaying it in 1947.

None of these states is disqualified from trade by its past; every one of them is a democracy Canada should deal with.

But Ottawa has told Canadians for a decade that a country’s colonial past measures its standing. By that measure, the club it has been invited to associate with fails at the door.

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The fifth is the deal we already have. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was signed in 2016 and has been provisionally in force since 2017. Nine years later, ten of the twenty-seven member states still have not ratified it, including France and Italy, and the French Senate voted it down two years ago by 211 to 44 (vive la fraternite franco-canadienne!).

The Union offers a status it has not invented, while it has not finished approving the deal it signed with this country. Canada has been associated to Pillar II of the EU’s Horizon research programme since July 2024, paying a contribution set by the size of our economy, under a regulation stating that association “does not confer on the third country any decision-making power.” Carney asked on Thursday for more of the same: Erasmus and the next Horizon. Those are membership fees for non-members.

The sixth is energy and climate. Carney told Strasbourg that Canada would offer Europe its energy “in every form the transition requires,” and he named climate change first among the storms the alliance is meant to weather. In 2011, the European Commission proposed labelling Alberta oil sands crude as dirtier than every other source, penalizing it for every fuel supplier in the Union; Alberta fought for three years before Brussels backed down in 2014.

Two years earlier, the Union restricted seal products, wrecking Inuit markets despite an exemption on paper, and the World Trade Organization upheld its moral rationale while finding the regime discriminatory. The regulatory instinct Alberta has spent fifteen years fighting in Brussels is the one an associate absorbs as law. A country that wants to sell more oil and gas to the world does not begin by binding its energy rules to the bloc that tried to keep its oil out.

The seventh is the man making the case. As Governor of the Bank of England in May 2016, Carney warned Britons that leaving the European Union could mean recession, a falling pound and slower growth. Britons left anyway, mostly because they wanted laws made at home, which is an assertion of sovereignty. Carney now proposes that Canada travel the same road the other way, citing sovereignty as the reason. If laws made at home were reason enough for Britain to leave, what makes rules made in Brussels a gain in sovereignty for Canada?

The eighth is the unseemly needy tone. Why must every trade relationship this government pursues arrive dressed as something more? In Beijing in January, Carney announced a “strategic partnership” for a new world order with a one-party state that held two Canadians hostage for a thousand days, penetrated the Winnipeg microbiology lab and counts agents among MPs and senators. Four days later, at Davos, Carney told the world the old order was not coming back. In Strasbourg this week, he spoke of roots, of acorns carried home from Vimy (the place Ottawa erased from passports), of an affinity “elective, chosen, and renewed,” and von der Leyen answered with the language of family.

A trade agreement is a contract between parties: it sets tariffs, rules of origin and a dispute panel, and either side can walk away from it. That freedom to walk away is what sovereignty means in practice (ask the United States). A government that describes each new customer as a partner, each partnership as a homecoming, and each homecoming as sovereignty seems to want to belong badly. Diversification means many customers and no exclusive loyalty. It’s business, but instead Ottawa is displaying the unseemly psychology of a jilted party everywhere it goes.

The customers Canada needs are in Asia, the Gulf, Latin America and, yes, Europe, and reaching them means building the ports, pipelines and terminals that get Canadian goods to tidewater. Selling more to Europe requires none of the things Carney asked for in Strasbourg; it requires using the agreement we already have and a way to ship.

Diversification is the right goal. Canadian goods need markets. A title of subordination from Brussels is not a market.

But it does not solve the central strategic problem.

Canada still relies almost entirely on a single corridor through Metro Vancouver for its non-U.S. crude exports. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline (TMX), even optimized to roughly 1.2 million barrels per day, channels the nation’s most valuable commodity through a region where Natural Resources Canada gives a 30 percent chance of a significant earthquake within the next 50 years.

The Lower Mainland sits on deep, saturated basin sediments that are prone to liquefaction; a corridor built across them is prone to catastrophic disruption. Dredging Burrard Inlet for larger tankers does not change this reality. Nor does the proposed terminus of the new line at Roberts Bank, south of Vancouver, which sits on the Fraser River delta.

Expanding west-coast egress is good. Relying solely on the Lower Mainland is foolish.

Canada needs geographic redundancy.

Prince Rupert, B.C., offers a deep-water port with real economic, environmental and logistical advantages for trans-Pacific energy trade. It is not a replacement for TMX — it is the strategic complement Canada lacks.

Prince Rupert is the closest major North American port to Northeast Asia. By the port authority’s reckoning, a tanker bound for Shanghai sails about 36 hours less from Prince Rupert than from Vancouver. Shorter voyages lower bunker fuel consumption, crew costs and emissions while improving vessel turnaround and supply reliability. For Canadian producers competing in Asian markets, those advantages matter.

The economics reinforce the resilience case. For Asian refiners, a shorter voyage means lower transportation costs and less inventory tied up in transit. For Canadian producers, it improves netbacks and makes barrels more competitive in markets where freight and carbon intensity increasingly affect sourcing decisions. Geographic diversification would therefore do more than insure against disruption: it would create a second export corridor with its own commercial advantages.

Prince Rupert also has natural maritime advantages. Unlike Burrard Inlet — a narrow, urbanized waterway requiring tug escorts, speed restrictions and complex navigational protocols — Prince Rupert opens directly onto the North Pacific. Tankers reach deep water quickly, avoiding many of the bottlenecks and ecological choke points that characterize southern shipping.

None of this requires pretending northern British Columbia is seismically quiet. The Queen Charlotte Fault, offshore from Haida Gwaii, produced Canada’s two largest recorded earthquakes: magnitude 8.1 in 1949 and magnitude 7.8 in 2012. The northern coast faces real seismic hazards, but they are different hazards. They do not sit beneath deep, liquefiable basin sediments or a major metropolitan area with fragile infrastructure.

A northern route does not eliminate seismic exposure; it diversifies it. That is my argument, and it is why redundancy should be treated as national infrastructure policy rather than an optional enhancement.

Recent events make the point difficult to dismiss. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Kumamoto, in southern Japan, on July 28 killed dozens, damaged roads and utilities, and halted automobile and semiconductor production, despite decades of investment in earthquake preparedness. Then, on August 10, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia, killing hundreds and damaging buildings and infrastructure. Neither event proves an earthquake in British Columbia is imminent. Both are evidence that major seismic disruptions are real, recurring risks. Critical national infrastructure should be designed accordingly: not around the assumption that disaster can be engineered away, but around resilience when it occurs. A second Pacific gateway would ensure that no single regional event can sever Canada’s principal export route to Asia.

Any serious discussion of northern access must also address the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, the former Bill C-48. The Act bars tankers carrying more than 12,500 tonnes of crude or persistent oil from loading at any port on the north coast, from the Alaska border to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, a stretch that includes both Prince Rupert and Kitimat. Ottawa announced the moratorium legislation in November 2016 on the same day it rejected Northern Gateway; the Act followed in 2019 and forecloses any revival of that route. The July announcement reaffirmed it: the new pipeline, Ottawa said, will “fully respect” the moratorium even as west-coast pipeline development advances.

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This policy reality cannot be ignored. But it can be debated.

The moratorium was designed for a different era — before TMX was complete and before energy security returned so forcefully to the geopolitical agenda. It closes off deep-water ports that offer Canada significant strategic advantages in Asian trade. If Canada wishes to diversify its energy corridors, reduce its dependence on a single seismic choke point and strengthen its position in Asian markets, it must revisit the moratorium. That could mean amending it, replacing it with a modern regulatory framework, or identifying northern destinations outside the restricted zone.

If British Columbia and the federal government remain unwilling to consider a northern alternative, Canada must acknowledge another geographic reality: Alaska is not bound by C-48. Ports such as Ketchikan sit just north of the moratorium boundary and offer deep-water access under a U.S. government supportive of expanded oil and gas infrastructure.

It is not a threat — it is a fact. If Canada chooses not to diversify its own corridors, others may step into the role.

The central point is simple. Expanding west-coast egress is positive, but concentrating it entirely in the Lower Mainland is strategically reckless. Prince Rupert offers a geographically distinct, economically attractive and environmentally advantageous second gateway. It does not replace TMX. It complements it.

Infrastructure resilience is not achieved by predicting which fault will move next. It is achieved by ensuring that when disruption comes — geological, economic or geopolitical — the country has another route. For an export economy as dependent on energy as Canada, redundancy is not duplication. It is risk management.

David A. McLellan is a senior fellow at the Haultain Research Institute. He has 30 years of experience in energy and finance.

Nova Scotia was not protecting its beekeepers from competition. It was protecting them from a beetle. The province’s hives were free of the small hive beetle, a pest that eats through comb and brood and cannot be driven out once it establishes; the only reliable defence is a closed border. New Brunswick made the opposite bet, admitted Ontario hives for blueberry pollination, and in 2017 found the beetle on the Acadian Peninsula. Nova Scotia had been right, and I had been wrong for a decade. Which raised a question I had never thought to ask: if bees are worth a border, what else about them had I never bothered to learn?

At ten o’clock on a July evening near Fort Vermilion, AB, the sun still stands above the poplars and the bees are still working. The Peace country sits at fifty-eight degrees north, well above Moscow and level with Juneau, Alaska. Beekeepers do push further north than that: Norwegian producers work between roughly sixty and sixty-one and a half degrees, and a Russian hobbyist above the Arctic Circle keeps forty hives and holds the latitude record. Nobody up there, though, keeps bees for a living at anything like this scale. The most northerly commercial honey industry on earth is Albertan, and it is also the most productive in North America. The geek in me thinks that’s cool.

Bees caught me by accident. The NS ban lingering on my mind and a stray curious question about Canadian honey sent me into the Statistics Canada tables, and every answer the tables gave up raised a better question (as tends to be the case). How does the province with some of the harshest winters on the planet make the most honey? Why do British Columbia and Ontario, holding two-thirds of the country’s beekeepers between them, produce barely a seventh of the crop? What follows is what I learned chasing those questions, and why the Alberta chapter kept stealing the country’s book.

The evidence paints the result plainly. Statistics Canada has counted honey since 1924, and across those hundred and two years Alberta has finished first sixty-four times, including every single season since 1986. Forty consecutive years at the top. (Manitoba borrowed the crown once in 1985 and never got it back.)

In 2025, Alberta produced 34 million pounds, roughly a third of the country’s crop, the work of 1,630 beekeepers running just over 200 hives each, triple the national average. Alberta out-produces the entire non-Prairie country every single year. This was all new to me. I was surprised I hadn't run into it before.

Which brings me back to the second question, the one about the coasts. British Columbia and Ontario have the beekeepers. They do not have the honey. Between them, the two provinces hold 65 percent of the country’s beekeepers and only 24 percent of its colonies because most of those beekeepers are hobbyists and sideliners tending a dozen or two hives apiece rather than commercial operators running hundreds. Their bees also work a different job.

Coastal and Ontario colonies earn much of their keep as rented pollination labour (worker bees!), trucked to blueberries, cranberries, and orchards at 120 to 150 dollars a hive, with honey as a sideline; Ontario shipped 22,792 colonies east in 2025 just to pollinate Maritime and Quebec berry fields. Prairie hives stay home and fill supers (extra space for bees to store their honey). The resulting yield gap startled me when I ran the arithmetic.

Average honey yield per colony, 2025, derived from Statistics Canada Table 32-10-0353-01. Chart: Haultain Research.

Saskatchewan tops that chart, and the reason is instructive. Saskatchewan has no coastline, no orchards, and almost no pollination contracts to speak of, leaving its 92,000 colonies with one job all summer: making honey in canola and clover country.

Manitoba runs the same model and lands just behind. Alberta’s 104 pounds looks modest by comparison, and the explanation sits in the south. Somewhere between 55,000 and 80,000 Alberta colonies, roughly one in five, are trucked each summer into the hybrid canola seed fields around Lethbridge, the largest pollination market in Canada. Those hives are managed to move pollen between parent lines rather than to fill supers, and they drag the provincial average down while earning their keep in a different currency. Alberta’s per-hive figure understates its bee pasture; the province simply asks more of its bees than honey.

Honey production, 2000-2025, national and by major province. Source: Statistics Canada, Table 32-10-0353-01 (StatsCan survey excludes Newfoundland and Labrador). Chart: Haultain Research.

Follow the yellow national line in the graph above, and you watch a golden age die abruptly in a single winter. In 2006 the country brought in a record 106.6 million pounds, and Alberta alone accounted for 46.7 million of them, a provincial haul never matched since. Then the floor gave way: the crash that followed cut the country by a third in a single season and cut Alberta by eighteen million pounds; the mite discussed below is responsible.

The line never climbs back. For two decades it saws between recovery and relapse, and the recent teeth are the sharpest, with the hard winters of 2022 and 2024 each erasing a fifth of the national crop; the 2024 fall was the steepest since the original collapse. Beneath all that turbulence, one thing never changes. The blue Alberta line rides above every other, in all twenty-six years, without exception.

My first real surprise came from the canola fields. From all that I had ever read, farm monocultures are usually a famine for bees, mile after mile of a single crop that blooms briefly and feeds them nothing the rest of the season. Canola is the great exception: its flowers run rich in nectar and protein-heavy pollen, and Alberta plants millions of acres of it, blooming in one synchronized yellow flood just as hives reach their summer population peak.

The northern light also puzzled me until I understood how a honey crop forms. Alberta’s season is short, and there is no getting around that: hives break their winter cluster in April, and the serious nectar flow lasts perhaps six or eight weeks, from late June into early August. A hive in a mild climate has months more calendar. What it lacks is a flow like this one. Honey is not a function of how many days a colony can fly; it is a function of how much nectar arrives while the colony is at full strength, and a Prairie hive meets its flood at exactly the moment it holds sixty thousand foragers. An eighteen-hour June day at Fort Vermilion then gives each of those bees four or five more working hours than California or Ontario can offer. Short season, enormous flow, long days: the calendar loses, and the arithmetic wins.

Dry Prairie air finishes the job. It keeps the bees flying, cures the nectar quickly, and starves the moulds and brood diseases that thrive on the humid coasts. The result is the premium white honey that Japan, the most contamination-averse food market on earth, buys by the tonne. Industrial agriculture built the pollinator boom.

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The dataset's villain, a mite, took some reading to understand, and its biography is stranger than I expected. A mite is not an insect but an arachnid, a cousin of the tick and the spider, and Varroa destructor is roughly the size of a pinhead: on a honey bee it rides about as a dinner plate would ride on a man’s back. It began as a parasite of the Asian honey bee, which spent a very long time learning to live with it. Asian workers groom mites off one another and bite them; when a mite slips into a brood cell to breed, the colony detects the infested pupa, tears open the wax cap, and destroys the brood and the parasite inside it. The bees lose a few of their young and keep the mite population down to a nuisance.

Our Western honey bee never learned any of that. When infested colonies were shipped into Europe in the early 1970s, the mite jumped to a host with no grooming reflex, no capacity to detect infested brood, and no instinct to open the cells. It crossed the oceans with the bee trade and first appeared in New Brunswick in 1989. What it does was misunderstood for fifty years: scientists assumed it sucked blood like a tick, until a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed it actually eats the bee’s fat body, the organ that works like a liver and stores the reserves a colony needs to survive five months of winter confinement.

The feeding wound doubles as a syringe. Viruses that would otherwise smoulder harmlessly in a hive travel on the mite and enter the bee’s bloodstream directly, and one of them deforms wings so badly that young bees emerge unable to fly. Beekeepers fought back with synthetic miticides, and the mite, which turns over a generation in a fortnight, evolved around each one within a few years.

So the record colony counts of the past two decades conceal a weaker animal, and each spring the industry rebuilds what winter took. Canadian beekeepers import some 300,000 queens a year, better than eight in ten of them from California and Hawaii, at roughly forty dollars apiece at the border, and they fly in package bees by the tonne from New Zealand, Australia, Italy, and Chile.

Why California, I wondered? Geography again, and this time the advantage runs the other way. A queen must mate on the wing in warm air, and no corner of Canada can stage a mating flight in February or March, exactly when Prairie beekeepers open their hives and count the winter dead. The California Central Valley can. What California sells to Canadians is less the insect than the calendar, and raising queens here in volume would help little against that arithmetic.

The dependency still contains one irony built for Prairie readers. The most promising winter-hardy, mite-resistant genetics in the world were bred in Saskatchewan, selected by putting colonies under mite pressure without chemicals and breeding the survivors. The hybrids are then mass-produced under an exclusive arrangement in northern California and sold back to the Prairies each spring. Saskatchewan supplies the genius; the Sacramento Valley collects the margin.

None of this offends me, and it should not offend anyone who has thought about it for ten minutes. The arrangement is what a continent looks like when its parts do what each does best. Alberta’s canola cannot be grown in the Sacramento Valley; a Sacramento queen cannot be mated in Fort Vermilion in February. The hives on Highway 3 hold both halves of that bargain at once.

The trade ledger held one more surprise, with a sting. Canada exports about a quarter of its honey, and the buyers are concentrated: the United States took 63 percent of 2024 shipments by volume and Japan another third. Japan is the more interesting customer of the two. It is the largest honey importer in Asia, buying some 45,000 tonnes a year against a domestic crop that covers barely six percent of what its people eat, and it pays for quality. Canada supplies only about one Japanese pound in twenty, well behind China, but that trickle earns 44 percent of our export dollars while accounting for 33 percent of our export volume. Japanese buyers paid nearly three dollars a pound for Canadian honey in 2024, while the American price sat closer to two and a half.

Canadian honey exports by province of origin and by destination, 2024. Sources: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Statistical Overview 2024; Statistics Canada. Chart: Haultain Research.

Look at the left panel and the tariff question answers itself. Manitoba is the export champion of Confederation, shipping over half of Canada’s exported honey and nearly two-thirds of its own production abroad, with Alberta a distant second at a fifth. So when Washington put honey on its 50 percent tariff list this year, the blow did not land evenly across the country. It landed on Manitoba. Manitoba’s honey exports were worth $28.79 million in 2024 against Saskatchewan’s $3.67 million, and the great majority of that Manitoba honey crosses the border south.

Premier Wab Kinew has been among the most enthusiastic voices for escalation, pulling American liquor from Manitoba shelves, backing Ottawa’s withdrawal from trade talks without reservation, and telling reporters that Canada should never appease the American president but fight back. A premier is entitled to that view. What he is not entitled to is the pretence that the bill lands somewhere else. Retaliation is decided in Ottawa and cheered in Winnipeg, and paid for, in this instance, by roughly a thousand Manitoba beekeepers whose product is now the most tariff-exposed sweet commodity in the country. The sweetest corner of Prairie agriculture doubles as a live exhibit in the tariff wars.

Something larger than agriculture also hums in those hives, and this discovery reframed the whole file for me. Environmental science formally deputizes the honey bee as a biomonitor: a colony operates as tens of thousands of airborne sampling devices, and every kilogram of honey represents more than 100,000 foraging flights through the surrounding country. Federal scientists published the case for bees as living environmental sensors in the journal Ecological Indicators in 2022.

By that standard, Alberta submits roughly thirty-four million pounds of favourable environmental evidence annually. A province that radical environmentalists would routinely have people believe is an ecological sacrifice zone accelerating the end of the world leads the continent in a product that functions as a distributed environmental assay, holds record colony counts, and clears the food-safety standards of Japan, the world’s fussiest importer. A wasteland does not do this.

The finding comes with limits. The bees acquit the province, rather than the oil sands mine perimeter. The mineable oil sands sit in the northeastern boreal forest around Fort McMurray; the bee belt runs through the Peace country, the central parkland, and the southern irrigation districts, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest tailings pond. Alberta’s own environmental tally puts the disturbed mining area near 900 square kilometres, little more than a tenth of one percent of the province.

Before anyone reaches for the obvious retort, apply it evenly. Pick whatever Alberta industry the critics consider greenest, and ask how many hives it supports within a kilometre of its operations. A wind farm produces no nectar. A solar array produces no nectar. A hydro reservoir produces no nectar. No industrial site of any kind feeds bees, which live on flowering plants and farmland, so the absence of hives beside a mine tells you where the flowers are and nothing whatever about what the mine emits. Provincial-scale evidence answers the provincial-scale slander, and answers it decisively. It says little about conditions within the foraging radius of the mines, because almost no hives sit there, and no one has yet put any there to find out.

That gap is a standing invitation, and the fairer version of the test is already sitting in plain view. Oil sands operators have reclaimed thousands of hectares of mined land and seeded it back to boreal cover, and reclaimed ground grows flowers. Put hives on it. Run a second line of instrumented colonies from Fort McMurray down to the Peace, assay the pollen, honey, propolis, and the bees themselves for hydrocarbons and heavy metals, and publish whatever comes back. The method is settled, and the cost is trivial beside what both camps spend on advertising. One season would settle what a decade of duelling adjectives has not. The reader may wonder why neither side of the oil sands debate has hurried to fund it.

Despite doomsday charges against Alberta and its energy and ranching industries, the Alberta environment is propitious and welcoming to these tiny canaries in the supposed contaminated coal mine that the radical environmentalists see in Alberta. Next time you hear/read someone tell you, and they will, that Alberta is an environmental wasteland, tell them about our bees.

The verdict writes itself at fifty-eight degrees north. Alberta’s story is sweet precisely where its critics insist it is toxic, and the proof works the canola under the midnight sun. The copious, coveted honey is the receipt.

Everything about the case except the arrest was Canadian. Ressam had arrived in 1994 on a French passport that officials identified as fake on sight. He stayed by claiming asylum. The claim failed in 1995; the appeal failed in 1996; the deportation order was never executed. Some things have not changed. CSIS had watched him as part of its investigation of a suspected Montreal extremist network. In March 1998, using a Canadian passport obtained under a false identity, he left for terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. He returned under that identity in February 1999. He cooked his explosives in a Vancouver motel and drove to the Victoria ferry. Within thirty seconds, an alert American inspector had seen enough to order the secondary search that exposed what five years of Canadian process had not.

That was an isolated incident, right? Perhaps not. Canada is a country persuaded that terrorism merely passes through it, so it may never examine itself honestly. That is the Canadian condition, and it has now lasted more than half a century. On this 25th anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, it might be propitious to examine the record as a way to honour the two dozen Canadians who died there.

The United States answered September 11 with a public, adversarial, document-driven commission that named its own institutional failures in print, under oath, for posterity. Canada, whose territory staged the nearest miss of the pre-9/11 era, held nothing. No commission examined what Canadian agencies knew about the Montreal networks, when they knew it, or why a man with a rejected refugee claim and a surveillance file boarded a ferry with a bomb. An American courtroom in Seattle assembled the accounting that now exists.

The reflex behind that omission surfaced again only a few days ago. Ahead of the 9/11 twenty-fifth anniversary, which is today, a memo from CBC News instructed journalists, in bold type, not to refer to the September 11 attacks as terrorist attacks; the approved formulation described hijackings that led to passenger jet crashes. After condemnation from the FBI director, the American ambassador, and Canadian ministers and opposition alike, the memo’s author, standards chief Basem Boshra, reversed the guidance on a Friday afternoon, conceding it had become an impediment to clarity and public understanding. The episode lasted four days and will likely be forgotten before Thanksgiving. But we should try to remember it because the memo is a small window into a larger habit.

The case for the defence

Attribution is a legitimate journalistic principle. The BBC, the Associated Press, AFP, and Reuters all counsel caution with the word terrorism because governments the world over abuse it to smear opponents, and a broadcaster that hands out the label freely will soon be handing it to whoever holds power. CBC’s editor-in-chief made that argument accurately in 2023. Nor was Canada attacked on September 11. Its 9/11 stories were real and were covered at length: Gander’s improvised hospitality to thousands of stranded passengers; a war in Afghanistan that cost 158 Canadian soldiers their lives; the Arar inquiry, which investigated Canadian complicity in the rendition and torture of a citizen and produced reform and compensation. On this reading, Canada owed nobody a commission because it failed to examine anything. The planes did not come down here.

Ressam alone destroys the premise. But he does not stand alone. Set the record out from October 1970 forward, and the premise collapses under its own weight.

The record

The FLQ opened the modern era with roughly two hundred bombings, culminating in the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte and Laporte’s murder in October 1970. In the following decade, Ottawa’s diplomatic quarter became a hunting ground. Armenian gunmen shot and paralyzed the Turkish commercial counsellor Kani Gungor in April 1982; that August they assassinated Colonel Atilla Altikat at a red light on the parkway, the only murder of a foreign diplomat ever committed on Canadian soil, which has never been solved. In March 1985, three gunmen stormed the Turkish embassy and killed the security guard on duty, Claude Brunelle, a thirty-one-year-old student.

In October 1982, the anarchist cell Direct Action drove a stolen van loaded with 550 kilograms of dynamite from Vancouver to Toronto and blew apart the front of the Litton plant that built cruise missile guidance components, injuring eleven people, including five employees, three police officers and three motorists. In September 1984, a pipe bomb in a luggage locker at Montreal’s Central Station killed three French tourists in the week before a papal visit.

Then came June 23, 1985. Air India Flight 182, destroyed off the Irish coast by a bomb built and loaded in British Columbia, killed 329 people, most of them Canadian citizens. It remains the largest mass murder in Canadian history, and Canadian institutions spent two decades processing it as a foreign tragedy. The public inquiry arrived in 2006, twenty-one years late, and Justice John Major summarized his findings as a cascading series of errors.

The extremist file around it kept producing warnings that went unheeded. When gunmen ambushed the visiting Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on a Vancouver Island road in May 1986, authorities had received clear information about the plot two days earlier; it sat unrelayed over a weekend. Tara Singh Hayer, the Surrey publisher who condemned the bombers within his own community and offered to testify, was shot and paralyzed in 1988 and assassinated in his garage in 1998, the first journalist killed in Canada for his work. No one has been convicted.

The 1990s added a campaign that Winnipeg police themselves called terrorism against doctors: three physicians shot through the windows of their homes, in Vancouver in 1994, Ancaster in 1995, and Winnipeg in 1997, each around Remembrance Day. The American anti-abortion militant James Kopp, convicted of the identical murder of a Buffalo physician, remains the prime suspect in all three. Canada never charged him.

Then Ressam, and then the jihadist era he foreshadowed. Momin Khawaja of Ottawa became the first person convicted under the Anti-terrorism Act in a plot tied to a British fertilizer bomb. The Toronto 18 assembled truck bombs and a plan to storm Parliament in 2006. An al-Qaeda-directed cell plotted to derail a Via Rail train in 2013. In October 2014, two attacks in three days killed Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Corporal Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial, and the killer then entered Centre Block with a rifle. Aaron Driver detonated a device in a Strathroy taxi in 2016 on his way to an attack. In July 2024, the RCMP arrested a father and son in a Richmond Hill hotel with an axe and a machete, in what the force called the advanced stages of planning mass murder for ISIS; the father also faces the first war crimes charges ever laid in a Canadian national security case.

The domestic ideological ledger has also been long. The Quebec City mosque shooting of January 2017 killed six worshippers at prayer and was prosecuted as murder, never as terrorism. The Toronto van attack of 2018 killed ten pedestrians. The London attack of June 2021 killed four members of the Afzaal family on an evening walk, and did produce a terrorist murder conviction. An armed man rammed the gates of Rideau Hall in 2020 in search of the prime minister. In July 2025, the RCMP charged three Quebec men, two of them serving soldiers, with facilitating terrorist activity in a plot to seize land near Quebec City and raise an anti-government militia; an earlier raid had gathered sixteen explosive devices, eighty-three firearms, and eleven thousand rounds.

Since October 2023, Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto have repeatedly been struck by gunfire, while synagogues and other Jewish institutions in Montreal and Vancouver have been attacked with incendiary devices. Many cases remain unsolved; authorities have generally investigated those with identified suspects under ordinary firearms, arson or hate-crime provisions rather than terrorism law.

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The habit

In half a century, every decade has been supplied, and every ideology represented. Yet the incidents live in public memory as disconnected curiosities: a crisis here, a cold case there, a near miss somewhere else. The thread connecting them is institutional conduct. In case after case, the sequence repeats: prior awareness, then inaction, then no reckoning. CSIS surveilled the Air India plotters before the bombing and Ressam before the millennium plot. The Sidhu warning sat in an in-tray over a weekend. Kopp was identified and never charged. The mosque shooter was never charged as a terrorist. And when the record demanded a national accounting, officials deferred it (Air India), outsourced it (Ressam, tried and debriefed in Seattle), or declined it outright (the entire pre-9/11 file).

Externalization is the country’s habit. Canadian institutions treat political violence the way one treats weather from elsewhere: it blows through, it belongs to other people’s histories, and nobody audits the sky. The bookkeeping is asymmetric in a revealing way. What arrives is minimized, and what Canada exports never enters the ledger. The deadliest aviation bombing before 9/11 departed from Canadian soil. The last al-Qaeda plot against America before 9/11 was staged from Montreal.

A 2024 plot against a Brooklyn Jewish centre was staged from Canada again. None of it disturbs the national self-image because the victims fell elsewhere, and a harm that lands elsewhere gets filed as someone else’s history. The CBC memo belongs to the same ledger: language held at tweezers’ length from events, so that the events never quite become ours. Why do we believe that these things are best held in oblivion?

The remedy

The prescription follows from the diagnosis. First, Parliament, were it sitting, could mark the anniversary by commissioning what was never done: a review, armed with the power to compel documents, of the pre-9/11 file, beginning with what CSIS and the RCMP knew of the Montreal networks and why a man under a deportation order assembled a bomb on Canadian soil. The Air India precedent proves that an inquiry two decades late can still tell the truth. Second, Ottawa must assign more resources and become more vigilant about who it lets into the country and prosecute/deport gangsters and foreign criminals. Third, prosecutors should apply the terrorism provisions of the Criminal Code with visible consistency, so that the label ceases to depend on the identity of the victim or the accused. Fourth, public institutions should speak plainly. The CBC found its way to plain speech within four days, once the cost of evasion exceeded its comfort. The rest of the state can be held to the same arithmetic.

The twenty-four Canadians who died in the towers 25 years ago deserve more than a style guide. So do the 329 of Flight 182, the travellers who never knew how close the millennium came to opening with a massacre, and the schoolchildren in Montreal and Toronto who now pass bullet marks on their way to class.

A country defends itself first with words that match the facts, and then with institutions willing to be examined. The postmodern impulse is to forget and look away from troublesome past events. What a country refuses to name at home, it invites again; what it audits honestly, it can begin to prevent. Fifty-six years after the October Crisis, the audit is still owed.

I arrived in this country as an adolescent, with two languages to learn in a new country and a revolution behind me in the old one. Canada asked nothing of me except what any country, new or old, tacitly asks of everyone: that we make ourselves useful. I have lived in Alberta for over 30 years, and this is my home. So, I take a particular interest in being told that the immigration questions on the upcoming October ballot appeal to people, many of whom are good friends of mine, who would rather I had stayed where I was.

Duane Bratt, a former colleague during my teaching days at MRC, has written a somewhat careful case against those questions. He goes through the questions in order, explains his reasoning on each, and lands on a No. He also opposes separation and says so plainly. All that is good. Anyone arguing either side of this referendum should want quality opponents because a case tested against a serious critic survives contact with the public. A case tested against a caricature never does.

However, Bratt writes that the immigration questions appeal to a racist fringe, and that within Alberta separatism “there is a clear racist element.” I will answer that first because a charge like that does not sit alongside the policy argument. It replaces it.

What is more, racism has become such a facile slur that it almost makes no sense. This is especially true when no racial elements are involved. In the Orwellian postmodern paradigm in which so many live, it is no coincidence that the folks who readily qualify other people as “racialized” here and “racialized” there are the most frequent users of the “racist” accusation. It has become a go-to word for those with no arguments, which is why it is somewhat sad to see Duane resort to it.

What the questions say

Read the five questions and look for the words that would carry the charge. Origin appears nowhere. Race appears nowhere. Religion, language, colour, creed: none of those markers that progressives typically assign to “race” appear in any of the five. Instead, the questions use categories of legal status that federal immigration law, which is to say the Parliament of Canada, created and uses daily: citizens, permanent residents, holders of work permits, holders of study permits, asylum claimants.

Bratt knows this, and his argument does not claim otherwise. His claim runs to motive: the questions solve problems that do not exist; therefore, their purpose lies elsewhere, and the elsewhere is scapegoating. The reasoning has an elegant shape and a serious flaw. Any policy a critic judges unnecessary can be assigned a hidden motive by the same method, and no evidence can dislodge the assignment because the absence of racial language in the text becomes proof of the coding rather than proof of its absence. A charge that cannot fail cannot inform. The beauty of some of the weakest thinking we see today lies in the argument that evidence of a nefarious conspiracy is the lack of evidence for it.

Alberta has ugliness, as every society does. Who can forget the infamous Jim Keegstra, vigorously defended by the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA)?

Some people voting Yes in October will vote Yes for reasons I might find contemptible, if I knew every person’s reasons, which I do not. No one can. The same holds for every side of every question ever put to a population. What Bratt owes the argument, and has not supplied, is evidence that this element drives the policy rather than merely stating it.

Consider the province he is describing. Calgary elected Naheed Nenshi, the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city, and then elected Jyoti Gondek, born in Britain to a Punjabi family. Edmonton elected Amarjeet Sohi, born in rural Punjab. For four years Alberta’s two largest cities were led at the same time by mayors of South Asian heritage. Montreal and Quebec City are still waiting to do it once. A racist electorate is remarkably bad at this. The only time that I have been to FortMac, I counted easily about 20 different languages spoken by people walking by at the airport. My church is bursting at the seams with Nigerians and Filipinos. I could go on.

The memory runs deeper than the mayors. John Ware crossed into the District of Alberta in 1882 at the back of a cattle drive, born into slavery in the American South and freed by a war he had no hand in starting. He worked the Bar U and the Quorn, registered his own brand in 1885, homesteaded at Millarville, and built one of the district's first irrigation systems. Ottawa’s immigration policy in those decades worked to keep Black settlers out of the West. The neighbours took a different view, and when Ware died under his horse in September 1905, his funeral was said to be the largest Calgary had yet seen.

Alberta later named a mountain, a creek, and a school after him. The cabin he built in his homestead has been sitting on display, restored, at Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park for decades. Parks Canada finally made him a national historic person in 2022, and the plaque at the Bar U says he built that life despite racism and frontier conditions and having been enslaved, which is the honest way to put it. A place reveals itself in whom it chooses to remember and whom it erases.

Claiming one knows someone’s motives is always difficult to sustain intellectually, and a professor of Duane’s experience knows this, but does it anyway. It is an illegitimate case to make, and it is always illegitimate to assign dark motives to people in the opposite camp to the one that one has chosen. The baseless claim that one knows the motives of those in the wrong opens one to ridicule, if not contempt, for one’s credibility as a person and, worse, as an academician.

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The Charter argument, examined

Bratt makes a second claim that can be tested against a document rather than against motives. He writes that the immigration questions violate mobility rights under the Charter.

Section 6 answers this directly, and the answer runs against him twice.

Subsection 6(2) grants Canadian citizens and permanent residents the right to move to any province and pursue a livelihood there. Holders of work permits and study permits hold no such right, and asylum claimants hold no such right, because the section does not extend to them. The courts have taken the same view. A foreign national who accepted a five-year commitment to practise medicine in one province as a condition of his work permit was later held to have waived any section 6 claim, precisely because the right had never attached to him before he obtained permanent residence. Questions 2, 3 and 4 address exactly the categories outside the section and expressly preserve the position of citizens and permanent residents. Whatever else may be said against them, they do not engage section 6.

Then comes subsection 6(3)(b), which subjects even the rights of citizens and permanent residents to any law providing for reasonable residency requirements as a qualification for receiving publicly provided social services. The framers of the Charter contemplated waiting periods for social programs and included that permission in the text. Question 3 proposes a twelve-month wait for people who hold no section 6 rights at all, which places it further inside the constitutional line rather than outside it. When I arrived in Alberta from Quebec, I had to wait three months to access health services. The same applied when I moved to Nova Scotia.

None of that makes the question unwise. Constitutional permission and good policy are different things, and the twelve-month figure invites a real objection under the Canada Health Act, which allows provinces to impose a residency wait of no more than three months for insured health services. That objection has some force. The mobility-rights objection does not, and a professor of policy studies would want to know which of his arguments carries weight before the campaign tests them.

The scale of the thing

Bratt asks who exactly is being excluded, and answers that the categories are small. On people whose visas have expired, he is right, and the number is modest. On the population the questions address he is not.

Alberta’s own Office of Statistics and Information counted 292,462 non-permanent residents living in this province on 1 July 2025. Work permit holders made up 59.3 per cent of them, study permit holders 16.8 per cent, people holding both 7.4 per cent, family members another 6.9 per cent, with asylum claimants making up the rest. That is a population larger than Red Deer and Lethbridge and Medicine Hat combined, arriving inside roughly three years, into schools and clinics and rental markets that were built for the province we had before.

Nobody in Alberta chose that number. Ottawa set it, and Ottawa has since reversed it, cutting the national non-permanent resident population by close to half a million in fifteen months, which is itself an admission that the earlier number was wrong. A province that absorbs a swing of that magnitude in either direction, without a say in either, has a jurisdictional complaint rather than a racial one.

The letter Bratt raises, and what it shows

He points out that Smith wrote to Trudeau in 2024 asking for more immigrants and asks how that squares with asking for fewer now. The question is fair, and the letter answers it.

On 27 March 2024, Smith asked Ottawa to double Alberta’s Provincial Nominee Program allocation from 9,750 to 20,000, and to add 10,000 places for Ukrainian evacuees. The Provincial Nominee Program is the stream Alberta selects. She was asking for more of the immigration this province chooses, while Ottawa was running federal streams the province does not choose at volumes the province was never consulted about. Her letter says as much, calling the allocation decision one more instance of federal interference in provincial jurisdiction.

Wanting more of what you select while objecting to the volume of what is sent to you states the autonomist position rather than contradicting it. Quebec has held that position since 1991, selects its own economic immigrants under the Canada-Quebec Accord, and nobody calls that arrangement a racist element in Quebec society. No one credible, anyway.

Where Bratt is right

Question 1 is badly built. That’s a fair comment, and there is some evidence for it. It bundles four separate propositions into a single yes-or-no question, and a voter who wants a Quebec-style selection agreement but dislikes the employment-priority clause has no way to say so. Bratt is right that “sustainable levels” carries no number, and right that a voter is entitled to ask what number the government has in mind before authorizing it.

The employment-priority clause is the genuine legal exposure in the whole set. Question 1 asks whether the government should take increased control over immigration to reduce it to more sustainable levels, prioritize economic migration, and ensure Albertans have “first priority to new employment opportunities.” Read that last clause beside subsection 6(2)(b), which protects the pursuit of a livelihood in any province, and which the Supreme Court has held does not depend on residence in the province where the livelihood is pursued.

A rule preferring Albertans for new jobs reaches past non-citizens and might touch Canadians from Saskatchewan and Manitoba, who hold the right in full. Alberta could not shelter such a law behind the notwithstanding clause either, since section 33 does not reach section 6. The rest of the immigration objection is weaker than this part.

Questions 2, 3 and 4 do sit awkwardly together, and a voter could reasonably read them as three answers to the same problem. And Bratt’s hardest case is the children. A province that funds schooling for the child of a temporary worker who pays Alberta taxes, and then bills that family for it, should be able to explain itself in a sentence a decent person would accept. The same can be said for childless Canadians whose property taxes help pay for schools for entire lifetimes.

Those are arguments about drafting, cost and administration. Every one of them can be made, and should be made, without a word about race.

What is being asked

The thread running through the five questions, and through the four constitutional ones behind them, is standing. I see nothing untoward in it. Alberta is asking to occupy space the Constitution already assigns to provinces. Section 95 makes immigration a concurrent jurisdiction, which means this province may legislate in the field today, subject to federal paramountcy where the two collide. Quebec has exercised that standing for over thirty-five years. Alberta is asking for the same, only to be told what its motives must be. This is the “asymmetry” that some Albertans rightly despise. I do.

A serious international literature on managed, orderly immigration exists that Canadians would benefit from reading, and Denmark and Sweden have both run the experiment in ways that ought to inform us. That belongs in its own piece, and I will come back to it in the next couple of weeks.

For now the narrower point stands. Bratt has partially written an argument, and I will engage it rather than dismiss it. The charge appended to it is a different kind of thing, and it does push what argument cannot: it places a question beyond discussion from the start and makes everyone asking it or agreeing to ask it beyond respectability. It is a recognizable tactic, unimpressively employed by people with nothing on their pitch.

I have been an Albertan longer than I was anything else. When I read those five questions, I find control, sustainability, eligibility and cost. I invite anyone who finds something else in them to point at the exact offending line. Innuendo and baseless slurs are not sufficient warrant.

Keep that date in mind.

On September 2 (2026), my good friend and former Alberta premier Jason Kenney posted a short lecture to the Alberta separatists. They want, he says, to copy Quebec’s separatist politics. Do they really want to go from richest province to poorest large province, from “have” to “have not,” from the lowest taxes in Canada to the highest in North America, and to relive the outflow of money, businesses and people that “separatist uncertainty and endless squabbling” set off in Quebec? (See tweet image below).

Four claims inside that post deserve a close look because the former premier is a serious Albertan and the referendum on October 19 is a serious vote.

I have insight to share into some of these things, not only because I studied them formally but because I experienced them firsthand: I grew up in Quebec and went through high school, college, and university in Montreal between 1979 and 1990. I lived a good portion of the story the former premier is telling, and for the benefit of Albertans, we must get it right.

First: who is copying whom?

Search the referendum campaign, the Alberta Prosperity Project’s materials, or the Free Alberta Strategy that Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From published on September 28, 2021, and you will find Quebec cited constantly. What you will not find is anyone proposing Quebec’s economic model.

Nobody in the Yes camp has asked for a 25.75 per cent top provincial income tax rate, a 9.975 per cent sales tax, Hydro-Québec-style rate suppression, or a labour code that forbids replacement workers. Jason first mentions Quebec politics but then swiftly veers toward economics, suggesting that politics begets economics or that autonomist Albertans want to copy Quebec’s economics.

Many Albertans admire Quebec’s institutional strengths: a provincial pension plan since 1966, a provincial police force since 1870, a provincial revenue agency, a permanent presence in the Supreme Court, and a seat at the federal table that Ottawa never dares to leave empty. Anderson said as much when he launched the strategy group in September 2021: “Basically we want what Quebec already has.” He clearly means institutions, not their economic model.

Those are exactly the instruments the Fair Deal Panel recommended studying in May 2020. The panel reported to Premier Jason Kenney, who commissioned it. The 2021 referendum on removing equalization from the Constitution was his too.

Some of the toolkit was assembled by the man now warning about the toolbox.

Second: Quebec was never a “have” province to begin with

Equalization pays provinces whose per-capita fiscal capacity falls below the ten-province average. Alberta’s capacity is the highest in the country, which is why economists on every side agree that no formula could ever make Alberta a recipient.

Quebec’s status is the opposite kind of constant. The program itself began in 1957, under Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale [corrected] government, seven years before the Quiet Revolution reached full stride and nineteen years before the Parti Québécois first won an election. Quebec drew a cheque in year one. It kept drawing one through Lévesque and Parizeau’s separatist governments, through Bourassa’s federalist ones, through Lucien Bouchard in the 1995 referendum, through Charest and Couillard’s austerity, and it draws one today under the Coalition Avenir Québec, a government considerably friendlier to markets than Lévesque’s ever was. Sixty-nine years, every government, every ideology, one status: Quebec has taken in roughly 51 to 52 per cent of every equalization dollar Ottawa has ever paid out.

Kenney’s tweet asks whether separatists want to go “from have to have not.” The question assumes a status Quebec has never held. There is no version of Quebec, nationalist or federalist, socialist or entrepreneurial, that has ever paid into equalization rather than drawn from it. “Have not” is not a destination Quebec risks reaching. It is the only address Quebec has ever had.

Meanwhile, Albertans sent Ottawa $321.9 billion more than they got back between 2007-08 and 2026-27, by the Fraser Institute’s June 2026 projection, roughly $20 billion a year on Trevor Tombe’s long-run estimate. While some complain that Alberta pays, the core complaint about Quebec is that the same province drawing the largest equalization cheque in the country has, for a decade, blocked Alberta’s energy from reaching the market that would let Alberta keep paying it. Quebec killed the Energy East pipeline in 2017 before a single barrel moved through it, and killed the Énergie Saguenay LNG terminal in 2021 after Western Canadian gas had already been engineered into the project, a decision Ottawa confirmed the following year. Both would have carried Alberta and British Columbia product to tidewater. Both died in Quebec. A province can be a permanent net recipient and a permanent gatekeeper at the same time. Quebec manages both.

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Third: secession does not carry a price tag by itself

Jason’s tweet does not directly claim that separation would impoverish Alberta. Its logic is narrower and, in his other public statements, more explicit: the wanting itself is the danger, whatever the outcome of any vote. He has made that case at length elsewhere. In The Republic of Alberta, the 2026 book draws heavily on his own commentary, warning that a referendum campaign could set off what he calls a “non-violent civil war dynamic,” rupturing families, marriages and community organizations before a single ballot is counted.

On one front, the concern is not hypothetical. Chief Clifford Poucette and other First Nations leaders claim that separatist talk, independent of any vote ever being held, already unsettles treaty obligations that predate the province itself. Justice Colin Feasby ruled in December 2025 that a proposed referendum question was unconstitutional because it failed to address Treaty 6, 7 and 8 rights, and a second judge quashed a revised petition on similar grounds in 2026; an appeal contesting these claims is still before the courts.

Those are real complications, and they deserve to be argued on their own terms, not folded into a tweet about Quebec’s tax rates. But Jason’s own logic cuts both ways. If merely wanting to leave produces the disorder he describes, that disorder cannot be blamed on any particular act of leaving, since by his account it arrives before the leaving does. Quebecers wanted to leave, loudly and repeatedly, for two decades before 1995 and have not entirely stopped wanting to since.

The disorder Jason attributes to that wanting would then have to explain not just 1976 to 1981 but every year afterward, including the years Quebec’s finances improved. It does not. The wanting was a constant. The outcomes were not. What changed the outcomes was what governments did while people kept wanting. That is the distinction Jason’s tweet erases, and it is the subject of the rest of this piece.

Jason’s implicit rule is that leaving makes you poor. History declines to cooperate.

Norway left its union with Sweden in 1905 and became one of the richest countries on earth. Singapore left Malaysia in 1965 with no hinterland and no water, and within a generation had outstripped the country that expelled it. Slovakia walked out of Czechoslovakia in 1993 as the poorer half; it now sits inside the European Union and the euro area with a per-capita income that would have seemed fanciful to anyone in Bratislava that year. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania left the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the club of high-income economies. Slovenia did the same from Yugoslavia. Each case had its own conditions, and none is Alberta. But the pattern is plain: what happened afterward depended on what the new state chose to do, not on the act of choosing.

And here is an important detail Kenney’s example quietly omits. Quebec never seceded. It lost two referendums and stayed. But 50 years later, they are still recipients, all while comfortably nestled inside the Canadian federation. Whatever economic damage Quebec suffered or continued to suffer after 1976, secession didn’t cause it. Something else did, and its presence in Canada has not magically fixed and turned it into a have province. So there is that.

Fourth: what emptied Montreal

The former premier is right about one thing. Uncertainty about the new Parti Québécois government did drive capital and people out of Quebec. Between 1976 and 1981, Statistics Canada counts 151,000 anglophones leaving Quebec, with a net loss of 123,000 people in five years, the worst on record. Head offices followed or led.

But look at what the government of René Lévesque did in its first 18 months, before any referendum date had been set, and before a single Quebecer had cast a ballot on sovereignty.

Language came first. The Charter of the French Language became law in August 1977, and it reached well past the schoolyard: French became the mandatory language of the workplace, francization certificates were required of every larger employer, and English commercial signage came under new restrictions, imposing crushing costs on business.

Labour came next, and it came from a real wound. Twenty months of the United Aircraft strike in Longueuil had turned violent, and when Bill 45 outlawed the use of replacement workers during a strike or lockout, the first such ban anywhere in North America, Labour Minister Pierre-Marc Johnson told the National Assembly why: “where there are scabs, there is violence.” The government matched the new labour code with a public monopoly on automobile insurance for bodily injury and, within its first two years, moved to buy an ailing asbestos producer through a new Société nationale de l’amiante, paying well for an industry already collapsing under cancer litigation.

The state’s reach extended into finance itself. Jacques Parizeau, the finance minister, filled the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the pension fund of every working Quebecer, with political appointees within months of taking office, a politicization one later study would call the beginning of “state capitalism” in the province.

And the government reached into wages and into its own survival. It raised the minimum wage to $3.27 an hour on January 1, 1978, and indexed it to stay there. Ontario, the province absorbing Quebec’s fleeing head offices, was still paying $2.65 an hour that same day, 23 per cent less. Quebec’s unemployment rate, a contemporary account in Reason magazine noted in mid-1978, had climbed past 11 per cent.

Parizeau’s second budget, in 1978, raised taxes on incomes above $30,000, and he met the backlash with a shrug he later made famous: “the revolt of the rich.” A new election-financing law capped private political contributions at levels that made building a rival party very hard indeed.

Lévesque had promised all of this as far back as 1976, in a phrase he used often enough that it became his own: a “préjugé favourable aux travailleurs,” a built-in bias toward the worker. His finance minister, an economic nationalist who never met an intervention he distrusted, ran deficits until 1984 and later, in the words of political scientist Brian Tanguay, “purchased social peace by granting the unions a number of generous concessions, especially with respect to maternity leave and job security.” A government of professors was building a socialistic state, and it said so loudly.

That, and not the referendum alone, is what Sun Life was leaving when it made its announcement in January 1978. Lévesque did not announce the referendum question until December 1979. The head offices had already gone.

A shift that started long before the PQ

Setting the record straight requires one more historical acknowledgement. Toronto did not become Canada’s financial capital because of Bill 101. The Toronto Stock Exchange had already overtaken Montreal’s in trading volume in the 1930s, and by 1950 Toronto was the ascendant centre for mining and corporate finance while Montreal’s relative weight had been sliding for two decades.

The Parti Québécois did not start that shift. In its first eighteen months, it gave businesses already leaning toward Toronto a decisive reason to stop delaying the move, and it did so with the specific instruments listed above, not with a plebiscite that had not yet been called.

Why the federal version won

Ottawa had no interest in that reading. Pierre Trudeau’s government needed autonomy-seeking Quebecers who were not separatists to see the PQ as the cause of their troubles, and “separatism scares business” did that work far more efficiently than “your government’s labour code scares business.” The second argument would have invited Quebecers to ask why Trudeau’s own labour code, and Ottawa’s own tax rates, were so close to Quebec’s. The unity narrative required that the exodus be filed under nationalism rather than under economics. It was, and it has stayed there for 48 years, long enough for a former Alberta premier to repeat it as settled fact.

Quebec’s later recovery tells the same story from the other side. The province’s economy did not improve by abandoning nationalism. It grew richer, relatively, when Lucien Bouchard’s PQ government balanced the budget in the late 1990s, when the Charest and Couillard Liberals trimmed the state, and when the Coalition Avenir Québec cut personal income taxes while remaining as nationalist as any government since Lévesque. Nationalism was a constant. Economic policy was the variable.

What this means on October 19

Alberta separatists, and the far larger number of Albertans who will vote Yes to send a message, are not asking to copy Quebec’s economics. They are asking why Quebec gets to push autonomist reforms and obtain significant advantages inside Canada, and Alberta does not. The former premier once asked the same question. He put it to a panel, and then to a referendum.

Canada is not perfect. Neither is Alberta. Sure. But Albertans are demanding changes and reforms to improve many things Canada has abandoned or neglected. But a province cannot be spooked out of making choices and seeking greater autonomy by an inaccurate reading of relatively recent domestic history. Some Albertans may fall for that, but most of us will not.

The Haultain Brief is a weekly compilation of the news that matters for Alberta and Western Canada. Each Wednesday, we cover the prior week’s political, economic, energy, legal, and institutional developments, organized by theme, with links to primary sources. The editorial perspective will be familiar to Haultain Research readers: evidence-driven, skeptical of fashionable orthodoxies, unapologetically Western Canadian. The Brief complements rather than replaces the longer analytical essays published here. If you find it useful, consider subscribing to support the work.

Economy & Finance

Alberta swings $11.4 billion in a single quarter, and the oil price did all of it

Alberta’s first-quarter update forecasts a $2 billion surplus for 2026-27, an $11.4 billion improvement over the $9.4 billion deficit projected in Budget 2026 in February. Non-renewable resource revenue accounts for $9.7 billion of that swing.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we read this as a price report rather than a performance report. Total revenue is now forecast at $86.3 billion on a West Texas Intermediate assumption raised to US$73.50 a barrel from US$60.50, and the province’s sensitivity is that each additional US$1 on the annual average is worth roughly $680 million. The benchmark has averaged about US$88 since April and must hold US$65 through the rest of the fiscal year for the forecast to survive. A treasury that can move eleven billion dollars in one quarter without a single policy decision has a volatility problem, not a management triumph, and the honest test of this update is what gets saved rather than what gets announced.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 27 August 2026; Lethbridge Herald, 28 August 2026.

Saskatchewan books a deficit on the same barrel that put Alberta in surplus

Saskatchewan’s first-quarter report, released the same day, forecasts an $825 million deficit against $819 million at budget. Revenue rose $331 million to $21.7 billion while expenses rose $337 million to $22.6 billion, cancelling out the resource gain entirely.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we think the two reports read together are more instructive than either alone. Saskatchewan collected an extra $320 million in non-renewable resource revenue on a West Texas Intermediate assumption of US$75.00 against US$59.75 at budget, and still finished worse than it started because health system demand, compensation, flood response and crop insurance claims from an exceptionally wet spring took slightly more than the windfall delivered. Net debt to GDP nonetheless improved to 14.9 per cent from 16.1 per cent. The lesson for Edmonton is that a commodity windfall only reaches the bottom line if the spending side is held still while it arrives.

Source: Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026.

The national economy grew 0.8 per cent, and the energy sector did the earning

Statistics Canada reported real gross domestic product up 0.8 per cent in the second quarter, led by exports, household spending and business investment. The first quarter was revised up from flat to 0.1 per cent, erasing the reported technical recession.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we note the line that got the least attention. Corporate incomes rose 9.6 per cent, the largest quarterly increase since the first quarter of 2021, and Statistics Canada names the energy sector as the top contributor to that gain. Exports rose 3.6 per cent, the largest increase since early 2023. Per capita output rose 1.0 per cent, which the agency attributes partly to a population that has now declined for three consecutive quarters nationally. So the quarter that rescued the national growth numbers was carried by the sector Ottawa has spent a decade constraining, and by an arithmetic effect nobody wants to celebrate out loud.

Source: Statistics Canada, 28 August 2026.

Intergovernmental Affairs

Ottawa publishes its counter tariff list, and Prairie machinery is on it

The Department of Finance published the schedule of Canadian counter tariffs covering $27.6 billion of United States imports at rates of 15, 25 and 50 per cent, effective 12:01 a.m. on 8 September. Named categories include agricultural equipment, pulp and paper.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would separate the politics from the mechanics. A counter tariff is a tax collected from the Canadian buyer, not the American seller, and this one applies to capital goods that Western producers import. The measures apply only to goods eligible to be marked as originating in the United States under the CUSMA marking rules, which means importers must now document origin on thousands of lines before the deadline. The list was also amended the day after publication, with seafood removed and other goods substituted. Two weeks is not long enough for a mid-sized Prairie business to reorganize a supply chain around a moving schedule.

Source: Department of Finance Canada, 25 August 2026.

The premiers cannot agree on weaponizing Western resources

Premier Danielle Smith rejected any tax on Alberta oil exports, saying it “would absolutely devastate the Canadian economy.” Premier Scott Moe refused to restrict potash but imposed a 50 per cent levy on American alcohol. Premier Wab Kinew backed retaliation.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would put the constitutional question plainly. Ontario Premier Doug Ford wants potash exports cut, a measure whose entire cost would fall on Saskatchewan, which supplies more than 86 per cent of the potash the United States buys from Canada. Moe’s objection is not sentiment but arithmetic: a customer forced to source elsewhere does not necessarily come back. Smith struck a cabinet committee co-chaired by her finance and jobs ministers and opened a portal for businesses to report tariff damage. Whatever one makes of the strategy, a federation that lets one province propose sacrifices for another is not negotiating as a country.

Sources: Red Deer Advocate, 26 August 2026; Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026; EnergyNow, 28 August 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Trans Mountain is running at 94 per cent

Trans Mountain Corporation, the federally owned pipeline company, moved 840,000 barrels a day in the second quarter, 94 per cent of capacity, against 703,000 a year earlier. It remitted $450 million to Ottawa in interest and dividends.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would treat the utilization number as the argument. A line the federal government was told nobody would use is close to full four years after opening, and it earned $808 million of revenue and $138 million of net income in a single quarter. Chief executive Mark Maki said deteriorating trade relations have made a second west coast line “much more urgent,” with a regulatory filing planned for early 2027 and a cost estimated between $35 billion and $44 billion. That is a very large number, and the case for it still rests on shippers committing barrels rather than on ministers committing adjectives.

Sources: EnergyNow, 28 August 2026; BOE Report, 28 August 2026.

Saskatchewan tells data centres to bring their own power

Saskatchewan published a data centre framework requiring new operators to generate their own electricity rather than draw on SaskPower, the provincial utility, with Bell Canada’s existing project the sole exception. Alberta allows large loads to connect before their generation arrives.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we regard this as the more defensible of the two designs, and we say so because we have criticized provincial intervention elsewhere. Saskatchewan puts the cost of new demand on the party creating it. Alberta’s bring your own generation rules let a data centre draw from the pool first and build later. The Pembina Institute, a Calgary energy think tank, estimates that Meta’s $13 billion Sturgeon County project could add between $267 and $462 a year to a typical household bill between 2027 and 2031. Whether that estimate holds is contestable. That the risk sits with ratepayers rather than proponents is not.

Sources: Global News, 27 August 2026; Pembina Institute, 26 August 2026.

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Business & Investment

Enbridge sells a quarter of its British Columbia gas system to KKR

Enbridge agreed to sell an indirect 29 per cent interest in its Westcoast natural gas system to KKR, the American investment firm, with Apollo as co-investor, for about C$2.7 billion. Enbridge keeps majority ownership and operating control.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we read this as a financing decision with a strategic tell. Westcoast runs more than 2,900 kilometres from Fort Nelson in northeast British Columbia and Gordondale on the Alberta border south to the Huntingdon and Sumas crossing, carrying 3.6 billion cubic feet a day and rising to 3.9 once its current expansion enters service in late 2028. Chief financial officer Pat Murray described the deal as a way to “efficiently recycle capital” while advancing growth. Foreign capital is buying minority positions in Western Canadian gas egress because liquefied natural gas exports have made that egress scarce. That signals capacity, not ownership.

Source: Enbridge, 27 August 2026.

Alberta’s technology grants turn person-years into jobs

Alberta awarded $15.1 million to seven Calgary projects on 24 August and $15.7 million to five Edmonton projects the next day, both through the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund, Alberta’s industrial carbon compliance pot.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we apply the same scrutiny to Alberta’s spending as to Ottawa’s, and the arithmetic here rewards a second look. Emissions Reduction Alberta, the agency that pays the money out, says the Calgary projects would generate 463 person-years of employment and the Edmonton projects 504. The government’s own releases on the same two days call those figures more than 460 jobs and more than 500 jobs. A person-year is not a job: 504 person-years is 504 people working a year, or 50 people working ten. Credit where it is due, the agency names every recipient and every dollar, which is more than most granting bodies manage. The unit should survive the trip to the news release.

Sources: Emissions Reduction Alberta, 24 August 2026; Emissions Reduction Alberta, 25 August 2026; Government of Alberta, 25 August 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

Alberta drops Water Act approvals for routine work on private cropland

Alberta will remove Water Act approval requirements for cultivating, seeding, spraying, ditching, draining and infilling where the work affects ephemeral water bodies and temporary or seasonal wetlands on private cropland. Water must stay on site and must not harm neighbouring land.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we generally favour removing an approval that a landowner needs for routine work on his own field, and Grant Hunter, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, is right that thousands of dollars and a wait for permission is a poor return on a seeding pass. But this is a wetlands policy change wrapped in a red-tape announcement, and it deserves to be argued as one. The amendments to the Water (Ministerial) Regulation and the Alberta Wetland Policy do not arrive until the fall, and the tile drainage code of practice not until early 2027. Announcing the outcome before publishing the rule inverts the order that makes consultation meaningful.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 28 August 2026; Western Standard, 28 August 2026.

The Prairie harvest is running weeks behind, and the moisture is the reason

Alberta’s major crop harvest stood at 1 per cent complete against five and ten year averages of 7 and 5 per cent. Saskatchewan reached 11 per cent against averages of 25 and 21 per cent. Manitoba was roughly 4 per cent.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would put the delay beside the tariff calendar. Canadian counter tariffs on American agricultural equipment take effect on 8 September, precisely when a late harvest raises the odds that a producer needs a part or a replacement machine in a hurry. Alberta and Ottawa extended AgriStability enrolment to 1 October and lifted the interim payment rate to 75 per cent from 50, which is sensible triage for the northeast where record moisture stopped field work outright. The provincial condition split remains stark, with the North West at 35 per cent good to excellent against a southern region running far better.

Sources: Big West Country, 24 August 2026; Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026; paNOW, 26 August 2026.

Health

Edmonton loses 62 addiction treatment beds, and nobody will say for how long

The Henwood Treatment Centre, the largest provincially run voluntary addiction treatment facility in the Edmonton region, has not operated since late June after overland flooding. Staff were told on 20 August the closure was permanent. Recovery Alberta says it will reopen.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we are less troubled by a flooded building than by the absence of a decision anyone will own. Nearly 600 people were on the wait list when Henwood stopped taking applications, for a four-week residential program with waits already running one to four months. Recovery Alberta describes the site as temporarily closed and says it will reopen once repairs are done; staff have told reporters otherwise. A public body that cannot state a reopening date, a cost and a responsible official is failing the accountability test regardless of which account is correct.

Sources: Global News, 25 August 2026; Friends of Medicare, 26 August 2026; Medicine Hat News, 28 August 2026.

Alberta History

April 1936: Alberta’s London bondholders begin asking questions

Alberta’s public finances have drawn international attention before, and not in a flattering way. On 1 April 1936, $3,200,000 of six per cent Alberta government bonds, issued as from 1 April 1921, reached maturity. Of that sum, $2,200,000 had been raised to build the province’s government-owned telephone system and $1,000,000 for general government purposes.

Three weeks later, the matter reached the British House of Commons. Sir Cyril Cobb asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs to establish from the Canadian authorities “the circumstances in which the burden of debt complained of was incurred by the Alberta Government,” and whether the province had invited the loans. Malcolm MacDonald’s reply was short and, for Alberta, unflattering in its plainness: tenders had been asked for in the usual way.

Alberta had gone to the London market voluntarily and on ordinary commercial terms, to string telephone wire across a province during a decade when both settlement and revenue looked permanent. When the Depression arrived, the revenue moved, and the obligations did not. That asymmetry is the oldest fact in Alberta public finance, and this week’s surplus does not repeal it.

Source: UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates volume 311, 21 April 1936.

Data Corner

Alberta’s population growth has very nearly stopped. Quarterly growth peaked at 1.36 per cent in the third quarter of 2023, when the province added 63,597 people in three months. It has fallen in every quarter but one since. The province added 7,280 people in the fourth quarter of 2025, a growth rate of 0.14 per cent, and 8,926 in the first quarter of 2026, a rate of 0.18 per cent. That is a decline of roughly seven eighths in two and a half years. Alberta crossed five million residents between the estimates for October 2024 and January 2025 and has added fewer than 70,000 people in the six quarters since.

This counters the fiscal update. The province forecasts real growth of 2.3 per cent in 2026, but with the population flat that growth must come from productivity or from prices rather than from more workers and more households. It also reframes the unemployment rate of 6.6 per cent: a labour force that stops expanding makes a stubborn jobless rate harder to explain away, not easier. Two cautions. These are quarterly estimates dated the first day of each quarter, so the latest reading covers January to March 2026 and was published in June; the next release is due in the autumn. And a slowdown driven by federal immigration policy is a national phenomenon, with the Canadian population falling for three consecutive quarters, not something Edmonton chose.

Sources: Statistics Canada, table 17-10-0009, retrieved via the Government of Alberta economic dashboard, updated 17 June 2026.

The Take

1. The most revealing Alberta number published this week was 2.45 per cent, and almost nobody printed it. Equifax Canada released its second quarter consumer credit report on Monday. Alberta’s ninety-day non-mortgage delinquency rate, measured by dollars owed, was 2.45 per cent against 1.76 per cent nationally; measured by number of accounts, it was 2.15 per cent. Average non-mortgage debt per Albertan was $25,082, and $38,074 in Fort McMurray. To Equifax’s credit, the national story is one of slowing delinquency growth, and Alberta’s own dollar-weighted rate fell slightly over the year. But a province forecasting a $2 billion surplus and 2.3 per cent real growth in the same week is carrying household balance sheets in visibly worse shape than the rest of the country. Treasury prosperity and household prosperity are different series, and only one of them shows up in a mortgage renewal.

2. The cheapest growth policy available to Canada was agreed in Iqaluit, and it cost nothing. Federal, provincial and territorial trade ministers ratified amendments to the Canadian Free Trade Agreement establishing a thirty day service standard for labour mobility applications, committed to an agreement by year end permitting free trade in services across the country, and undertook to reach an agreement in principle on model mutual recognition legislation by the end of the fall. Set that beside the $7.5 billion federal relief package announced the same week. One creates a new fund, a new initiative and a new set of application processes; the other deletes a waiting period. Internal barriers are the one form of protection against Canadian producers that Canadians impose on themselves, and removing them requires no money, no new agency and no American consent. We would rather see this file finished than another envelope opened.

3. Ottawa’s retaliation is loaded onto the goods the West must buy. The counter-tariff schedule names agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, wood, steel, and appliances. No chapter of mineral fuels appears on it. We do not object to leaving energy alone; taxing our own most valuable export would be self-harm, and Premier Smith is right about that much. The objection is to what was chosen instead. A Prairie farmer replacing a combine three weeks into a harvest that is running at a fifth of its normal pace, and a British Columbia mill buying inputs, will pay this tariff themselves, because a counter tariff is collected at the Canadian border from a Canadian buyer. A narrower list aimed at consumer goods with ready domestic substitutes was plainly available and was not taken.

Worth Watching

• British Columbia will hold a by-election in Abbotsford-Mission on 26 September, in a seat vacated on 22 August; press coverage reports that BC Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who does not sit in the legislature, intends to run. (BC Gov News, 29 August 2026)

• Trade ministers met in Iqaluit and set a thirty-day service standard for labour mobility applications, with an agreement on free trade in services targeted for the end of the year. (BC Gov News, 28 August 2026 and Government of Nova Scotia, 26 August 2026)

• Saskatchewan’s rate review panel warned that SaskPower bills could rise as much as 6.4 per cent next February, well above the 3.9 per cent the utility proposed, and deferred its final recommendation until updated financial statements are filed by 2 November. (650 CKOM, 28 August 2026)

• More than 7,000 Alberta Safeway workers return to bargaining on 15 September after mediation ended without agreement on a contract that expired a year ago; the union has floated Thanksgiving as a strike date. (The Alberta Worker, 25 August 2026)

• Alberta named its second Designated Industrial Zone, roughly 75 square kilometres of the Municipal District of Greenview near Grande Prairie, with no investment figure attached to the announcement. (Government of Alberta, 26 August 2026)

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

In September 1937, a group of farmers in the provincial riding of Okotoks-High River filed the paperwork to remove their own Member of the Legislative Assembly. They paid the $200 deposit. They wrote out their grounds: the member had failed to keep the promises he made before the election, and had lost the confidence of the electorate. The member in question was William Aberhart, Premier of Alberta, and the recall law they were using had been passed by his own government eighteen months earlier. His government repealed it, retroactively, and Aberhart kept his seat.

Alberta’s democratic tradition produced that petition. Alberta’s governing class killed it. Both halves of that story belong to us, Albertans, and anyone who wants to understand the 10-question ballot Albertans will mark on 19 October should start there, not in May of this year.

Indeed, the ballot will include ten questions. Five concern provincial policy on immigration and elections, four propose constitutional amendments sought jointly with willing provinces, and the tenth asks whether the government should begin the legal process toward a binding vote on separation from the Canadian State.

Commentary from Laurentian Canada has treated the exercise as an eruption, a novelty, an anomaly, a stunt engineered by one premier in one bad season. But that reading fails miserably against the historical record. The instrument predates the province’s paved roads.

The 1913 statute nobody mentions

Alberta’s legislature passed the Direct Legislation Act in March 1913, eight years after the province’s founding. The Act let citizens force the hand of their own government: gather signatures equal to ten per cent of the vote in the last general election, and the legislature must pass the requested law or put it to the people. Temperance organizers used it almost immediately, delivering a petition of roughly 24,000 names, and Alberta held its first province-wide plebiscite in June 1915. Eight years later, a petition of some 56,000 names produced a second vote, which went the other way and buried prohibition by a wide margin.

That the same instrument produced opposite results eight years apart speaks to the oft-used action-reaction of this province’s politics. Nothing is ever settled with finality here, not the climate, not the science, not the policies of government. We like to revisit and re-examine things.

Consider what that sequence demonstrates. Albertans built a mechanism for putting questions to themselves, used it, lost with it, used it again, and won. The mechanism did not serve one faction. It served whoever could organize, which is the whole point.

The practice isn’t entirely foreign to the Rest of Canada. Ottawa put conscription to the whole country to a plebiscite in 1942 and did the same with prohibition in 1898. The last time this country asked its citizens a direct constitutional question was the Charlottetown referendum of 1992; every province voted, and Alberta and Quebec both said no. Quebec has held two sovereignty referendums, and the second posed a question so tangled and mangled that Parliament later passed a statute to prevent a repeat.

Against that standard, Alberta’s tenth question is a model of plain drafting: stay a province, or begin a legal process. Whatever one thinks the answer is, nobody needs a lawyer to understand what is being asked.

What the word means out here

Contemporary progressive usage has flattened “populism” into a term of abuse, roughly synonymous with demagoguery, nativism and contempt for expertise. That usage would puzzle anyone who has read the literature on the Canadian prairies, which is substantial, and which nobody in the national commentariat appears to consult.

C. B. Macpherson, the notable Marxist scholar from the University of Toronto, opened the file in 1953 with Democracy in Alberta, a study written from the political left and hostile to much of what it described, yet clear that Alberta had generated a distinctive form of representation rather than a pathology. Macpherson’s farmers wanted delegates who carried instructions, not trustees who exercised independent judgment on their behalf from a great distance.

David Laycock’s Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies mapped the terrain properly in 1990, and found four separate strands rather than one: crypto-Liberal, radical democratic, social democratic, plebiscitarian. Note where he placed them. Henry Wise Wood’s United Farmers supplied the radical democratic strand, the Farmer-Labour movement and the CCF the social democratic, and Aberhart’s Social Credit the plebiscitarian. Three of the four grew on prairie soil, and they pointed in different ideological directions. Tom Flanagan’s Waiting for the Wave traced how the impulse organized itself into the Reform Party and then into national government. Jared Wesley’s Code Politics examined the durable political cultures of the three prairie provinces and why campaigns here sound the way they do.

Something curious happens to that scholarship when the thing it describes walks into the room. Studied at a century’s remove, prairie populism becomes a respectable object: a political culture, a delegate theory of representation, a set of variants worth cataloguing. Encountered in the present tense, on a ballot, in one’s own province, the same phenomenon gets reclassified as a crisis. Macpherson wrote about the quasi-party system as a defect requiring explanation. Laycock catalogued four traditions and left the reader to judge. Wesley documented why prairie campaigns speak the way they do, and has since helped assemble a group whose founding statement calls the present moment a separatist crisis and argues against putting the question to a vote at all. One register for the academy and one for political activism.

No need to assign hypocrisy is required to explain this. Distance flatters and power distorts. The UFA convention of 1921 reads as folk democracy at a hundred years; the town hall of 2025 reads as a mob at ten months. Progressive scholars share the same instinct as everyone else: to treat the past as finished and the present as dangerous, and the instinct grows stronger the closer the subject sits to one’s own commitments. Recognizing a tradition in the archive costs nothing. Recognizing it at the door costs something, and that price separates description from understanding.

Read the literature rather than its authors’ recent commitments, and one fact becomes impossible to avoid. Prairie populism has never exclusively belonged to the right.

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was founded in Calgary in 1932 and issued the Regina Manifesto the following year. Tommy Douglas built the first social democratic government in North America out of Saskatchewan grain country using exactly the organizing methods, the hall meetings and the delegate conventions, that Aberhart’s Social Credit used to win Alberta in 1935. The United Farmers of Alberta took power in 1921 on Henry Wise Wood’s theory of group government, an idea considerably stranger than anything on the October ballot. Alberta’s New Democrats won in 2015 and now campaign under a leader who made his name in municipal politics wrapped in purple and speaking directly past the press gallery to a crowd.

The machinery came out again in the autumn of 2025, and it came out swinging at a conservative government. Some 51,000 teachers left their classrooms on 6 October in the first province-wide teachers’ strike this province has seen, and the government ended it with back-to-work legislation carried on the notwithstanding clause. Fury at that manoeuvre produced twenty-six recall petitions against members of the legislature, nearly all of them United Conservatives, the Premier included, filed under a Recall Act the United Conservatives themselves passed in 2021.

Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour told his members that if the government would not shrink the size of their classrooms, they would shrink the size of its caucus. By the end of March, every petition had failed or been withdrawn, the strongest gathering roughly 6,500 signatures against a threshold above 16,000. Whether they succeeded is a separate matter from what they demonstrate. Teachers and union locals in 2025 reached, it seems unwittingly, for the same instrument farmers used in 1937, and they did so against a government of the right. The idiom is identical. Only the policy content changes.

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The lineage of the protest

The Prairie’s habit of protest runs continuously from before the provinces existed. Louis Riel’s people at Red River and along the South Saskatchewan pressed grievances against a distant capital that did not consider itself obliged to answer, and Riel won election to the House of Commons three times without ever taking his seat. The United Farmers replaced a party system they judged captured. Social Credit rose out of the Depression on a monetary theory that was wrong and an anger that was not. The Western Canada Concept elected Gordon Kesler in Olds-Didsbury on 17 February 1982 by better than a thousand votes, and nine months later the party ran a near-full slate, took close to twelve per cent of the provincial vote and elected nobody, Kesler included.

Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report gave the sentiment a printed voice and a steely spirit for thirty years. Preston Manning built Reform around similar discontent with the slogan, “the West wants in,” which conceded federalism while demanding a renewed place inside it. Six conservatives published the Firewall Letter in January 2001. Wildrose formed, merged, and reshaped the governing party. The truckers’ convoy gathered its momentum here in 2022, and much of the organizing that carried it to Ottawa started with Tamara Lich, a woman of Métis heritage living in Medicine Hat.

Each of those movements failed on its own terms. Each of them changed the country anyway. That is what a healthy protest tradition does, and a political culture that produces one every generation is not sick. It is awake, and it is alive.

The most recent demonstration required no new party. On 18 May 2022, Jason Kenney learned that 51.4 per cent of his own members approved of his leadership: 17,638 yes against 16,660 no, out of 34,298 mailed ballots. Party rules let him stay, but he resigned that evening. A sitting premier with a majority government, once a popular federal MP and minister elected in his riding with massive majorities, the architect of the merger that created his party, was removed by ordinary members who bought memberships, filled in a card and posted it. The machinery was constituency associations and kitchen tables, and it worked precisely as the tradition intends.

In 1937, Premier Aberhart escaped the wrath that Kenney could not in 2022. Aberhart survived his members by repealing the law they used. Kenney could not attempt the equivalent. In essence, it was the same event separated by eighty-five years. Whatever else divides those two men, the spirit that came for both was recognizably the same spirit.

The Laurentian puzzlement

Alberta’s practice looks bizarre from Ottawa and from Halifax for a reason worth naming honestly. The dominant Canadian theory of representation descends from Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol: the elected member owes his constituents his judgment, and betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion. Burke was largely right. Parliamentary government requires deliberation, and referendums decide nothing about the questions they do not ask.

The prairie answer to Burke is narrower than its critics allow. Delegate democracy claims authority on the questions a governing class refuses to put on any agenda at all. Alberta voted 61.7 per cent to remove equalization from the constitution in October 2021, and Ottawa never opened a single discussion. Albertans have elected Senate nominees since 1989 under provincial legislation, and prime ministers have honoured the results when convenient and ignored them otherwise.

None of this means that the Alberta populist spirit gives us perfection. The same Aberhart government that killed the recall law pushed the Accurate News and Information Act through the legislature in October 1937, a bill that would have forced newspapers to print government corrections and to surrender their sources on demand. The Lieutenant Governor withheld assent and referred it, and in March 1938 the Supreme Court held it beyond Alberta’s power. The bill never became law. Plebiscitary enthusiasm can turn on the press, on minorities of different sorts, on procedural restraint, and the machinery that stopped it in 1938 was the federal state.

The tradition survives the memory. Alberta’s instinct, tested and occasionally disgraced across eleven decades, remains that a government which will not ask has stopped governing by consent. Albertans will keep asking the questions. Ten questions will be asked on 19 October, and Albertans will answer them in numbers, and the answers will be recorded.

Laurentians, especially upper Laurentians, may find the exercise unfamiliar. Alberta does not.

More next week.

Alberta’s data centre debate runs on three claims: that the province regulates nothing, that political turbulence is driving investment away, and that an AI bust would leave Albertans holding the wreckage. Each claim collapses on inspection. Each collapse is instructive.

One of the largest private investments in Canadian history landed this summer in a rural county north of Edmonton. The people who spent the past decade demanding exactly this kind of investment now want it stopped.

Progressives and the Alberta NDP have opened a campaign to torpedo the data centre projects taking shape across the province. Their objections repay a close reading because the arguments tell us a great deal about the movement’s neuroses. Less than a decade ago, these same voices clamoured incessantly for exactly what has now arrived: diversify the economy, attract technology, end the dependence on hydrocarbons.

Three claims carry their campaign: Alberta regulates nothing, political turbulence is scaring capital away, and an AI bust would leave Albertans holding the wreckage. Each claim refutes itself. Watch.

I. The demand that dared not come true

What does a political movement do when its demand comes true? Naheed Nenshi delivered the demand personally. As mayor, he flew to Toronto’s Collision conference in 2019 to pitch Calgary to the industry: “If we actually get the next great big app in Calgary, we’d be thrilled,” he said. “But we are actually looking at tech, AI and machine learning to enable other sectors in the economy.”

He advertised the city’s “tons of engineers, tons of data scientists.” A collection of people in what is now his party matched him. Under Rachel Notley’s name, the Alberta NDP caucus declared that “Alberta’s tech and AI sectors have enormous potential to create jobs and grow our economy” and demanded a stable funding environment to “further diversify Alberta’s economy.” The party even tabled legislation for a public technology venture fund, lamenting that Ontario drew $7.4 billion in venture investment in a single year while Alberta managed only $561 million.

Then the investment came. On July 8 this year, Meta committed more than $13 billion to a one-gigawatt campus in Sturgeon County, its first Canadian data centre and its largest anywhere outside the United States. It comes paired with a $4.6 billion privately financed power plant. Premier Danielle Smith stated the terms in four short sentences: “No subsidies. No grants. No discounted power. No taxpayer backstop.” No public money for it. The project promises roughly 3,000 construction jobs, 300 permanent positions and about $250 million a year in royalties, taxes, levies and fees.

It is clear to everyone that this project brings diversification in the exact sector progressives had specified, on terms no subsidy-hunting battery plant, gaming company or film studio has ever offered this country.

But the movement that demanded it, if you ask progressives, seems to have vanished. Nenshi now calls the file a “Wild West free-for-all” with “no regulations in place to protect Albertans.” His technology critic, Nathan Ip, describes a “concierge service for foreign billionaires.” They want Meta and all similar or related projects to pause, and eventually scrapped.

Let’s test the free-for-all Nenshi claim against the statute book first. The Alberta Electric System Operator capped large-load connections at 1,200 megawatts in June 2025 precisely because it refused to let data centres become a risk to grid reliability. Bill 8, the Utilities Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, built a tailor-made regulatory framework for the industry and makes every data centre pay for its own transmission upgrades rather than pushing the cost onto the province’s ratepayers.

The Data Centre Regulation, Alberta Regulation 117/2026, in force since June this year, prioritizes projects that bring their own generation ability and leaves the rest waiting. Bill 12, the Financial Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), imposed a levy on any facility drawing 75 megawatts or more from the grid.

Proposed power plants still face full Alberta Utilities Commission hearings; the Indus project spent this very August before the commission. Municipal permits, Water Act licences and Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act approvals all continue to apply. A politician may argue these instruments are miscalibrated. But Nenshi cannot credibly say they do not exist. His claims of a free-for-all fail miserably when they meet the work of the legislature, where he also now sits.

Nenshi has long sold himself as the professor, the policy wonk, the smartest man in the room. Yet the regulation he says does not exist is numbered, published and already in force. He sits in the Legislature whose laws created the framework. Either he has not read it, or he has read it and chooses to describe Alberta as having “no regulations in place.” Neither explanation flatters the wonk.

A harder question follows. Set the gas plant aside for a moment and ask what remains of the opposition. The official objection is environmental: data centres burn natural gas, and gas means emissions. If that were the true complaint, it would vanish the moment the fuel changed. So apply a simple test. Imagine every data hall in Alberta running on some emissions-free miracle, on unicorn flatulence if you like. Would the NDP stand down?

Their own town halls answer the question. Participants cited “the disruptive cultural effect of generative AI” as a reason to oppose the projects. Others objected to foreign control of data, or to the personalities of the billionaires involved. They never mentioned these when they championed the AI tech they wanted to bring. And notice that none of these grievances burns a single molecule of gas. The objections would survive the greenest power source on earth, which means the power source was never the true objection. The emissions argument is the respectable costume. Underneath it stands a plain dislike of the industry and of the people building it.

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II. The exodus that keeps not happening

A second inconsistency concerns political predictions of failure, even advanced by some conservatives. Through the spring, three choirs sang the same warning: Alberta’s political turbulence was strangling investment. Jason Kenney called the referendum question “kryptonite for investor confidence” and accused the government of “playing with fire,” warning that Quebec “has paid the price for the uncertainty created by separation for 50 years.” By May he had escalated: separation would be “the single most dramatic act of economic suicide in modern history.”

Nenshi wrote that “just the talk of separation is putting a freeze on investment, scaring businesses away,” and accused Premier Smith of “doing generations of economic harm to Alberta.” The Calgary Chamber of Commerce supplied some numbers: 28 per cent of surveyed businesses said separation talk was already affecting them, and a commissioned analysis by UofC economist Trevor Tombe modelled that Alberta could forgo $10 billion to $15 billion in investment in the first year if investment responded to a separation process as it did after Brexit.

Note the grammar of the warnings. Could forgo. Would be. A freeze that an unnamed someone is putting on. It is all done in the conditional, sometimes with great hyperbolic drama.

Now set the speculation beside the ledger. The referendum date, October 19, was public knowledge by early June. On July 8, five weeks later, Meta announced. A corporation whose planning horizon spans decades, whose lawyers even price the political risk of eating a bagel for breakfast, and which had never built in Canada before chose Alberta this year, with that question on the ballot. Its dedicated power plant enters service in 2030 and will run for decades past it. Every dollar of the commitment assumes Alberta remains a jurisdiction where property is secure, contracts hold and electricity flows, straight through the vote Kenney and the autonomy alarmists said would freeze capital in its tracks.

The private conversation matches the public ledger. When The Logic canvassed Alberta’s corporate heavyweights this summer, Ensign Energy chief executive Bob Geddes reported: “Not one single person said, ‘Oh, I’m worried about investing in Calgary, or in Advantage, or Alberta, because of the separatist thing.’” The S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index climbed more than 30 percent between late August 2025 and late February 2026, and the foreign capital that stayed away when PM Trudeau wanted to leave it all in the ground now has started to arrive in the oilpatch.

We can grant the alarmists their strongest ground. One hyperscale commitment cannot disprove hesitation at the margin, and Tombe’s figure describes a counterfactual nobody can observe. Fair enough. But the burden now runs the other way. The forecasters predicted a freeze but one of the largest private investments in Canadian history arrived in the middle of it. Surveys measure an ethereal anxiety. Final investment decisions measure judgment. A poll asks a business owner how the headlines make him feel; a long-term tolling agreement asks him to commit for decades. Between the Chamber’s forgone billions and Meta’s committed billions, only one is a fact.

Kenney governed this province for a bit. Nenshi wants to. Both told Albertans capital was fleeing while capital was signing in. When the announcement came, neither said a word. A man who diagnoses economic suicide owes the province a note when the patient walks out of the hospital alive.

One more plank of the alarm needs some scrutiny: the Quebec analogy itself. Yes, capital fled Montreal after 1976. Sun Life announced it would move its head office to Toronto in 1978, and dozens of firms followed. But those head offices fled a hostile language law that imposed significant burdens and liabilities, as much as they fled a referendum. They also fled a government: the Parti Québécois came to office as the most left-wing socialist party ever to govern a Laurentian province, and business was as genuinely concerned about its socialism as about its separatism. A head office, besides, is the most portable asset a province holds. Alberta’s wealth does not fit in a moving van. Nobody relocates an oilsands mine, a gas field or a petrochemical complex to Bay Street.

History elsewhere is just as unkind to Kenney’s analogy. Czechs and Slovaks parted in 1993 and both economies grew. Singapore left its federation in 1965 and became one of the richest places on earth. Norway left its union with Sweden in 1905, and nobody in Oslo mourns. Separation carries real costs and real risks, and this piece takes no position on the October question at the moment (it deserves a full discussion that would only sidetrack the argument here). My point is narrower: economic ruin follows bad policy, not the mere act of a people voting to govern itself.

III. Heads Alberta wins, tails Alberta keeps the turbines

The naysayers may hold one strong card. No one can guarantee business success. Artificial intelligence may be a bubble. Meta will spend between US$130 billion and US$145 billion on capital projects in 2026 alone, nearly double last year’s outlay; its free cash flow shrank below one billion dollars last quarter, and Wall Street has punished the stock, down roughly 12 per cent on the year and nearly 30 per cent from its peak. If model progress stalls, or the revenue never matches the compute, the hyperscalers will slash their spending. Alberta, the argument goes, will then inherit ghost warehouses on 1,750 acres. A monument to a gold rush that ended the way gold rushes end.

So suppose it all happens. Now inventory what Alberta holds on the morning after.

A data centre is two assets wearing one name. The first is the computing hardware: servers that depreciate in three to five years, belong to Meta, and become Meta’s write-down in any bust. The second is the power plant, which endures. Greenlight will deliver 932 megawatts of modern combined-cycle generation, expandable to 1,864 megawatts, built by Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor for roughly $4.6 billion of private money, under fixed-price contracts, with Siemens equipment reserved years in advance. Combined-cycle plants run for roughly forty years. Servers come and go. Turbines remain.

Recall January 2024. Emergency alerts lit up phones across the province on a brutally cold night because the grid stood within a rounding error of rolling blackouts. The system lacked one thing: power plants that run on demand, in any weather. Alberta’s rules now make the data centres solve that problem at their own expense. Before a large project can jump the connection queue, it must bring its own generation that covers everything it consumes. The rule works as a priority system rather than a ban, but the grid’s spare room is already spoken for, so self-supply is in practice the only door in. Every campus that walks through it adds more reliable power to Alberta than it takes out.

The AESO is also designing contracts that let it pause a data centre for an hour on the coldest evening of the year, and here the computers hold an advantage no heavy industry can match. Pause a smelter, and the metal freezes in the pots. Pause a training run and the machines simply wait. The bottom line for anyone paying a power bill is worth repeating: each data centre arrives carrying its own power plant, the province gains the right to interrupt the computers in an emergency, and the lights in Alberta homes sit more securely than they did before the industry came. That is a net benefit in potentia.

So run both branches of the future. If AI succeeds, Alberta hosts a new industry, collects its levies and taxes, sells its gas into a domestic market and pockets transmission relief. If AI busts, the shareholders of Meta, Pembina and Morgan Stanley absorb the losses, exactly as the premier framed it: “If it fails, the investors lose the money, not you.” And Alberta’s market keeps a modern generating fleet the public purse never paid for, wired into a grid that nearly failed without those very machines. Name another industrial policy in this country’s history whose failure mode is surplus electricity. I can’t think of one.

The critics demanded diversification and, when it arrived, called it a menace. They predicted flight and watched one of the largest arrivals in the country’s history. They warned of a bust whose principal legacy would be cheap, abundant, dispatchable power. Three objections, three self-refutations. The debate Alberta deserves begins where these end.

One question remains for Nenshi and the progressives: What happened?

After trade talks with Washington collapsed, Ontario’s premier and Alberta’s most recent former premier would use Alberta energy as a bargaining chip. That is a dangerous game. There is worse.

The Sierra Club, no friend to Alberta, sent a fundraising letter to Canadian inboxes four days after the collapse. It calls for the federal government to impose an export tax on the oil and natural gas we ship to the United States.

The proposal belongs to the economist Seth Klein, who set it at 15 per cent and costed it at “close to $25 billion” a year. What the letter adds is a sentence of its own. An export tax, it says, is “a Federal choice (not a provincial one) and one the Alberta Government has no grounds to oppose.”

No grounds?

In fact, there are three, and each is a matter of public record.

The first is a Supreme Court of Canada judgment. In 1980 Ottawa proposed a tax on exported natural gas as part of the National Energy Program. Alberta challenged it through a constitutional reference, on the basis that the province itself owned the gas the levy would capture. In Re Exported Natural Gas Tax, [1982] 1 S.C.R. 1004, the Court struck the tax down as it applied to Alberta’s own gas, on the plain words of section 125 of the Constitution: “No Lands or Property belonging to Canada or any Province shall be liable to Taxation.”

That is not ancient history. The Crown owns 81 per cent of Alberta’s mineral rights, some 53.7 million hectares. The Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, created out of the 1973 oil-pricing fight, still takes the Crown’s conventional crude royalty in kind and markets the barrels itself. How much royalty Alberta takes that way is a policy choice made in Edmonton, and the barrels the province owns are the barrels Ottawa cannot tax.

The second is section 92A of the Constitution Act, 1982, the resources amendment, which exists because of this quarrel. In plain language, Alberta decides how much comes out of the ground. Peter Lougheed improvised that power under fire in 1981, cutting output in stages toward 180,000 barrels a day. Ottawa’s grab backfired: it had to levy a special charge of $1.15 a barrel on Canadian consumers to help pay for the costlier imported crude that replaced Alberta’s. Today the power is written into the Constitution.

The third is a treaty Canada signed. Article 2.15 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement reads, in full: “No Party shall adopt or maintain any duty, tax, or other charge on the export of any good to the territory of another Party, unless the duty, tax, or charge is also applied to the good if destined for domestic consumption.” Annex 2-A exempts Canadian logs, unprocessed fish, coasting trade and ethyl alcohol. Mexico secured a carve-out for hydrocarbons. Canada did not. A 15 per cent levy on barrels bound for Chicago is lawful only if the same 15 per cent lands on every barrel burned in Hamilton, which is not the policy being sold. Ottawa would argue that American tariffs have suspended the obligation. That is an arguable position, not a settled one, and it would be fought alongside the constitutional case.

Then there is the arithmetic. The letter assumes the tax lands chiefly on Americans. Largely, it would not. Alberta sells a heavy sour barrel into a narrow market of refineries built to process it, from a landlocked position, at a discount that exists precisely because the seller has nowhere else to go. As energy analyst Heather Exner-Pirot puts it: “Just like Americans pay the tariffs, if we impose an export tax, it’s our companies that are responsible for paying the export tax.” Much of that cost would work its way back to the wellhead, cutting producer revenue and the royalties that pay for Alberta schools and hospitals.

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None of this required special access. It required opening the file.

Nobody did in the 1970s, and the country paid.

On 13 September 1973, nine days after the producing provinces declined a voluntary price freeze, Ottawa announced a 40-cent-per-barrel charge on exported oil. The Trudeau government’s budget of May 1974, delivered by finance minister John Turner, then made provincial royalties non-deductible against federal income tax. The Alberta Law Review worked the arithmetic at the time: a producer could pay federal tax and provincial royalty exceeding one hundred per cent of income. What followed, in that journal’s words, was “a massive exodus of drilling and exploration companies and equipment from Canada.” Alberta cut its own royalty to 35.2 per cent in December 1974 to keep the industry alive. The province paid for Ottawa’s tax.

The escalation came six years later. The Liberals won the election of February 1980 holding two seats west of Ontario, both in Manitoba, and eight months later, with nobody from Alberta at the table, brought in the National Energy Program and held Alberta oil below world prices. The government shelved Cold Lake in July 1981. Alsands was cancelled in May 1982. Active drilling rigs in western Canada fell from about 550 to 120 in two years.

On 17 February 1982, the voters of Olds-Didsbury elected Gordon Kesler of the Western Canada Concept, a party nine months old, running on an independent western nation. He was the first separatist elected to the Alberta legislature, and the first elected anywhere outside Quebec in living memory. Lougheed, who had spent a decade fighting Ottawa, was outflanked by people who thought he had not fought hard enough.

Now the calendar. Albertans vote on 19 October, eight weeks from now, on ten questions, one of which asks whether the province should begin the legal process toward a binding referendum on separation. Ipsos found support for separation at 28 per cent in January, falling to 18 or 19 by early June, with 72 per cent saying they would stay.

Into that eight-week window, a national environmental organization proposes to drop a federal tax on Alberta’s principal export, justified in writing on the ground that Alberta has no standing to object. It is a reckless policy, urged with no evident regard for the unity of the country its authors claim to be defending.

They are not alone in liking it. Klein’s brother-in-law, Avi Lewis, now federal NDP leader, backs the idea too. With his wife, Naomi Klein, Lewis helped produce the 2015 Leap Manifesto, the document that Rachel Notley, then Alberta’s premier, called “naive and ill-informed.” A decade on, the same instrument is back, and one of its authors leads the party Notley belonged to.

Alberta’s own government has already answered. Asked in July about withholding the energy that goes south, Premier Danielle Smith called it “not a viable option.” The Prime Minister has likewise declined the invitation. Asked the same month about using energy as leverage, Mark Carney said: “I don’t see the value of it.”

They are right, and for a reason larger than trade tactics. The question was tried once, in court and on the ground, and Alberta won both. What Ottawa got for the attempt was a wrecked drilling sector, a constitutional amendment written against it, and a separatist in the legislature inside sixteen months.

That was against a province with no referendum on the calendar. There is one now.

In their haste to punish Donald Trump, who will not feel it, Laurentian environmentalists would damage the country they claim to defend. Happily, the file is already full. The Constitution shielded Alberta’s own petroleum in 1982, a treaty bars the tax now, and Alberta’s voters have answered this kind of federal adventure before. You cannot save the country by giving Alberta more reasons to leave.

Sources

• Seth Klein, “Canada should hit Trump where it hurts the most — oil and gas,” Canada’s National Observer, February 2025. sethklein.ca

• Re: Exported Natural Gas Tax, [1982] 1 S.C.R. 1004. decisions.scc-csc.ca

• Constitution Act, 1867, ss. 92A and 125. laws-lois.justice.gc.ca

• Nigel Bankes, “Peter Lougheed’s Section 92A,” ABlawg. ablawg.ca

• Mineral ownership in Alberta, Government of Alberta. alberta.ca

• Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, “Petroleum Marketing.” apmc.ca

• CUSMA, Chapter 2, Articles 2.11 and 2.15, Global Affairs Canada. international.gc.ca

• Graison Foster, “Ontario premier wants Canada to withhold oil exports to the U.S. Here’s what that would mean,” Edmonton Journal, 25 August 2026 (Exner-Pirot and Smith quotations). Edmonton Journal

• “Carney vows Canada will remain reliable oil supplier despite U.S. tariffs,” World Oil, 29 July 2026. worldoil.com

• B. Tyerman, “The Pricing of Alberta’s Oil,” Alberta Law Review (1976). albertalawreview.com

• Robert G. Skinner, “The Liberalization of Canada’s Oil and Gas Markets” (2023), on the $1.15/bbl Special Compensation Charge. thinkingenergy.ca

• “The Notorious NEP,” CBC News Interactives. newsinteractives.cbc.ca

• UPI archive, 18 February 1982, on Gordon Kesler and the Western Canada Concept. upi.com

• “Alberta separatism support drops sharply from early 2026: Ipsos poll,” Global News. globalnews.ca

• “Rachel Notley calls Leap Manifesto naive and ill-informed,” CBC News. cbc.ca

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