Free Alberta, save the West

Professor Bruce Pardy’s address to The Courage to Listen town hall, recorded on June 25.

As a nation rooted in deference to authority, systemic corruption (“grift”), and a self-destructive managerial state, Prof. Pardy argues that Alberta must secede from Canada to dismantle entrenched systems like the Westminster model, single-payer healthcare, and bureaucratic overreach. Framing Alberta’s potential independence as a revolutionary opportunity akin to America’s founding, he urges Albertans to reject Canada’s “cartel” of bribes in favour of liberty, meritocracy, and a broader Western civilizational renewal.

See also: Queen’s Professor Argues It’s Time for Alberta to Leave Canada.

Transcript in full below.

Transcript (slightly edited)

I'm the interloper from Ontario. [See Alberta Declaration of Independence]

Inside your hearts there is a Canada that you know and love: the True North Strong and Free.

A land of opportunity where everyone has a chance, where people prosper by their own initiative, and hard work. A compassionate country where no one gets left behind, of institutions working for the good of the people and, above all else, a free country; a country governed by the rule of law which our soldiers have fought to protect and preserve. 

This is the country to which you have been loyal, flown its flag, cheered on at the Olympics, and on the ice. The country which you may have served and sacrificed for.

The past five years have revealed an ugly truth. It was apparent before that but our disbelief got in the way. This Canada that you thought that you lived in does not actually exist.

There are two candidates. The one we love is imaginary and the other one is all too real. What is the real one?

In 1775, George Washington wrote to the inhabitants of Canada, as it then was, and invited them to join the Americans in their revolution to reject the rule of the British king.

“Come then, my brethren,” Washington wrote. “Let us run together to the same goal. We have taken up arms in defense of our liberty. We look forward with pleasure to that day, not far remote, when we will be the inhabitants of America, and have one sentiment, and the full enjoyment of the blessings of a free government.”

The Canadians said “no”. They wanted to be subjects of the Crown. America’s foundational idea is liberty. Canada’s is deference to authority and Canadians are subject still. Now the King is just a figurehead but the Crown still rules.

Under our Westminster system of government, the same small group of people command the executive and the legislature, appoint people to the Senate, and judges to our highest courts. The Crown owns the territory, while people and property rest beneath its benevolent hand. Its public authorities tell you what to do and the people obey. But this is just the half of it.

The real Canada is not just capitulation to authority, Canada is also a grift. It has always been a grift. As my Energy Probe colleague, Lawrence Solomon, has put it: Canada’s colonies came together not for some grand vision of a free and noble country but for subsidies and grants from the central government. The British North America Act reads like it was written by accountants, not by visionaries or statesmen. Grift is not an aberration. It’s part of the design of Confederation. It’s not the True North Strong and Free. It’s a cartel held together by bribes.

I don't need to tell you that in the Canada of today the grift is everywhere. Government contracts to politically friendly firms, banks—one of the biggest grifts of all—Crown corporations, Aboriginal communities, Quebec (yes, the whole damn province). Newfoundland was persuaded to join Confederation, not for the liberty, but for the unemployment insurance payments, government programs for this and that, and the next thing … universities, public servants, politicians and their pensions, protected industries, and the list goes on and on. Everywhere you look, someone is on the take. The main exception: the taxpayers of Alberta. 

Pyramid schemes in order to work have to have someone paying in at the bottom. That would be you. Don’t be surprised. Do not be surprised. This is the way it was built. The real Canada is a beleaguered, corrupt, and managed country. It’s in retreat. More interested in redistribution than in production. More resolved to administer than to build. Abandoning freedom for the appearance of safety, its elites collaborate with foreign powers and global institutions, sacrifice the interests of its people, and plunder the country for what remains of its prosperity.

Those who aspire to build a sovereign Alberta inside a united Canada are thinking of the Canada that exists only inside their heads. This Canada they think can be reformed with reasonable dialogue and rational problem solving. It can be fixed, they think, because it still rests on the pillars of Western civilization: the rule of law, private property, free markets, merit, equal protection, limited government, and so on and so forth. That Canada is a figment of their imagination.

In the real Canada, our country's most powerful institutions, governments, legislatures, bureaucracies and courts have made Canada into a managerial society. This Canada is not united. It is not reasonable and it is not rational. It is planned and directed. It is progressive and socialist, and it is pathologically self-destructive. The people are managed. They are directed, influenced, regulated, supervised; what kind of cars to drive, how to carry their groceries, what medications to take, what to think, how to speak, who to hire; taxed at work, at home, at the pump, at the store, so that their money can be sent elsewhere.

The problem is not just bad policy, this is national character. This is baked into the Constitution. The real Canada cannot fundamentally reform and, yet, Alberta might, just might be able to save Canada.

You do that by leaving it.

Only in the face of an existential political earthquake is there any chance that Canada will face its own problems, and maybe not even then. But pass a referendum, disrupt the country, start a cascade, let the dominoes fall.

Your biggest danger Alberta in becoming an independent country is this: that you will keep the system that you are trying to escape. You are trying to rid yourselves of Canada. Rid yourselves of the Canada outside of Alberta but also rid yourselves of the Canada that is inside Alberta. That means you must get rid of the Westminster system of government. You must get rid of your managerial state. You must get rid of your single-payer public health care. You must get rid of the idea that there are different rights for different kinds of people. And you must get rid of the grift that also exists inside Alberta. Same kind of list: government contracts, protected industries, carbon capture and storage. I don't need to go on, you know the list. This is happening in your backyard as well. If you want a free Alberta, these things must go.

You must change the way you govern yourselves. Don't get rid of the tyranny from far away and fail to banish the tyranny that’s right next door. Save yourselves. Save Canada. Heck, you could save Western civilization. Alberta could be the new America. Now by that I do not mean necessarily that you will join the Americans. What I mean is you could be the new America. You could be the 21st century America.

In 2025, Alberta is in the same kind of situation that the Americans were in at the time of the revolution: a hinterland being pushed around, its riches taken for the benefit of the established order far away, a lack of representation at the center, an abusive relationship, taken for granted, pleas and complaints ignored.

America made itself the land of the free. They didn't just break away. They didn't just rid themselves of that particular king, they got rid of kings. They started again.

If it is within you, Alberta can make itself more American than America. Take the best of what the Americans did and make it better. Fix it so that it actually works. Think big, Alberta. This is your moment to remake civilization. And there is nobody left to do it but you, and the moment may not come again.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Shakespeare wrote, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Seize the day!

Enough of Canadian deference to authority. Don’t be the schmucks paying the bill for this system of bribes. The American Declaration of Independence says that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of liberty it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, or to leave.

Alberta, it is time for you to go.