James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.History, if it is anything, is a stern tutor. And in the 18th century it delivered two lectures of unequal weight: the American Revolution and the French Revolution.Both began as cries against tyranny, both carried aloft the banners of liberty, democracy, and equality. Both invoked the high priests of the Enlightenment — Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Locke. And yet — one birthed a durable republic, the other a guillotine.Why? Because, though children of the same intellectual age, they drank from different wells..MCMILLAN: To hell with the east, we want to be released.The American mind took its cues from Locke and Montesquieu: rights endowed by a Creator, liberty fenced by law, equality understood as equal standing before government and opportunity to rise. It distrusted the romance of man’s perfectibility. The framers of the US Constitution assumed what every farmer, preacher, and housewife of the day already knew — man is fallible, prey to ambition and vice. Therefore power must be restrained, diffused, hemmed in by checks and balances. Their model was cautious, pragmatic, and skeptical of utopias.Thus republicanism, not pure democracy. They would not trust liberty to the whim of mobs, nor suffer freedom to be consumed by the fever of majority rule — or, as we might observe in today’s Canada, by the tyranny of the minority. They built instead a republic — imperfect, yes, but enduring..The French, meanwhile, succumbed to the fever dreams of Rousseau and Voltaire: the “general will,” radical equality of outcomes, the cleansing fire of reason against throne and altar. Man, they declared, was good, only corrupted by institutions. Sweep away church and tradition, and paradise would dawn. What followed was not paradise but chaos, guillotines, and the kindly-sounding “Committee of Public Safety.” The endgame? Napoleon.One revolution left a constitution still standing. The other collapsed into terror and dictatorship.Enter Alexis de Tocqueville. Travelling the young United States, he observed what France had lacked: liberty tempered by faith, government rooted in the local and the communal, and an ethic that sought opportunity rather than imposed equality..GIESBRECHT: How to fix CBC? Hire Ezra Levant.America had preserved the moral consensus of its Christian inheritance, without making government a sect. It pushed decision-making downward, shielded the individual, and gave every citizen a chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.That moral grounding made all the difference. Two centuries later, America still wrestles with itself, but the frame still stands. By contrast, much of the modern West — Canada included — drifts into the same errors that felled the French. Liberty divorced from morality. Power centralized in the bureaucratic state. Equality of outcomes elevated above equality of opportunity..Which brings us to Alberta.The federal government has wandered far from its Westminster roots. Worse, it has become untethered from the culture of the West — a culture still rooted in responsibility, faith, and self-reliance. Ottawa pursues the French disease of abstractions and centralization. Alberta lives in the real. And in that divide lies the lesson of these two revolutions.If Alberta is to remain free, it cannot afford to forget the wisdom the Americans cherished — that liberty requires limits, that equality must be of standing not outcomes, and that democracy without morality is just mob rule in a suit..MASON: To leave or not to leave, that is the question.Our choice is clear. Ottawa will not correct its course; the rot has set too deep. But Alberta still has a window. We have the right, the responsibility, and — dare I say it — the duty to pursue independence. We must do this if we wish to preserve not only our prosperity, but the moral foundations that make liberty possible at all.That is the lesson of two revolutions — and it would be sheer folly for Alberta to ignore it.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
