James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development. He is also a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, and served with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light InfantryIt may sound strange — absurd, even — to suggest that Alberta seceding from Canada might be the last hope for what used to be called Canadian culture. But these are strange times, and strange times make the unthinkable not only thinkable, but necessary.The topic arose during a conversation with an old friend — like me, a former soldier. A man who once bled red, not just in body but in allegiance. A man who swore an oath to Canada, stood ready to defend her and who now, with a heavy heart and unflinching clarity, no longer recognizes the country he once called home.We spoke of others like us — men and women of service, of duty — now marching to a new drumbeat: Alberta independence. Not out of bitterness. Not from disloyalty. But out of mourning — mourning for a country that once inspired pride but now curdles in the mouth like a slogan gone sour..I, too, served. I’ve walked the silent rows of headstones in Europe. Read the tear-stained inscriptions carved into white crosses. Felt the quiet thunder of gratitude in Dutch pubs, beer in hand, beneath a Maple Leaf patch. There was a time when the flag meant something. When Canada stood for something. Not a globalist brand. Not a “post-national state.” A nation.I use the past tense deliberately because the Canada we knew — the Canada of individual liberty, enterprise and quiet strength — has been replaced. In its place is a bureaucratized “post-national state,” obsessed with rebranding its citizenry into compliant cogs of a globalist experiment. The values that once animated this country have not vanished, but they have certainly been exiled — from our institutions, from our media and from the political class that now governs by algorithm and ideology.That exile is most visible in the growing divide — no longer just geographic, but philosophical — between the Laurentian elite and the people of the West. In Ottawa, they speak in the language of control: control of speech, of enterprise, of movement, of energy. On this side of the divide, in Alberta and Saskatchewan and the reaches of rural B.C., we speak a different language: freedom. Freedom of thought, of conscience, of work, of self-determination..These are not partisan ideals. They are Canadian ideals. Or rather, they were.The irony, cruel and sharp, is that in order to preserve those ideals, Alberta may need to leave the very country that once embodied them. Independence is not a betrayal of Canada. It is, in fact, an act of remembrance. An effort to keep alive something that has been suffocated by the smug progressivism of the political centre.Some say this is just sour grapes.They should spend a day on a rig site or a ranch.They should speak to the young families watching their paycheques shrink under heavy taxes and policy experiments dreamt up by people who’ve never held a wrench.These are not radicals. They are Canadians who have been told — implicitly and explicitly — that their values no longer have a place in the country they helped build.Yet here, in the West, those values endure. And not just here. I have heard from people in northern Ontario, Vancouver Island and the Maritimes — people who see Alberta as the last holdout of a Canada they still recognize and desperately miss. They don’t have the means to act where they live, so they look to us. They cheer us on. Not because they hate Canada — but because they remember her.To them I say: come. Join us. This isn’t about building walls — it’s about preserving foundations. Alberta has the resources, the will and the cultural memory to stand as a free and flourishing nation. And when we succeed, it will be the greatest tribute ever paid to the country we once called home.Strange, isn’t it? That Alberta independence may not be the end of Canada. It may be the last echo of her greatness.But stranger still would be doing nothing — and watching it all vanish.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development. He is also a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, and served with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
