ALBERS: Not all ideas are equal. Neither are all cultures

James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.As a student of history, I am struck by the rise and fall of civilizations on this small celestial body we call Earth. Empires have come and gone. Kingdoms have risen in confidence and collapsed in corruption. And today, whether we care to admit it or not, we stand at the edge of the possible unravelling of what may well be the greatest civilization humanity has ever produced: the modern West.My premise is simple, though unfashionable in our Age of Hurt Feelings: not all ideas are equal, and neither are the cultures that spring from them. History is littered with ideological experiments; the results are neither subtle nor mysterious. Marxist philosophy, that academic fever dream, took root in Eastern Europe, China, and parts of the developing world. It promised equality and delivered poverty. It preached liberation and built prison camps. China has not yet collapsed under its contradictions, but even now it staggers under economic strain masked by authoritarian choreography..HILL / THOMPSON: Here’s why Calgary City Hall should keep ‘blanket rezoning’.And we know this truth not merely through books or statistics, but by the direction of human footsteps. People did not risk their lives on rafts, in deserts, or in the underbelly of transport trucks to reach Beijing, Caracas, or Moscow. They fled theocracies, autocracies, and ideologies of control — and ran toward the West. That movement, sustained over centuries, is the clearest possible referendum on which ideas produce flourishing, and which produce flight. Western society did not stumble into freedom. It did not arrive at prosperity by accident, nor design its institutions through convenience. It was built deliberately, carefully, and often painfully, upon a moral and philosophical foundation unmatched in human history. That foundation produced not only wealth and order, but something far rarer: liberty under law, dignity within authority, and opportunity within structure.At the center of Western thought lies a radical assertion: Lex Rex — the law is king. Not the monarch. Not the government. Not the collective will of the moment. Law, grounded in a higher moral order, stands above all rulers and all institutions. This one idea shattered the doctrine of divine-right monarchy and gave rise to constitutional government, due process, and the revolutionary notion that power must justify itself before the law..Closely bound to this was another remarkable belief: that the individual mattered and was paramount. Rooted in the Judeo-Christian understanding that each person is created in the image of God, the West rejected the ancient assumption that men and women exist merely to serve the tribe, the emperor, or the state. In Western civilization, the individual possesses inherent worth. Rights are not handed out by government. They are recognized as pre-existing, and therefore cannot be withdrawn.From this flowed the separation of powers described by Locke and Montesquieu. Because human nature is flawed, no single authority can be trusted with total power. Power must be divided, restrained, and checked. Government is necessary, but it must be limited. Freedom must be protected, but it must exist within order. This delicate balance produced the stability and dynamism that defined the West.Beneath it all lay another essential pillar: private property. When individuals can own, protect, improve, and pass on what they build, they become sovereign in a practical sense. Property creates independence. It encourages stewardship. It rewards ingenuity and effort. When property rights are weakened or treated with suspicion, freedom soon follows them into decline..BURTON: Ottawa, Alberta’s MOU hands BC a veto, Canada another missed opportunity.The West also embraced a unique understanding of time. History was no longer seen as a meaningless cycle of repetition, but as a linear journey toward something better. Progress was possible. Truth was discoverable. This belief gave birth to science, universities, innovation, free markets, and representative government. In an ironic twist, it is now that very belief in progress that fuels a radical, progressive movement determined to erase the past — to saw off the branch upon which it comfortably sits. It seeks to replace the ideas and the culture they produced with something far inferior and lacking in authority.And so, quietly but steadily, these foundations have begun to weaken. Law has increasingly become politicized, leading to a situation where rights are now conditional and truth is negotiable. Property is viewed with suspicion, and power has become centralized, concentrating influence in fewer hands. Additionally, history is often seen as something to erase rather than learn from, reflecting a shift in societal values and priorities..What was once a civilization anchored in principle now wobbles on opinion. What once restrained tyranny now justifies it — wrapped in softer language and better packaging. The institutions built to protect the citizen increasingly turn inward, regulating, redistributing, and redefining the very liberties they were created to defend.Western society is not collapsing by invasion.It is dissolving by invitation — by self-inflicted erosion..OLDCORN: ‘Singh Hortons’ has become a national disgrace, no longer ‘Canada’s coffee shop’.It is unraveling by choosing to forget itself.Nowhere is this more evident than in Canada — a nation built upon British common law, parliamentary tradition, and Western legal thought, yet increasingly uneasy with its own inheritance. In that widening gap between Western principle and modern political reality, an uncomfortable question has begun to surface — once unthinkable, now whispered, debated, and in some corners, openly stated: if a nation no longer reflects the values that created its freedom, do its people still owe it their allegiance?For Alberta — a province forged by work, self-reliance, private enterprise, and fierce belief in individual liberty — that question is no longer theoretical. As federal power centralizes, economic independence shrinks, and constitutional balance erodes, the tension is no longer merely political. It is philosophical. It is civilizational..And if one needed a fresher example of how far Canada has drifted from its own intellectual inheritance, one need only look to Parliament’s vote on Tuesday night — a vote opposing new pipeline development, taken in open contradiction to the very Memorandum of Understanding Ottawa had just signed with Alberta. A government that cannot keep its promises is not merely disorganized; it is disoriented. It is no longer governed by principle, but by a creed — and such creeds rarely tolerate reality.This was not a vote about oil in the ground. It was a vote about ideas — and about which ideas shall rule the country.And here, one can see the unmistakable imprint of Prime Minister Mark Carney, he of the theory that Canada must be morally remade before it can be economically revived. His book “Value(s)” is not a manifesto for national prosperity, but a sermon for national re-education: a call to reorder the economy, the culture, and ultimately the citizen according to a new set of values crafted not by history, but by technocrats. It is the climate movement, not as an environmental concern, but as a secular theology — a creed that elevates symbolic virtue above material reality, and treats the extraction, transport, and use of energy as moral crimes rather than national necessities..QUESNEL: Sacred or sinister? Rethinking religious defences in hate speech.Thus, the contradiction is not a contradiction at all. Ottawa signs an MOU with one hand and kneecaps it with the other because the pipeline, the province, and the prosperity it would bring are all subordinate to a greater mission: reshaping Canada into a country that bears no resemblance to the one our forebears built. A country where the foundational Western ideas — private property, industry, the rule of law, the dignity of work, the moral legitimacy of individual privacy and prosperity — are steadily displaced by an ideological framework in which energy is shameful, aspiration is suspect, and economic strength is a threat to the new national catechism, and individuals must become subject to the arbiter of all things, the government.Parliament did not vote against a pipeline..It voted against the very ideas that once made Canada possible.Under Premier Danielle Smith, Alberta has begun to answer this deeper struggle with something more than polite memos and Ottawa-approved deference. She has taken up the tools of provincial self-respect. Through the Alberta Sovereignty Act, amendments to the Alberta Bill of Rights, resistance to Ottawa’s carbon-tax orthodoxy, opposition to federal firearms confiscation, protections for parental authority and protection of our youth from harmful — life-altering fads, and new safeguards for free speech and professional independence, her government has revived an older, sturdier principle: that decisions about Albertans should be made by Albertans. That the law is a shield for citizens, not a cudgel for governments. That children belong first to families, not to bureaucracies. That speech should not be corralled by ideologues in professional associations who fancy themselves the gatekeepers of permitted thought.And now, with new “firewall” measures unveiled at the AGM — a provincial mechanism to halt federally imposed policies that trespass on Alberta’s interests; reinforced jurisdiction over natural resources and electricity generation; and a firm refusal to act as Ottawa’s errand-runner for programs that breach constitutional limits — Smith has gone further still. She is signaling that Alberta will no longer play the national piñata while Ottawa swings the stick. The days of passive absorption are over; the days of building fortifications have begun. These are not the quibbles of routine provincial-federal friction. They are statements of first principles — declarations of what kind of civilization Alberta still believes in and intends to keep. Together, these actions signal something much larger: a deliberate stand to preserve a worldview rooted in Western ideas of individual dignity, ordered liberty, and responsible self-government — a worldview increasingly at odds with the centralized, managerial, and ideologically driven direction of modern Canada..PINDER: The West’s breaking point — how Canada’s emissions policies expose a rigged federation.Which leaves us with the hardest questions of all — not merely for Albertans, but for Alberta’s leadership.How many MOU’s must Ottawa undermine before we acknowledge the obvious? How many defensive laws must Alberta pass before we recognize that this is not a policy disagreement, but a philosophical divorce? How many times must Premier Smith shield Alberta from Ottawa before concluding that the real issue is not governance, but compatibility?There comes a moment in the life of any people when endurance ceases to be prudence and becomes submission. That moment is now upon Alberta. A nation that cannot keep its word, cannot restrain its ideology, and cannot honour its own foundations is not a partner — it is a liability. Confederation, as it stands, asks Alberta to shrink so Ottawa may expand; to weaken so the federal creed may flourish. But a civilization that still believes in liberty, property, law, family, and work cannot survive under a government that rejects all five. And so, the real question is no longer whether Alberta can afford independence. It is whether Alberta — to remain Alberta — can afford anything less.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.

ALBERS: Not all ideas are equal. Neither are all cultures

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