James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.I confess, I admire the US Constitution. It is not perfect, but it is brilliant in its resilience. For 250 years, it has allowed America to stumble, argue, repair, and carry on without losing the thread of its republic. It adapts without amputating. It reforms without razing. Always striving for better without tossing the baby out with the bathwater.And now — consider our own sorry spectacle this week. A prime minister, having failed to meet even one of his glittering campaign promises, cloaks himself not in Canadian maple leaf but in Ukrainian blue and gold. With flourish, he pledges $2 billion more in aid, perhaps even troops, as though Canada were a vault stuffed with surplus riches and battalions to spare. Noble? Perhaps. Accountable? Not in the slightest.Tell me, where in the budget — oh wait, we haven’t one — was this little line item tucked? By what authority does a Canadian Prime Minister unilaterally promise billions abroad without so much as a parliamentary nod? This is a parliamentary democracy, is it not? Or are we merely extras in the grand drama of his self-regard?.EDITORIAL: Scrap the Temporary Foreign Worker Program so Canadian young people can work again.The gesture, of course, is pure virtue signalling — expensive, theatrical, and wildly out of step with our allies, particularly the US, who at least have the good sense to be brokering peace instead of grandstanding war. This is not leadership. This is posing.Kevin O’Leary once dubbed Trudeau the “Idiot King.” Harsh, yes. But at least Trudeau, in his posturing, seemed dimly aware of his own shallowness. His successor? Worse. More arrogant, less self-aware, and more convinced of his own genius. Bertrand Russell said it best, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”Canada, as a system, was meant to prevent this. The US built safeguards — executive, legislative, judicial — designed to keep any one branch from turning monarch. Ours, copied in miniature, was supposed to do the same with the executive held accountable to Parliament, Parliament checked by sober second thought of the Senate, the judiciary a final bulwark. In theory, a balance..In practice? A prime minister’s office that controls it all. Supreme Court appointments? PMO’s choice. Senators? PMO’s list. Cabinet? PMO’s cronies. Even the Governor General bows to the prime minister’s nod. Only the most iron-willed within this system would dare to push back.This is how Carney can pledge $2 billion abroad without a budget, without a vote, without even a blush. He claims a “strong mandate” but governs only with the indulgence of the Bloc Québécois — the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party. Accountability? Forget it. When plum posts and lavish spending are the coin of the realm, no one bites the hand that feeds.What we have is not democracy. It is managed consent, “controlled participation” as historians call it — the illusion of choice dressed up in ballots and talking points..EDITORIAL: Danielle Smith must continue fight against porn in school libraries.And so Alberta must learn its lesson. Ottawa will not change. The “Nine Nasty Policies” will not vanish. The rot will not reverse. Our premier and our people will soon have to face the truth. If Alberta wants to live free, it cannot do so as Ottawa’s ward.Tocqueville warned that a people weary of their government will either reform it or collapse willingly into the arms of it as a master. Eastern Canada has made its choice. If it wishes to curl at Ottawa’s feet, let it. Here in Alberta, we must choose the freer institutions through the pursuit of independence. May we choose wisely.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
