James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.Virtue signalling — our modern plague — is the act of parading one’s moral superiority, not through genuine deed or meaningful reform, but through cheap theatrics and public declarations. It costs nothing, achieves less, and yet fills the air with the pompous perfume of inaction under the guise of progress.Take the Prime Minister’s latest flourish: Canada will now recognize Palestine as a state. There was no plan, no strategy, no meaningful engagement — just a press release meant to keep time with the fashionable notes struck by Messrs. Starmer and Macron. Europe hums a tune and Ottawa sings along, eager to be seen as virtuous on the world stage..HANNAFORD: The making of revolution in Alberta....We’ve seen this opera before. Recall the sudden blossoming of Ukrainian flags on Twitter profiles. Remember the flotillas of plastic kayaks pretending to halt oil tankers. Political life has seized this habit from social media and elevated it into an art form.Consider “Elbows Up” Carney, brandishing a faux “executive order” to repeal the carbon tax. A theatrical gesture, a zeroing out rather than a repeal, with Parliament still left to clean up. It was mimicry, a bizarre imitation of the American president he so loftily opposed..Or the vaunted “energy corridors” tucked into Bill C-5. Promising vision and progress, until the footnotes reveal they are corridors for green power alone — stage props for the great EV mandate, that other towering shrine of political posturing.And of course, the pièce de résistance: our Prime Minister playing “Canada’s negotiator” in the tariff skirmish with Washington. Yet when the curtain rose, he shuffled back from his second vacation to admit defeat: tariffs were coming anyway. To mask the failure, he announced a “review” of the F-35 contracts. Bold words. Hollow substance. If Ottawa goes Swedish with the Viggen, Canada will pay billions to build an infrastructure no ally uses. The promised “punch in the American nose” becomes, inevitably, a kick in Canada’s own knickers..MCTEAGUE: ’Net-Zero' Carney's going to build new pipelines? I'll believe it when I see it!.This is the poisonous genius of virtue signalling: it cloaks inaction in moral grandeur. It offers Canadians the narcotic of superiority while entrenching the status quo. It is theatre for the Laurentian elite while the West, weary of this charade, waits for something real.We are not immune here in Alberta. Professor Bruce Pardy has rightly pointed out that our own Citizen Initiative Act is a trap of our own design — a tangle of procedural checks that hobble democracy under the guise of constitutional caution. That’s why the Alberta Prosperity Project now finds itself before a judge, its referendum question stalled by rules meant less to empower citizens than to contain them..To the Premier’s credit, she has acted swiftly on other matters — rolling back the secrecy around ministerial receipts, for example. But the pressing question remains: will she amend the Citizen Initiative Act to cut away this procedural choke-hold, or will even Alberta fall prey to the same empty virtue signalling that poisons Ottawa?The clock, Premier, ticks loudly. By your own telling, Alberta’s demands before Mr. Carney are non-negotiable. If the very machinery of democracy is left hobbled by red tape, then independence itself simply becomes another prop on the stage. .CARPAY: Neither freedom nor democracy is destined to live forever.Albertans want to have this discussion and are looking to you to ensure that happens.Virtue signalling is no mere annoyance. It is a toxin, eating away at a once proud nation. Carney fiddles, Ottawa applauds, and Canada burns. Albertans want to decide whether they will be in the audience — or write a new script altogether. Premier Smith, the ball is in your court.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
