BROWN: Alberta independence is no longer just about money — it’s about escaping Ottawa’s moral rot

Grant A. Brown has a DPhil in political philosophy from Oxford University and an LL.B. from the University of Alberta. Now retired, his career includes teaching at the University of Lethbridge, practicing law in Edmonton, and running a B&B in Stratford, Ontario. He returned to Alberta in 2022 to support Alberta independence.I divide arguments for Alberta independence into two broad categories: economic and moral. Or more colloquially, pocketbook issues and matters of the heart and soul. Despite the fact that the economic benefits of Alberta independence are obvious, undeniable, and considerable, federalists are most comfortable debating in this area for a number of reasons. People tend to be risk-averse, and significant institutional change represents risk to them. Moreover, they are asymmetrically risk-averse: they care much more about potential losses than potential gains. People also tend to rate their contentment in life relative to their peers. As long as Albertans are doing better than their peers in the rest of Canada on pocketbook issues, they will tend to be content and resist change. Third, Albertans are generous people — generous to a fault. As long as Albertans are prospering, they are pleased to transfer wealth to other parts of Canada that are struggling (even if their economic underperformance is self-inflicted, as it usually is).For these reasons, and perhaps others, the pocketbook arguments for independence do not grab many Albertans as forcefully as would be rationally prudent. As long as federalists are allowed to choose this field of battle, they have a good chance of winning. This is more true if they can narrow the field down to one or two pocketbook issues. Clever federalists take the initiative and set the terms of the debate: this "independence thing" is only about a pipeline to the West Coast, or it is just about the equalization formula. We can fix those! Too many independence supporters take the bait and spend all of their time responding to these two issues. This is a fatal debating tactic. Not only do the pocketbook issues extend far beyond the two issues federalists recognize, it leaves out the entire range of heart and soul issues. Independence supporters have to go on the attack and expand the debate to our favoured turf..In my opinion, the two biggest pocketbook issues independence supporters should be pursuing are the size of the federal deficits and debt (despite our obscenely high levels of taxation), and the absurd assortment of regulations and interprovincial trade barriers that throttle the Canadian economy. Deficits and debt cause inflation; high taxes and extensive regulations cause investment to flee, productivity to fall, and employment to lag — not only in the oilpatch, but everywhere. Canada does not have an entrepreneurial culture; in fact, it is a point of pride in the rest of Canada to be disdainful or at least naive about how a market economy works. Canadians love carving the economy up into little fiefdoms and big cartels. Alberta might as well be a separate country; it would likely reduce the trade barriers we face with the rest of Canada.But enough about pocketbook issues. The main point of this intervention is to elevate the heart and soul issues to the centre of the debate — to put federalists on their back foot, on the defensive. What are the moral issues that independence supporters should be raising on behalf of Alberta's autonomy? The mother of all moral issues is the rampant political corruption in Ottawa. Every day brings to light a handful of new conflicts of interest and self-dealing, spending scandals, wasteful or partisan agenda-driven boondoggles. It's not just that every new program or initiative is tied to a Brookfield interest. Is there a single Liberal cabinet minister left who does not have a friend or a relative making a living from federal government spending or regulations, or in the deep state bureaucracy facilitating the grift? There's an enormous ecosystem of consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, "experts," and private sector businesses that feed off the pallets of money churning through Ottawa — many of them former politicians milking the system.All of this has gone on, often in plain sight, for decades with zero accountability. It's not what is illegal that they get away with that bothers me the most; it's the corruption that is perfectly legal. The perpetrators keep getting re-elected, re-appointed, rewarded, and promoted. I won't argue here that one political party is more corrupt than another, although that is quite apparent. There is a general principle in the public choice literature that the closer a government is to its public, the less corruption and the more accountability one can expect: it is harder to cheat friends and neighbours who can see what is going on. Thus, the United Nations is by far the most corrupt political organization imaginable (you have to believe by design); the least corrupt is a town council. Ottawa is near the top of the food chain, and thousands of kilometres away from Alberta, so you draw the inference. Cutting out one huge corrupt level of government is a moral imperative. .Another important heart and soul issue that Albertans should be distancing themselves from Ottawa over concerns about crime and punishment. Our criminal laws are so soft, and our enforcement of them so weak, that Canada is now the world's number one destination for "crime tourism." Literally, folks come to Canada on a tourist or student visa for the sole purpose of committing robberies, extortion, and a rape or two if the opportunity arises. If they get caught, they get bail and flee the country. We have no effective means of stopping Mexican cartels from setting up drug labs in the suburbs, obtaining chemical precursors from China, transporting and trafficking deadly narcotics domestically and abroad, then laundering the proceeds in Canadian banks, casinos, and real estate. Canada is also the world leader in the practice of identity politics. We do not have a two-tier system of spoils in Canada; we have a twenty- or thirty-tier system. It works its evil from cradle to grave. Preferential policies and practices pervade the education system, all types of employment, criminal and civil law, government grants and procurements, the "human rights" commissions — basically, everywhere the federal government can find a way to poke its bony little finger. These wasteful practices corrupt the very soul of a polity, pitting everyone against everyone else. An increasingly concerning problem is federal government censorship, surveillance, and propagandizing people with their own money via a bought-and-paid-for media. There is a creeping, velvet-gloved totalitarianism in Canada, where only one narrative — the government's — is acceptable. "Hate speech" is speech that the government hates. In the interest of child safety, every adult must tell the government every time they access the internet. We are quickly headed down the path of the United Kingdom, where orders of magnitude more people are jailed than in Russia over tweets deemed by the authorities to be offensive — tweets that had been commonplace or mainstream a decade or two ago. It makes you wonder whether any value of Western civilization is sacred anymore. .Don't even get me started on Ottawa's foreign affairs shenanigans! (OK, too late...) It begins with the smug anti-Americanism that pervades the rest of Canada and threatens to ruin a working relationship with our one essential trading partner and protector. America is not perfect, but it is usually directionally right. Canada's reflexive anti-Americanism leads Ottawa into doing all manner of evil just to show that we are not taking marching orders from Washington. This week, Ottawa gave away another $100 million to UNRWA — an agency known to be riddled with Hamas terrorists. Meanwhile, the Minister of Industry was visiting China, trying to build ties with their EV manufacturers who use forced labour. The Prime Minister has been trying ever since he was elected to build a stronger relationship with China as a bulwark against the ravages of a supposedly less trustworthy USA, the same China he has accused of being our biggest danger for foreign interference. Nobody asks how integrating more closely with the world's leading organ-harvesting regime from political prisoners is morally justified. Ottawa's morally deranged foreign affairs gambits alone make it imperative that Alberta leave Canada.Wouldn't it be better if Alberta could make our own laws in relation to controversial social policies around (e.g.) genderwang, guns, and MAiD? As opposed to passing stop-gap measures to work around activist-influenced federal government laws. Wouldn't it be better if Albertans wrote our own constitution, with our own slate of rights, interpreted by our own judges? Rather than being at the mercy of the morally deranged politicians in Ottawa and their myrmidons. Naturally, advancing heart and soul issues as I have done above will inflame a lot of Albertans, because a lot of Albertans have been corrupted by a terrible university education into thinking that the positions staked out by Ottawa are what make Canada great. Should independence supporters be reticent about upsetting these Albertans? Won't fighting "culture wars" lose more votes than it gains? Not at all. As I pointed out in an earlier op-ed in these pages, the federalist camp is deeply divided between progressives and conservatives. Yes, the progressive federalists, who are still a minority in Alberta, will be deeply offended by these moral arguments for independence; indeed, since they side with Ottawa on moral issues, they take the view that these are good reasons to keep Alberta under the thumb of Ottawa. I welcome progressive federalists to take up their battle with the conservative federalists, and get back to me once they have sorted out their differences. The fact is, we don't need the progressive federalists to win independence. We may happily throw them under the bus if it means sweeping up additional conservative federalists — the ones with a conscience, with a heart and soul — to the independence cause.Grant A. Brown has a DPhil in political philosophy from Oxford University and an LL.B. from the University of Alberta. Now retired, his career includes teaching at the University of Lethbridge, practicing law in Edmonton, and running a B&B in Stratford, Ontario. He returned to Alberta in 2022 to support Alberta independence.

BROWN: Alberta independence is no longer just about money — it’s about escaping Ottawa’s moral rot

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