MACLEOD: The quiet nationalization of Canada — Ottawa's socialist blueprint is hiding in plain sight

Canada is not just drifting to the Far Left. It is being shoved there by a federal political class that has learned how to buy dependency, centralize authority, and call the whole thing compassion, while calling anyone who objects selfish, extreme, or dangerous.Ottawa is now providing the daycare, the dental care, the pharmacare, the housing money, the media money, the climate rebates, the industrial subsidies, the infrastructure bank, the carbon contracts, the pipeline ownership, the project approvals, and increasingly, the rules around what Canadians may say online. Canada is building a dependency state in which citizens are encouraged to look first to Ottawa, rather than to their own work, family, province, employer, savings, church, community, or marketplace.The deal being offered to Canadians is simple: vote for the people promising “free” things, and they will send the bill to others: your children, your employer, your province, your savings, or your industry. It sounds kind and compassionate. It certainly wins elections. But it is definitely poison over the long term. That is not a free country becoming more generous. That is a government becoming more powerful.Nothing is free. Somebody always pays. In Canada, that somebody is usually Alberta.The federal government now runs the Canadian Dental Care Plan as a national benefit program. It has signed pharmacare agreements to publicly fund selected diabetes medications and contraception. It continues to push the Canada-wide childcare model through federal-provincial agreements. Each of these programs can be defended on emotional grounds. But the real question is who pays, who controls it, and how long a country can keep expanding permanent promises with borrowed money..The fiscal answer is already ugly. Canada’s federal deficit for 2025–26 is rising to $90 billion. The total government debt in Canada is $2.3 trillion. We now spend more on debt servicing, $53.8 billion, than we do on healthcare, $52.1 billion. That is not “investment.” That is a government living beyond its means and pretending that maxing out the credit card is a national strategy.And while Ottawa spends, Canada gets poorer in the only way that really matters to ordinary people. The Bank of Canada has warned that Canada’s weak productivity has persisted for 25 years. Labour productivity growth was roughly 3% annually in the 1960s and 1970s, fell to about 1% from 2000 to 2019, and the weakness has continued. The Fraser Institute found Canadian GDP per person fell 2% from 2020 to 2024, despite overall GDP growth. Translation: the country got bigger, the government got bigger, but the average Canadian got poorer. That is what managed decline looks like.The most insulting example for Albertans is energy. Ottawa spent years making private pipeline investment a political, legal, and regulatory nightmare. As private capital lost patience, Ottawa bought Trans Mountain for $4.5 billion. The expansion later became a massively expensive public-sector project, with the completed expansion costing $34 billion. Now, after proving the government cannot build a pipeline efficiently, Ottawa appears ready to do it again. The newly announced West Coast pipeline proposal is expected to be built by government-owned Trans Mountain Corp., with the federal and Alberta governments as majority owners and Pembina holding only a 10% (guaranteed) stake during construction.Let’s call that what it really is: nationalization of industry by failure.The government poisons the private market. Private capital leaves. Government steps in, takes control of the asset, assumes the risk, and demands applause for “nation-building.” That is not capitalism. That is not even competent socialism. That is Ottawa breaking the window and then selling us the replacement glass..This pattern is now everywhere. The Canada Infrastructure Bank is a federal Crown corporation investing in infrastructure projects. The Canada Growth Fund is a $15-billion state-backed fund designed to absorb risk and attract private capital into politically favoured areas. Carbon contracts use public money to underwrite projects whose business case depends on federal carbon policy. In plain English, Ottawa creates the regulation, creates the subsidy, creates the risk, then creates a fund to rescue the investment climate it damages. That is not a market economy. That is a political economy.The Major Projects Office may be the most revealing piece of the whole structure. Ottawa says the office assesses projects under the Building Canada Act and provides recommendations and advice to federal departments. It also says the office is advancing “nation-building projects” in Canada. That sounds harmless until you understand what it means: Ottawa is building a federal gatekeeping system for major projects. It decides what is important, what gets fast-tracked, what gets blessed, and what gets buried. Projects are no longer built because they make commercial sense. They are built because they satisfy coalitions, calm regional anger, reward favoured partners, and generate press conferences. Like the West Coast pipeline project, the result is entirely predictable: higher costs, longer delays, politicized procurement, weaker accountability, questionable economics, and fewer projects overall. For Albertans, that should be a five-alarm fire.We are a resource province. We build pipelines, mines, processing facilities, roads, rail, power, petrochemicals, and export infrastructure. Alberta does not need a federal permission office deciding whether Alberta’s projects fit the mood of cabinet, the climate lobby, British Columbia politics, or whatever indigenous consultation structure Ottawa chooses to empower this week. Alberta needs clear rules, private capital, provincial control, and the right to build..Then there is the right to free speech. Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, would create a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. The government says this is about online safety. Children should be protected online. But we have seen this movie before. A real problem is identified. A broad federal regulator is created. The mandate grows. The definitions stretch. Eventually, yesterday’s political disagreement becomes tomorrow’s “harm.”Michael Geist has warned that Bill C-34 creates an Internet “super-regulator.” That should concern anyone who still believes citizens should be allowed to argue with their government without wondering whether some federal office is taking notes. Worse, Blacklock’s Reporter has reported that an Access to Information memo from Mélanie Joly’s department contemplates “legal action” against users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms suspected of spreading “false and misleading information.” That phrase should make every Canadian sit up straight. Legal action against citizens for social media posts? Decided by whom? Using what definition? Enforced by what process? Governments mislead people constantly. They deny parliamentary committees, bury costs, massage numbers, hide reports, break promises, and rename failure as success. Yet now these same people want to supervise the truth and what you can say online? No. Absolutely not.This is how your freedom shrinks. Not all at once. It shrinks through benefits, subsidies, regulators, project offices, Crown corporations, safety commissions, speech rules, and endless federal programs that make citizens dependent and provinces subordinate.Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia did not fail because they lacked slogans about fairness. They failed because centralized control kills initiative, scares away capital, rewards loyalty over competence, and turns citizens into dependent clients of the state. .Countries do not become centralized command states overnight. They move there one program, one subsidy, one regulator, one emergency, and one Digital Safety Commission at a time. Canada is not there yet, but the direction most certainly matters. For Alberta, the answer is becoming clearer by the month.Independence is not about anger or about hating Canada. It is about refusing to be tied permanently to a federal system that takes Alberta’s wealth, blocks Alberta’s industries, overrides Alberta’s priorities, regulates Alberta’s speech, and then lectures us about morality and being difficult.An independent Alberta would not magically solve every problem. We would still need fiscal discipline, serious leadership, restrained budgets, competent institutions, and adult decision-making. But at least the decisions would be made here. Our energy policy, project approvals, tax policy, and speech laws would be made in Alberta by people answerable to Albertans. Our money would no longer be siphoned away to fund a federal machine increasingly hostile to the very industries that built this province. Not another federal promise, or another panel, or another “nation-building” press conference. Not another government-owned pipeline is being built because private investors have been chased away. Not another Ottawa office deciding whether Alberta is allowed to develop its own economy or what opinions we are allowed to offer online.The path out is political independence, economic self-respect, and the courage to say that Alberta was not built to become a branch office of Ottawa’s managed decline.We can keep feeding the ever-increasing socialist machine, or we can build our own country.

MACLEOD: The quiet nationalization of Canada — Ottawa's socialist blueprint is hiding in plain sight

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