OPINION: Alberta as a Nation — Why We Would Be Better Off Without Ottawa

September 20th, 2026 Opinion — Jason LaFace, Editor, Alberta Radio

For decades Albertans have been told the same story: you are lucky to be Canadian, so keep sending the cheques and keep quiet when Ottawa blocks your pipelines, taxes your work, and lectures you about your own land. That deal is broken. A free Alberta would not be a tantrum. It would be a grown-up country with its own rules, its own money, its own deals with First Nations and Métis governments, and a government that answers to people here — not to party machines three time zones away.

Here is the case, pillar by pillar.

1. First Nations and Métis: partnership on Treaty ground, not Ottawa theatre

Alberta sits on Treaties 6, 7, and 8, and is home to dozens of First Nations and a large Métis Nation of Alberta community. Confederation did not invent those relationships, and Ottawa has not earned a monopoly on honouring them.

An independent Alberta could put Nation-to-Nation deals at the centre of the constitution — resource revenue sharing that is written down, not whispered; education and health authority that travels with the community; hunting, fishing, and land-use rights protected in black letter law; and economic development that treats First Nations and Métis governments as owners and partners, not photo ops every September.

“Every Child Matters” means nothing if kids on reserve and in the cities are still cycling through underfunded housing, child welfare, and the street. A new country that keeps the orange shirts and skips the budgets is the same hypocrisy we already have. A serious Alberta nation would measure reconciliation by housing, jobs, schools, and clean water — and by whether Indigenous governments have a real seat when energy, water, and land rules are written.

Ottawa’s brand of reconciliation has been symbolism plus bureaucracy. Alberta’s opportunity is results.

2. Oil and gas: keep the wealth that pays for everything else

Mining, oil, and gas are roughly a quarter of Alberta’s GDP. Crude and hydrocarbon gases make up about three-quarters of our merchandise exports — on the order of $119 billion in crude alone in recent trade figures. Non-renewable resource revenue still funds a huge share of provincial services even when prices dip. Fraser Institute and related fiscal work put Alberta’s net contribution to federal finances in the tens of billions a year, and well over $300 billion across two decades. We get $0 in equalization.

That is not envy. That is arithmetic.

As our own country, Alberta would set export corridors, royalty regimes, and environmental standards for our geology — without a federal veto dressed up as climate virtue while foreign tankers still dock elsewhere. We could sell to Asia, Europe, and the United States on Alberta’s timetable. We could build upgrading and petrochemical capacity here so the jobs stay here. We could grow the Heritage Fund for real, instead of watching Ottawa treat our industry like a moral problem and our cheques like an entitlement.

Energy done right is not the opposite of conservation. It is the cash that pays for land reclamation, tech, and the transition experiments Ottawa loves to announce and hates to fund honestly. An Alberta nation that owns its resource policy can be both a serious energy exporter and a serious steward. A province trapped in Confederation is neither.

3. Free college and university: invest in our own kids first

A country that prints opportunity for the world and then prices its own young people out of trades and degrees is running a racket.

An independent Alberta could phase in tuition-free public colleges, polytechnics, and universities for residents who finish high school, serve in a civilian or defence national service year, or commit to working in-province for a set term in health, teaching, skilled trades, agriculture, or energy. Pair it with aggressive trades seats, apprenticeship wages, and rural campus expansion so a kid in Peace River is not told the only future is a debt load in a downtown condo.

Pay for it from resource rents we no longer ship east, from a sovereign wealth fund that actually behaves like Norway’s cousin, and from cutting duplicate federal–provincial program empires. Education is not a slogan. It is how a small nation outruns a large one.

4. Government without parties: voters over machines

The party system trains MLAs and MPs to obey the whip, not the riding. Albertans have watched enough floor-crossing, nomination-fixing, and caucus silence to know the costume changes. The problem is the costume shop.

A new Alberta constitution could ban registered parties from controlling nominations, funding, and legislative votes. Candidates run as individuals. Cabinets are built from the Assembly by open ballot. Confidence votes are about budgets and war — not about hurting the leader’s feelings. Citizens’ assemblies handle boundary changes and ethics rules. Referendums are mandatory for constitutional change, tax increases above a threshold, and long-term debt.

Would it be messy? Good. Democracy that never gets messy is just administration with better lighting. The point is simple: no more governing Alberta from a party war room.

5. Farmers, agriculture, and biodiversity: food security as national policy

Alberta feeds far more than Alberta. Cattle, canola, wheat, pulses, and specialty crops are not side hustles — they are strategic industries. An independent country would treat them that way.

That means trade deals written for exporters on the Prairies, not for voters in central Canada. It means water, soil, and grassland policy designed with producers and Indigenous stewards at the table — not with activists who think a feedlot is a crime scene and a pipeline is original sin. It means paying farmers and ranchers for measurable biodiversity outcomes: wetlands, pollinator habitat, native grass, carbon in soil — without turning the countryside into a museum.

Food security is national security. Biodiversity is not the enemy of production; abandonment and bad policy are. An Alberta nation can run both — productive acres and living landscapes — if it stops importing rules from people who have never sat in a cab during harvest.

6. Our own dollar: monetary policy that matches our economy

Sharing a currency with regions that do not share our cycle means interest rates and exchange rates built for someone else’s housing market and someone else’s industry mix. An Alberta dollar, backed by a transparent central bank, clear inflation rules, and a growing Heritage Fund, would let monetary policy fit an energy-and-ag export economy.

Starting a currency is serious work — reserves, payment systems, bank transition, public trust. Other small countries have done it when they left larger unions. The risk of doing it badly is real. The risk of never controlling it is also real: watching your purchasing power, your export competitiveness, and your mortgage rates get set elsewhere forever.

An Alberta dollar would not be a meme coin. It would be a national tool — audited, boring, and ours.

7. Infrastructure, jobs, and growth: rebuild the country we already live in

Drive the secondary highways. Sit in the emergency rooms. Look at water plants, transmission lines, rural broadband, and ring roads that were “almost funded” for a generation. Alberta does not have an ambition problem. It has a priority problem.

Nationhood is a construction program: roads and rail to ports and border crossings we control; power generation and transmission that keep industry here; hospitals and housing stock that match population; digital infrastructure so northern and rural communities are not second-class; and defence and emergency capacity sized to our borders and our winters.

That is job creation with a balance sheet — trades, engineering, manufacturing, logistics — not make-work press releases. Every delayed pipeline, cancelled corridor, and stalled municipal project under federal friction is a reminder: when someone else holds the veto, your kids hold the unemployment.

8. Restructure municipal government: fewer fiefdoms, clearer accountability

Alberta’s municipal map is a patchwork of cities, towns, villages, summer villages, MDs, counties, and special-purpose boards that often duplicate planning, policing contracts, economic development, and admin overhead. Citizens should not need a flowchart to find out who raised their taxes.

A new nation should rewrite the Municipal Government Act from scratch:

Amalgamate where service areas already overlap and taxpayers are double-paying.

Charter cities for Edmonton and Calgary with real taxing and transit authority — and real audit transparency.

Regional service boards for water, waste, and emergency services that stop at watersheds and commute sheds, not at 19th-century survey lines.

One ballot, clear roles: who builds roads, who zones housing, who runs policing — published in plain language.

Indigenous municipal partnerships where urban reserves and adjacent cities already share streets and utilities — deal in contracts, not court fights.

Local government closest to the people only works if the people can tell who is in charge.

The honest close

Leaving Canada would not be a camping trip. There would be debt talks, border talks, Treaty talks, currency markets, and people who call you a traitor because you noticed the invoice. Fine. Adults read the invoice.

Alberta already funds a big share of the national project, powers a huge share of export wealth, and still gets told to wait for permission to build. First Nations and Métis communities already know what broken promises look like. Farmers already know what distant regulation feels like. Students already know what debt tastes like. Municipal taxpayers already know what duplication costs.

A free Alberta would not be perfect. It would be ours — with a constitution that elevates Treaty partners, keeps energy wealth at home, educates kids without selling them into loans, kills the party whip, backs farmers and living landscapes, issues its own dollar, rebuilds infrastructure for growth, and cleans up municipal sprawl.

Ottawa’s offer is more of the same. Alberta’s offer to itself should be better.

— Jason LaFace, Editor / CEO, Alberta Radio

Editor’s note on sourcing

Fiscal and energy figures referenced above draw on recent Alberta budget / revenue publications, Library of Parliament trade profiles, CAPP sector summaries, federal transfer tables (Alberta equalization at $0), and Fraser Institute / related net-contribution estimates (multi-year federal revenue collected in Alberta vs spending returned). Policy pillars on free tuition, no-party governance, and a new currency are proposals for debate, not descriptions of law already in force.