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The Alberta I Know, the Canada We Need

By Paula Simons

Originally published on June 28, 2026 in issue 14 of Forward Weekly

Someone asked me the other day if I still felt proud to be an Albertan. 

The question caught me short. I am Albertan, as I like to say, right down to the marrow of my beefy bones. My Jewish family members first started arriving here before Alberta was even a province. I grew up riding horses and driving ATVs and picking saskatoon berries, eating green onion cakes and Fringing and dancing (on the sidelines) at the Heritage Festival.

While I left this province in my twenties to attend grad school in the United States, and again, in my thirties, to work for the CBC in Toronto, I have always returned. The wild adventurous spirit of this place, its bold embrace of risk and new ideas, its social egalitarianism, its freedom, its cultural richness, its wide skies, have always called me back, and held my heart.

But the last few months have been breaking my Alberta heart. With Canada Day approaching, I can’t help wonder what has happened to our vision of Alberta and its role in nation-building. Our culture of hope and generosity feels subsumed by a culture of grievance and persecution. Once, we prided ourselves on being the strongest, wealthiest, hardest-working province in Confederation, the province with the best school system, the best public health system, the best funding for arts and culture.

Now, far too many politicians and pundits posture as woebegone victims. Instead of asserting our role as the moral and economic leaders of Confederation, we have allowed an angry vocal minority to dominate — those afraid, not just of the wider world, but of the future itself.

The wild adventurous spirit of this place, its bold embrace of risk and new ideas, its social egalitarianism, its freedom, its cultural richness, its wide skies, have always called me back, and held my heart.

Alberta, for so long, had a sunny sense of itself as a New Jerusalem. We imbibed a triumphalist narrative, of doughty pioneers who broke the prairie and tamed the forests to build a promised land. It was a deeply colonial, imperialist narrative, of course, one that utterly erased Indigenous history, one that conveniently ignored the Chinese Exclusion Act or the limitations imposed on African-American immigrants or discriminatory rules against Hutterite farm colonies. But as limited as that settler narrative might have been, it was a template that generations of provincial premiers, from across the ideological spectrum, used to inspire us to see ourselves as citizens of a brave new world. Even when we did face discrimination and misunderstanding from Ottawa (or Toronto) we fought hard to shape a better country, one that worked for all Canadians.

It was, after all, five dauntless, albeit problematic, Alberta women — Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby — who waged the legal war that established Canadian women as equal persons, and established the precedent that Canada’s constitution was a living tree, capable of growth and change. 

It was Social Credit premier Harry Strom who demanded that multiculturalism be a condition for constitutional reform during the 1971 Victoria Constitutional Conference, pushing back against the old “two founding nations” bicultural vision of Canada.

It was Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed who, in 1972, introduced Individual’s Rights Protection Act to Alberta, and gave it primacy over all other provincial legislation — five years before Ottawa adopted a Human Rights Act of its own.

It was queer activist Delwin Vriend, who went all the way to the Supreme Court to establish equal rights for Canadians, regardless of sexual orientation, using the very living tree constitutional doctrine that underpinned the Person’s Case.

And now, in 2026, while our elected leaders are missing the moment at best, or enabling an angry fringe at worst, it’s Alberta’s chiefs, the leaders of the nations of Treaties Six, Seven and Eight, who are fighting hardest, and most effectively, to keep the country united.

The Alberta I love wasn’t such a cramped, selfish place.

Our national sovereignty is under assault, from hegemons across the sea and right next door. Canada needs Alberta’s brand of courage. Sadly, the hostile, xenophobic discourse emanating from this place has turned many Canadians against us. They see only the worst shadow side of Alberta, the public performance of its ugliest stereotypes. 

Such self-sabotage. Who would want to help us get our oil and grain and beef to market? Who would want to invest in our burgeoning biotech sector or our revolutionary AI research, while we are throwing a strop, threatening to separate, issuing a long series of disingenuous, malicious referendum questions designed to incite resentment of immigrants, and of Canada’s political institutions? We are damaging our relationship with our fellow Canadians, and our international reputation, in ways that could haunt us for a generation.

The Alberta I love wasn’t such a cramped, selfish place. It opened its doors, welcomed the world, gave a new home to refugees, recruited the best and brightest, to build an economy and culture the world could envy. 

We need that spirit back. We can’t let cynicism and frustration overwhelm us.

On this Canada Day, we must champion our Alberta values, proudly, joyfully. We must celebrate the land we cherish, in the country we love, and reclaim our story from those who neither honour our past nor grasp our potential.