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Alberta’s Problem Is in the Mirror

By David Berry

Originally published on March 29, 2026 in issue 01 of Forward Weekly

Despite the best efforts of a handful of delusional politicians and business leaders, the province of Alberta is not in need of an epitaph just yet. Should that day come, though, I would like to nominate the poetry of our shortest-serving premier, Jim Prentice: “In terms of who is responsible, we all need only look in the mirror.”

Without context — which is the only way our fulminating separatists understand the world — it could be a tribute to self-sufficiency, the idea that we could rely on ourselves, if only the literal and spiritual Trudeaus would ever get out of our way. With the actual context — primarily the fact that Prentice’s sentence serves as the last quotable phrase of his political career — no prominent Albertan has more succinctly, if ironically, captured the trajectory of Alberta since his words were uttered. Whatever this province was like in the now distant memory of the year 2015 CE, the past decade of blaming Ottawa while attacking any Alberta institution or group perceived as an ideological enemy has seen us not just refuse to look in the mirror, but smash every reflective surface in the place and threaten to cut anyone who has anything to say about it.

For the people who are ostensibly leading this province, their biggest issue at present is that they’ve proven themselves consistently unable to corral this insatiable need for an enemy to their own ends. Jason Kenney rather definitely proved that the Harper playbook of throwing red meat from Sky Palace doesn’t work anymore, having lost control of the rhetoric he dutifully fomented before he could even see a second election. Now, Danielle Smith and her mixed team of true believers and the definitively spineless are caught in an ever-widening maw, unable to sate the beast they rode into power on, facing a very possible referendum that simultaneously cannot hope to achieve anything tangible without massive foreign interference and will probably destabilize the province so thoroughly they’ll need to fill the Strait of Hormuz with concrete and dragons for anyone to consider investing here in the next five years.

If the particular issues facing us are unique, their root cause is at least a planet-wide issue: over the past decade (or four, or since time immemorial) nothing has been more central to conservatism than the idea that whatever you are currently doing is fine, morally pure, actually probably the best, most righteous thing any person has ever done, if you think about it. And as per usual, Alberta remains Canada’s vanguard of the conservative mindset.

If, despite this, everything seems to be getting worse around you, then it absolutely must be somebody else's fault for wanting to do something slightly different. Probably because they’re a lying degenerate who hates freedom, or possibly because they’re just tragically misinformed. Whatever their motivations, they and their dangerous ideas must be expunged from the face of Earth in order to restore Western Civilization to a time when bike lanes were parking and trans people were called gay people and they didn’t make banks put up rainbow flags about it.

In this understanding of the world, there’s no room for making things better — only for making them more “efficient,” a distinction that reliably serves those with money and power while making things worse for everyone else.

We have, of course, got a massive assist in this project from our southern neighbours, the Fred Astaire to our Ginger Rogers, waging a total culture war to cover up graft and ideological bankruptcy, only with a poorly concealed German heritage. Supercharged by a social media landscape that literally suppresses Canadian news, and led by a premier who thought she was a governor until six months into the job, Alberta’s leaders are able to port over any retrograde attack point they need, with a notwithstanding clause ready for whenever our Charter of Rights and Freedoms gets in the way.

So committed to the fight they’ve forgotten to even bother justifying it with the old lie that, in their version of the province, we’d all at least be richer. Though the old Progressive Conservatives were never quite as fully committed to a philosophy of “do whatever you want as long as there are royalty cheques and jobs on your board” as they now seem in retrospect, the UCP has imposed a moratorium on even pretending to be interested in the economic stewardship of anything but foreign-owned oil companies and private providers of what were previously government services. The throughline between decimating a booming renewable energy market and ensuring public schoolchildren will never see a picture of two women holding hands (or of a teacher with basic job satisfaction) is distraction. That is, keeping UCP supporters from noticing that while oil profits and political donations have returned, oil jobs — along with 24-hour emergency room access and a manageable cost of living — have not. But, hey, can you really put a price on making disempowered people extra miserable just to feel momentarily better about your deteriorating situation?

Now, as the looksmaxxers have shown us, there’s no guarantee that taking a good, long look in the mirror will produce a saner outcome. But still, you have to think that, had we at the very least tried to confront the world a bit more honestly, and not just looked for other people to blame, we wouldn’t be standing on a pile of broken glass, threatening to cut our own throat.

To the extent that there’s good news here, it’s that a movement that can only offer stagnation, aggression and bitterness is ripe to be ripped apart. As the separatists have taught us, anyone who can make change seem possible can also shake people out of their stupor (or despair). The trick is, you can’t just post about it. This government only responds to tangible shows of force: moving things on the ground, showing people how and why things can be different.