Merry Christmas, Alberta

Thoughts on why 2026 may not be a Happy New Year

Dear Albertans,

I love Alberta. That may not be obvious from my relentless criticism of Premier Danielle Smith and the oil and gas industry, but I spent twelve happy years living there. Almost all my friends still reside in Alberta. Calgary is my favourite Canadian city—sorry, Edmonton and Vancouver. But I am not a cheerleader. Digging into Smith’s ungoverning of the provincial machinery of government while pulling back the curtain on the industry’s carefully constructed narrative has made me deeply skeptical of both. Canadians—yes, including the large majority of Albertans—deserve to know the truth. But once you choose the red pill, there is no going back. And, frankly, blue-pill Alberta is not a cheery place these days.

Alberta has fallen down the MAGA rabbit hole. Not accidentally. Not overnight. And not because Albertans are uniquely prone to authoritarian politics, though its long history of Social Credit-style conservatism hasn’t helped.

It has happened because a particular style of politics—resentment-driven, anti-institutional, and contemptuous of democratic constraints—has been deliberately imported, normalized, and weaponized by leaders who know exactly what they are doing.

Smith is Trump With Less Bombast But the Same Playbook

Danielle Smith is not an aberration. She is a vehicle.

The Premier calls herself a libertarian or a libertarian conservative. She is neither. What Smith embodies is something political theorists increasingly describe as libertarian authoritarianism, a paradoxical but now well-documented phenomenon in which the language of freedom is used to justify the concentration of power, the erosion of democratic norms, and the dismantling of institutional checks.

Professor Trish Roberts-Miller, a Texas scholar of rhetoric and authoritarian movements, has described this pattern in the American MAGA context with unnerving precision: leaders frame themselves as champions of individual liberty while simultaneously attacking courts, legislatures, independent regulators, and the civil service as illegitimate obstacles to “the will of the people.”

Freedom becomes a slogan. Power is the point.

Smith governs this way instinctively. She presents herself as the lone tribune of “ordinary Albertans” while treating democratic institutions as hostile actors to be bypassed, disciplined, or broken. Power is increasingly centralized in the executive— the Premier’s office. The legislature is sidelined as much as possible. Independent officers of the Legislature are attacked. The judiciary is framed as an enemy. The administrative state—the professional, rules-based machinery that makes modern government function—is depicted as a bastion of “woke culture,” a swamp that must be drained.

This is not small-government conservatism. It is ungoverning by design.

Ungoverning is not incompetence. It is strategy. It is lifted straight from the Trump-MAGA playbook, adapted for provincial use. Replace professional norms with loyalty. Replace process with politics. When something breaks, blame elites, Ottawa, judges, academics, journalists—anyone but the people in charge.

Chaos is the feature. Confusion is the cover. Just like Donald Trump, Smith’s hero.

Smith’s defenders often protest that she is not a Christian nationalist, not a separatist, not an outright authoritarian. That may be true in the narrow sense. But it misses the point.

She is prepared to pander to a minority of the population that is deeply undemocratic and authoritarian, to echo its grievances, to legitimize its conspiracies, and to translate its anger into policy. In doing so, she drags the centre of Alberta politics toward a place that is hostile to pluralism, suspicious of expertise, and contemptuous of democratic restraint.

You do not need to believe the most extreme ideas yourself to make them politically consequential. You only need to find them useful.

Alberta the Petro Province

Smith’s politics do not exist in a vacuum. They are tightly coupled to the structure and behaviour of Alberta’s dominant industry, which has reshaped the province’s economy, politics, and self-understanding to such an extent that Alberta now functions less like a diversified province and more like a petro-sub-national-state.

Oil and gas is not simply an important sector. It is THE sector. It dictates fiscal capacity, political priorities, cultural identity, and external posture. Everything else is secondary.

This was not inevitable.

Alberta, especially under conservative Premier Peter Lougheed from 1971 to 1986, once understood the difference between stewarding a resource and surrendering to it. That distinction has been lost. Today, the industry’s interests are so deeply embedded in government decision-making that it is often impossible to tell where public policy ends and industry strategy begins.

Regulatory capture is not an accusation here. It is a description. The Alberta Energy Regulator, for example, is considered a classic case of regulatory capture by the oil and gas sector. When an industry becomes synonymous with prosperity, criticism becomes heresy and reform becomes betrayal.

Alberta’s Classic Incumbency Behaviour

Faced with structural change in the global energy system—technological disruption, imminent long-term demand decline, rising competition, accelerating climate policy—the Canadian oil and gas industry has behaved exactly like incumbents always do. It has doubled down on the status quo. It has fought delay rather than embraced adaptation. It has sought to capture policy rather than reimagine its business model. It has invested more energy in shaping the political environment than in preparing for the economic future that is already arriving.

This behaviour is rational in the short term and disastrous in the long term. Instead of using decades of wealth to build resilience, diversification, and optionality, the industry has used its influence to entrench dependence. Governments are encouraged to bet the province on a single trajectory, to resist transition rather than manage it, to frame global change as a conspiracy rather than a reality.

Risk is socialized. Profits are privatized. And when markets turn, Albertans are told, again, that the solution is more of the same.

The most corrosive element of this relationship is the gap between the industry’s public narrative and its actual record.

The rhetoric is one of responsibility, innovation, environmental leadership, and national necessity. The reality is chronic underinvestment in emissions reduction relative to promises, repeated failures to meet targets, aggressive lobbying against even modest regulatory constraints, and a business model that remains overwhelmingly dependent on expanding production despite flashing red lights from global customers.

These facts are not secrets. They are documented. But they rarely penetrate public debate because one attribute overwhelms all others: the industry makes people wealthy.

The Bottom Line in Alberta Really is the Bottom Line

It makes shareholders wealthy. It makes executives wealthy. It fills government coffers when prices are high. It creates a sense—sometimes real, sometimes illusory—of security. Wealth buys patience. It buys silence. It buys political indulgence. When an industry is perceived as the source of collective prosperity, its contradictions are forgiven and its warnings are heeded. That is how petro-states are made, even within democracies.

The coupling of MAGA-style ungoverning with a retrenching, defensive oil and gas industry is bad news for Alberta. Very bad news.

It leaves the province uniquely exposed at a moment when the global economy and energy system are undergoing rapid, uneven, but irreversible change. It weakens institutions precisely when adaptability is required. It narrows the political imagination precisely when creativity is essential. It teaches Albertans to fear the future rather than prepare for it.

Alberta deserves better.

It deserves leadership from all quarters that understand power as stewardship, not domination. It deserves an industry that treats transition as a strategic challenge, not an ideological threat. It deserves a premier in the mould of Lougheed, who understood that resource wealth was a means to an end, not an end in itself, and who believed that democratic institutions were assets to be strengthened, not obstacles to be crushed.

What Alberta needs—far better leadership in government, in industry, and in civil society—will be the subject of my next essay.