Selling Our Alberta

Reading this timeline

The events above can look like a chaotic pile-up — a health crisis here, a data centre there, a referendum, a pension fight, a data breach. Read closely, though, and a pattern holds across nearly every entry: public assets and public risk move outward (land, water, electricity, pensions, pipelines, carbon liability), while public protection moves inward and shrinks (AISH, legal aid, shelters, accessibility law, Charter rights). That's not disorder. It's the standard neoliberal governing sequence — privatize the upside, socialize the downside, and manage the resulting discontent politically rather than resolve it materially.

Gramsci: hegemony and manufactured consent

Managing that discontent is where Antonio Gramsci's idea of hegemony is useful. Gramsci argued in his Prison Notebooks that durable rule isn't secured by coercion alone; it's secured by manufacturing consent — getting the governed to experience elite interests as common sense, or as their own interests. You can watch this timeline do exactly that: the "Alberta Next" panel and its town halls, the referendum process itself, Bill 54's lowered signature threshold, Wonder Valley's open houses — each looks like consultation, but the underlying decisions (data centre approved, pension referendum non-binding, land already under conditional contract) were largely settled beforehand. The forms of consent are honoured; the substance of consent is not required to bind anyone. Populist framing — "sovereignty," "a decade of consent," grassroots petitions with a lowered bar — does the work of making elite-favourable outcomes feel like the will of ordinary Albertans. And when consent breaks down anyway — when teachers strike with public support, when courts protect trans youth, when thousands protest a water licence — Gramsci's model predicts exactly what happens next: coercion replaces persuasion. The notwithstanding clause gets invoked. The application gets refiled.

Agamben's argument

Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception (2005) builds on Carl Schmitt's definition: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." The state of exception is the moment when the sovereign suspends the normal legal order — ostensibly temporarily, ostensibly for emergency reasons — while claiming to act in defence of that order. The paradox Agamben identifies is that the exception becomes the rule. The emergency power, once used, normalizes itself. The suspension of law becomes the operating mode of government.

Agamben traces this from Roman dictatorships through Nazi emergency decrees to post-9/11 America. His core argument is that modern liberal democracies have made the state of exception their permanent condition — the legal order always contains within it a mechanism for its own suspension.

How it maps onto Alberta

The notwithstanding clause is a constitutionally embedded state of exception. Section 33 of the Charter is literally a provision that allows governments to suspend fundamental rights — freedom of association, equality rights, security of the person — by simple legislative declaration, for five-year renewable terms. It was designed as a last resort for genuine emergencies. In Alberta, it was used twice within weeks of each other in late 2025: once to end a teachers' strike, framed as an emergency threatening children's education; once to override court protections for trans youth, framed as protecting children from medical harm.

Both invocations used the language of emergency and protection. Both suspended rights that courts had found deserved Charter protection. Both were aimed at groups with limited political power to retaliate. This is Agamben's point exactly: the state of exception is never declared in the name of power. It is always declared in the name of protection, necessity, the common good. The form of the exception — emergency, crisis, threat — legitimizes the content, which is the suspension of rights.

The deeper Agamben move — bare life

Agamben's other key concept, drawn from Homo Sacer (1995), is the distinction between bios — political life, life with rights and social recognition — and zoē — bare biological life, life stripped of political standing. The homo sacer is the figure who can be killed but not sacrificed — who exists outside the protection of law. Agamben argues that modern biopolitics (following Foucault) operates by deciding which lives count as politically qualified and which are reduced to bare life.

Look at who Alberta's state of exception has been deployed against: trans youth, whose bodily autonomy has been legally suspended; teachers, whose right to collective action has been legally extinguished; people with addictions, who can now be detained without a court order, without a mental illness diagnosis, on the decision of a single administrative commission; disabled Albertans, whose income floor is being lowered below the poverty line with no democratic recourse; Indigenous Nations, whose consultation rights are routed around through administrative architecture. These are populations being progressively stripped of political standing. Their suffering is acknowledged in the language used to justify the policies — "compassionate intervention," "protecting children," "getting kids back to school" — while the policies themselves remove their capacity to resist, appeal, or be heard.

The Compassionate Intervention Act is perhaps the most literal Agamben case: it can detain adults without a court order, without a mental illness diagnosis, and can force treatment on someone found capable of making their own decisions — a combination of powers no other Canadian province has legislated for the general adult population. When Premier Smith was asked whether the evidence supports it, she said: "You won't know if something works until you try it." The bodies of people with addictions become the experimental ground of the exception.

The Wonder Valley connection

The state of exception operates here too, through different but structurally identical mechanisms: a military development authority (MIDA) is used to make county consent irrevocable, placing the project outside normal democratic accountability; a full environmental assessment is waived by exemption, placing the project outside normal regulatory review; Indigenous consultation is structurally bypassed, placing the project outside normal treaty obligations; when citizens attempt a referendum, the legal architecture of the exception (the MIDA Act) is invoked to declare it non-referable.

The exception in each case is framed as necessity — national security, economic urgency, competitiveness with China, the AI race. Agamben would note that this is exactly how the exception always presents itself: as the temporary, regrettable, necessary suspension of normal process in the face of an emergency that cannot wait. The emergency never ends. The exception becomes permanent. The project gets built.

Schmitt's shadow

It's worth noting that Agamben's framework draws heavily on Carl Schmitt, who was the Nazi party's legal theorist. Schmitt argued that liberal constitutionalism was inherently unstable — that genuine political authority always required the capacity to decide the exception, to identify the enemy, and to act outside the law when necessary.

The UCP's use of the notwithstanding clause has a Schmittian quality: the identification of enemies (striking teachers, trans youth, Chinese-backed protesters, "professional agitators") who threaten the community, and the suspension of their rights in the name of protecting everyone else. O'Leary's claim that Wonder Valley protesters are Chinese agents is not just a smear — it performs the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction that legitimizes exception.

The same logic runs through the referendum's immigration questions, sitting on the same October ballot as the separation question. Asked directly in February 2026 whether she shared language circulating in Alberta Next materials describing immigration as "reckless, unsustainable mass immigration" and "explosive, unmanageable population growth," Smith answered by invoking Alberta's "Judeo-Christian tradition" — never endorsing the framing, never rejecting it either, gesturing instead at a civilizational register that does the enemy-construction work without saying it aloud. At the movement's edges, the coding disappears. The Alberta Prosperity Project's "Value of Freedom" policy document — produced by the group behind the Stay Free Alberta petition — proposes an immigration framework for an independent Alberta giving "natural born Canadians" preference over "naturalized citizens." APP's own CEO, Mitch Sylvestre, has repeated at public town halls a fabricated claim that Justin Trudeau spoke of "replacing old stock white Canadians" — a quote with no documented source, functionally importing Great Replacement theory, the framework that has motivated white-nationalist violence elsewhere, into the movement's public meetings. An anti-racism watchdog has fielded a formal complaint over comments made at one such town hall.

None of this is new to Canadian politics. It echoes Stephen Harper's 2015 debate line about "old-stock Canadians" — which he later defined as descendants of immigrants "for one or more generations" — a phrase pollsters at the time called a deliberate dog-whistle, part of a strategy to energize a base around an us-versus-them frame. What's different in Alberta's case is that the coded and the explicit now sit in the same campaign, on the same ballot, days apart.

Strauss's Alberta lineage

Schmitt didn't go unanswered. In 1932, Leo Strauss published a critical review of Schmitt's The Concept of the Political — significant enough that Schmitt revised passages of the book's third edition in response, even though he never answered Strauss publicly. Strauss's verdict wasn't rejection; it was that Schmitt didn't go far enough. Schmitt's critique of liberalism, Strauss argued, still argued from within liberalism's own moral vocabulary — rights, values, the individual — so the friend/enemy politics he proposed as liberalism's replacement ended up smuggling liberal assumptions back in. For Strauss, the critique had to go deeper: back past liberalism entirely, to classical political rationalism. Meier's book on the exchange is literally titled Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue — it's one of the more consequential arguments in twentieth-century political theory, and it means Strauss's tradition isn't merely Schmitt-adjacent. It's a push past him.

Strauss supplies the moral and civilizational half of the Calgary School's lineage; Friedrich Hayek supplies the economic half. Hayek's central argument, laid out in "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) and The Road to Serfdom (1944), is that the knowledge needed to allocate resources well is too dispersed across millions of individuals for any central planner to gather, and that prices — not bureaucrats — are the only mechanism that transmits it; state planning, however well-intentioned, therefore tends to concentrate power in ways that erode both efficiency and liberty. His later distinction between evolved order (markets, common law, inherited custom) and "constructivist rationalism" — the belief that reason can and should redesign institutions from scratch — became a standing brief against deliberate redistribution and regulation of almost any kind. Hayek's 1947 Mont Pelerin Society built the international infrastructure of free-market think tanks that this movement still runs on, including the Fraser Institute, where Smith interned straight out of Flanagan's mentorship.

That tradition has a specific, institutional home in Alberta. The "Calgary School" — political scientists Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton, Barry Cooper, and David Bercuson, all at the University of Calgary from the 1980s onward — is widely credited as the intellectual nursery of both the Reform Party and Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, and its founders named two explicit influences: Friedrich Hayek and Leo Strauss. Knopff and Morton were trained at the University of Toronto under Walter Berns, a direct Strauss student. Their throughline was a shared suspicion of judicial "activism" (Morton and Knopff's "Court Party" thesis), of the Charter as a vehicle for "social engineering," and of federal institutions — universities included — as captured by orthodoxies they saw as ideologically driven rather than neutral.

The connection to Danielle Smith isn't diffuse influence; it's personal mentorship. Smith earned a second University of Calgary degree, in economics, in 1997, under Tom Flanagan directly. Flanagan recommended her for the internship at the Fraser Institute that launched her career, and later served as her campaign manager during her run for the Wildrose Party leadership — a relationship spanning roughly thirty years. A 2023 Maclean's profile put it plainly: Smith "soaked up the School's philosophies, adopting them as foundational pieces of her own political persona."

Bill 18 — already on this timeline — is close to a direct case study. Smith justified the bill's provincial vetting of federal research funding by claiming federal money flows disproportionately to "certain types" of researchers and opinion, despite a published review finding no such bias in the funding record. That complaint isn't new: it echoes Flanagan's own written grievances about federal research funding and "social engineering" in Canadian universities, and it has institutional precedent — Barry Cooper, another Calgary School founder, was previously reported to have directed university research funds toward Friends of Science, a group organized around discrediting the scientific consensus on climate change. What looks like Smith's original policy instinct is, on this reading, the Calgary School's decades-old playbook, executed by its most prominent former student.

The exception that didn't hold

One entry breaks this pattern, and it's worth sitting with. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation and other First Nations are, by any Agambenian reading, prime candidates for exclusion — treaty rights have been overridden or ignored throughout this timeline, from the Smoky River water licence to the Environmental Appeals Board's dismissal of their challenge. But on May 13, 2026, a court quashed the government's own referendum-petition process specifically because it failed the duty to consult — not through protest or extra-legal resistance, but through a pre-existing, constitutionally entrenched legal category the state itself is bound by. It's a reminder that the state of exception isn't total: where a group holds independent legal standing that predates and doesn't depend on the sovereign's goodwill, that standing can still bind the sovereign back — at least provisionally, at least until appeal.

The most honest summary

What Agamben gives you that Gramsci doesn't is an account of the legal mechanism through which this happens — not just the ideological manufacture of consent, but the constitutional and administrative architecture of exclusion. Alberta is not a dictatorship. It operates entirely within the forms of liberal democracy. But it has discovered that liberal democracy contains within it the tools for its own suspension — and it is using them, systematically, against the people least able to resist.

The slogan that follows might be the most unsettling one of all: the exception is the rule now. Or, more plainly: this is what the inside of a state of exception looks like.

This timeline was researched and compiled with AI assistance (Claude); every entry and source was verified by Janice Williamson.