The ban on social media for children under 16 is an idea that has merits. But the way it is being done is simply a way to force everyone, including adults, to identify themselves online, creating the most powerful surveillance and censorship architecture in human history.

A country that punishes productivity eventually runs out of producers. Canada pushes away talent, capital, and ambition. An Independent Alberta will attract all three.

Alberta is not helpless, but that supports independence rather than defeats it. They say Alberta has wealth, agency, institutions, and opportunity. Exactly. Alberta has energy, agriculture, food, petrochemicals, technology, courts, universities, infrastructure, a capable population, and proximity to and deep ties with the largest economy on earth. Alberta is not too small to be a country. Alberta is the right size to be a country and at the right location.

These conservative establishment writers say Alberta would have to rebuild arrangements that are currently in place within confederation. But those arrangements are precisely the problem. Ottawa has total control over trade, borders, banking, immigration, international agreements, federal environmental law, interprovincial pipelines and national energy policy. Alberta may have some influence, but we do not have control over the decisions that affect us and our kids The question is not whether Alberta receives some benefits inside Canada. The question is whether those benefits are worth Alberta's permanent political minority status and condemning the next generation of Albertans to the dark and costly path of present-day Canada.

“Lead, not leave” sounds appealing. But it is a slogan, not a plan. Lead whom? With what votes? Under what constitutional formula? Against which entrenched interests? Albertans have tried Mulroney, Reform, Harper, Senate reform, equalization reform, pipeline fights, court challenges and “fair deal” federalism. After all that, Alberta is still asking Ottawa for permission over fundamental decisions affecting our future. “Lead, not leave” only works if someone can explain how Canada will actually be fixed.

Alberta is a distinct political society, with our own economy, culture, resources, interests and values. Yet Ottawa repeatedly claims the final say over decisions Albertans should be making for ourselves. That is the question their article avoids: not whether every slogan is perfect, but whether Alberta should remain a permanent political minority in a federation that will not reform and that these conservative establishment elites have no plan to fix.

Yes, independence would require negotiation but so too does staying Canada. Trade, debt, pipelines, treaties, defence, currency and public services would all need serious work for a smooth transition. But Alberta would not be negotiating from weakness or lack of institutional competence. British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec all have a real need to hope (and pray) Alberta will continue to supply them with critical oil and gas—for their businesses, transportation, industry and heating their homes through Canadian winters. Complexity is not impossibility. It is the reason serious people prepare transition plans. Every serious act of statecraft requires negotiation.

These federalists are promising fantasy. They say Canada can be fixed if Alberta just waits, votes correctly, argues politely, or “leads” harder. But where is the mechanism? How will equalization be fundamentally changed? How will the Senate be meaningfully reformed? How will Ottawa be prevented from reimposing energy-hostile policies after the next election or even before? Hope is not a constitutional plan. Independence is.

🚨BREAKING: A new independent national poll shows Alberta independence support has surged to 40.9%. The sample was smaller, but unlike the major polling firms, this wasn’t another narrative-driven poll designed to demoralize the movement.

RT @sapinker: And my favorite, from Boyan Slat: "Problem-solvers take an issue and cut it up into small, solvable chunks. Problem-sellers d…

The anti-@elonmusk crowd is hilarious. Ro Khanna: $250M Gavin Newsom: $30M Elizabeth Warren: $12M Bernie Sanders: $5M 3 houses They’re attacking a guy who built companies that changed transportation, space exploration, communications, and AI. The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. It’s the entire point. 🚀🇺🇸

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

I remember studying Voltaire in university and wondering how any civil society could ever have considered constraining free speech to be a good idea. images.app.goo.gl/PzkgBvsKtd…

The Canadian political establishment fears Alberta independence for one simple reason: Once someone fully understands the issue, the system never gets them back. Once you see that confederation is structurally unfair, that Alberta is exploited, and that our wealth is extracted to fund the rest of the system, it becomes painfully obvious. This cannot be fixed by electing a different federal government. The only real option left is independence.

We're gonna abundance so much, you may even get tired of abundance. And you'll say, please, please, it's too much abundance. We can't take it anymore. Mr. Musk, it's too much, and I will say no it isn't, we have to keep abundance, we have to abundance more, we're gonna abundance more!

The question is no longer whether we love Canada. The question is whether we love our kids enough to choose Alberta’s future.

Alberta's commitment to its citizens is clear: no one gets left behind, especially concerning federal provisions. Financial responsibility means ensuring everyone is supported, no matter the future. #Alberta #Independence #Citizens