The Haultain Brief is a weekly compilation of the news that matters for Alberta and Western Canada. Each Wednesday, we cover the prior week’s political, economic, energy, legal, and institutional developments, organized by theme, with links to primary sources. The editorial perspective will be familiar to Haultain Research readers: evidence-driven, skeptical of fashionable orthodoxies, unapologetically Western Canadian. The Brief complements rather than replaces the longer analytical essays published here. If you find it useful, consider subscribing to support the work.

Economy & Finance

Alberta swings $11.4 billion in a single quarter, and the oil price did all of it

Alberta’s first-quarter update forecasts a $2 billion surplus for 2026-27, an $11.4 billion improvement over the $9.4 billion deficit projected in Budget 2026 in February. Non-renewable resource revenue accounts for $9.7 billion of that swing.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we read this as a price report rather than a performance report. Total revenue is now forecast at $86.3 billion on a West Texas Intermediate assumption raised to US$73.50 a barrel from US$60.50, and the province’s sensitivity is that each additional US$1 on the annual average is worth roughly $680 million. The benchmark has averaged about US$88 since April and must hold US$65 through the rest of the fiscal year for the forecast to survive. A treasury that can move eleven billion dollars in one quarter without a single policy decision has a volatility problem, not a management triumph, and the honest test of this update is what gets saved rather than what gets announced.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 27 August 2026; Lethbridge Herald, 28 August 2026.

Saskatchewan books a deficit on the same barrel that put Alberta in surplus

Saskatchewan’s first-quarter report, released the same day, forecasts an $825 million deficit against $819 million at budget. Revenue rose $331 million to $21.7 billion while expenses rose $337 million to $22.6 billion, cancelling out the resource gain entirely.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we think the two reports read together are more instructive than either alone. Saskatchewan collected an extra $320 million in non-renewable resource revenue on a West Texas Intermediate assumption of US$75.00 against US$59.75 at budget, and still finished worse than it started because health system demand, compensation, flood response and crop insurance claims from an exceptionally wet spring took slightly more than the windfall delivered. Net debt to GDP nonetheless improved to 14.9 per cent from 16.1 per cent. The lesson for Edmonton is that a commodity windfall only reaches the bottom line if the spending side is held still while it arrives.

Source: Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026.

The national economy grew 0.8 per cent, and the energy sector did the earning

Statistics Canada reported real gross domestic product up 0.8 per cent in the second quarter, led by exports, household spending and business investment. The first quarter was revised up from flat to 0.1 per cent, erasing the reported technical recession.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we note the line that got the least attention. Corporate incomes rose 9.6 per cent, the largest quarterly increase since the first quarter of 2021, and Statistics Canada names the energy sector as the top contributor to that gain. Exports rose 3.6 per cent, the largest increase since early 2023. Per capita output rose 1.0 per cent, which the agency attributes partly to a population that has now declined for three consecutive quarters nationally. So the quarter that rescued the national growth numbers was carried by the sector Ottawa has spent a decade constraining, and by an arithmetic effect nobody wants to celebrate out loud.

Source: Statistics Canada, 28 August 2026.

Intergovernmental Affairs

Ottawa publishes its counter tariff list, and Prairie machinery is on it

The Department of Finance published the schedule of Canadian counter tariffs covering $27.6 billion of United States imports at rates of 15, 25 and 50 per cent, effective 12:01 a.m. on 8 September. Named categories include agricultural equipment, pulp and paper.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would separate the politics from the mechanics. A counter tariff is a tax collected from the Canadian buyer, not the American seller, and this one applies to capital goods that Western producers import. The measures apply only to goods eligible to be marked as originating in the United States under the CUSMA marking rules, which means importers must now document origin on thousands of lines before the deadline. The list was also amended the day after publication, with seafood removed and other goods substituted. Two weeks is not long enough for a mid-sized Prairie business to reorganize a supply chain around a moving schedule.

Source: Department of Finance Canada, 25 August 2026.

The premiers cannot agree on weaponizing Western resources

Premier Danielle Smith rejected any tax on Alberta oil exports, saying it “would absolutely devastate the Canadian economy.” Premier Scott Moe refused to restrict potash but imposed a 50 per cent levy on American alcohol. Premier Wab Kinew backed retaliation.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would put the constitutional question plainly. Ontario Premier Doug Ford wants potash exports cut, a measure whose entire cost would fall on Saskatchewan, which supplies more than 86 per cent of the potash the United States buys from Canada. Moe’s objection is not sentiment but arithmetic: a customer forced to source elsewhere does not necessarily come back. Smith struck a cabinet committee co-chaired by her finance and jobs ministers and opened a portal for businesses to report tariff damage. Whatever one makes of the strategy, a federation that lets one province propose sacrifices for another is not negotiating as a country.

Sources: Red Deer Advocate, 26 August 2026; Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026; EnergyNow, 28 August 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Trans Mountain is running at 94 per cent

Trans Mountain Corporation, the federally owned pipeline company, moved 840,000 barrels a day in the second quarter, 94 per cent of capacity, against 703,000 a year earlier. It remitted $450 million to Ottawa in interest and dividends.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would treat the utilization number as the argument. A line the federal government was told nobody would use is close to full four years after opening, and it earned $808 million of revenue and $138 million of net income in a single quarter. Chief executive Mark Maki said deteriorating trade relations have made a second west coast line “much more urgent,” with a regulatory filing planned for early 2027 and a cost estimated between $35 billion and $44 billion. That is a very large number, and the case for it still rests on shippers committing barrels rather than on ministers committing adjectives.

Sources: EnergyNow, 28 August 2026; BOE Report, 28 August 2026.

Saskatchewan tells data centres to bring their own power

Saskatchewan published a data centre framework requiring new operators to generate their own electricity rather than draw on SaskPower, the provincial utility, with Bell Canada’s existing project the sole exception. Alberta allows large loads to connect before their generation arrives.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we regard this as the more defensible of the two designs, and we say so because we have criticized provincial intervention elsewhere. Saskatchewan puts the cost of new demand on the party creating it. Alberta’s bring your own generation rules let a data centre draw from the pool first and build later. The Pembina Institute, a Calgary energy think tank, estimates that Meta’s $13 billion Sturgeon County project could add between $267 and $462 a year to a typical household bill between 2027 and 2031. Whether that estimate holds is contestable. That the risk sits with ratepayers rather than proponents is not.

Sources: Global News, 27 August 2026; Pembina Institute, 26 August 2026.

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Business & Investment

Enbridge sells a quarter of its British Columbia gas system to KKR

Enbridge agreed to sell an indirect 29 per cent interest in its Westcoast natural gas system to KKR, the American investment firm, with Apollo as co-investor, for about C$2.7 billion. Enbridge keeps majority ownership and operating control.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we read this as a financing decision with a strategic tell. Westcoast runs more than 2,900 kilometres from Fort Nelson in northeast British Columbia and Gordondale on the Alberta border south to the Huntingdon and Sumas crossing, carrying 3.6 billion cubic feet a day and rising to 3.9 once its current expansion enters service in late 2028. Chief financial officer Pat Murray described the deal as a way to “efficiently recycle capital” while advancing growth. Foreign capital is buying minority positions in Western Canadian gas egress because liquefied natural gas exports have made that egress scarce. That signals capacity, not ownership.

Source: Enbridge, 27 August 2026.

Alberta’s technology grants turn person-years into jobs

Alberta awarded $15.1 million to seven Calgary projects on 24 August and $15.7 million to five Edmonton projects the next day, both through the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund, Alberta’s industrial carbon compliance pot.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we apply the same scrutiny to Alberta’s spending as to Ottawa’s, and the arithmetic here rewards a second look. Emissions Reduction Alberta, the agency that pays the money out, says the Calgary projects would generate 463 person-years of employment and the Edmonton projects 504. The government’s own releases on the same two days call those figures more than 460 jobs and more than 500 jobs. A person-year is not a job: 504 person-years is 504 people working a year, or 50 people working ten. Credit where it is due, the agency names every recipient and every dollar, which is more than most granting bodies manage. The unit should survive the trip to the news release.

Sources: Emissions Reduction Alberta, 24 August 2026; Emissions Reduction Alberta, 25 August 2026; Government of Alberta, 25 August 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

Alberta drops Water Act approvals for routine work on private cropland

Alberta will remove Water Act approval requirements for cultivating, seeding, spraying, ditching, draining and infilling where the work affects ephemeral water bodies and temporary or seasonal wetlands on private cropland. Water must stay on site and must not harm neighbouring land.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we generally favour removing an approval that a landowner needs for routine work on his own field, and Grant Hunter, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, is right that thousands of dollars and a wait for permission is a poor return on a seeding pass. But this is a wetlands policy change wrapped in a red-tape announcement, and it deserves to be argued as one. The amendments to the Water (Ministerial) Regulation and the Alberta Wetland Policy do not arrive until the fall, and the tile drainage code of practice not until early 2027. Announcing the outcome before publishing the rule inverts the order that makes consultation meaningful.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 28 August 2026; Western Standard, 28 August 2026.

The Prairie harvest is running weeks behind, and the moisture is the reason

Alberta’s major crop harvest stood at 1 per cent complete against five and ten year averages of 7 and 5 per cent. Saskatchewan reached 11 per cent against averages of 25 and 21 per cent. Manitoba was roughly 4 per cent.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would put the delay beside the tariff calendar. Canadian counter tariffs on American agricultural equipment take effect on 8 September, precisely when a late harvest raises the odds that a producer needs a part or a replacement machine in a hurry. Alberta and Ottawa extended AgriStability enrolment to 1 October and lifted the interim payment rate to 75 per cent from 50, which is sensible triage for the northeast where record moisture stopped field work outright. The provincial condition split remains stark, with the North West at 35 per cent good to excellent against a southern region running far better.

Sources: Big West Country, 24 August 2026; Government of Saskatchewan, 27 August 2026; paNOW, 26 August 2026.

Health

Edmonton loses 62 addiction treatment beds, and nobody will say for how long

The Henwood Treatment Centre, the largest provincially run voluntary addiction treatment facility in the Edmonton region, has not operated since late June after overland flooding. Staff were told on 20 August the closure was permanent. Recovery Alberta says it will reopen.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we are less troubled by a flooded building than by the absence of a decision anyone will own. Nearly 600 people were on the wait list when Henwood stopped taking applications, for a four-week residential program with waits already running one to four months. Recovery Alberta describes the site as temporarily closed and says it will reopen once repairs are done; staff have told reporters otherwise. A public body that cannot state a reopening date, a cost and a responsible official is failing the accountability test regardless of which account is correct.

Sources: Global News, 25 August 2026; Friends of Medicare, 26 August 2026; Medicine Hat News, 28 August 2026.

Alberta History

April 1936: Alberta’s London bondholders begin asking questions

Alberta’s public finances have drawn international attention before, and not in a flattering way. On 1 April 1936, $3,200,000 of six per cent Alberta government bonds, issued as from 1 April 1921, reached maturity. Of that sum, $2,200,000 had been raised to build the province’s government-owned telephone system and $1,000,000 for general government purposes.

Three weeks later, the matter reached the British House of Commons. Sir Cyril Cobb asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs to establish from the Canadian authorities “the circumstances in which the burden of debt complained of was incurred by the Alberta Government,” and whether the province had invited the loans. Malcolm MacDonald’s reply was short and, for Alberta, unflattering in its plainness: tenders had been asked for in the usual way.

Alberta had gone to the London market voluntarily and on ordinary commercial terms, to string telephone wire across a province during a decade when both settlement and revenue looked permanent. When the Depression arrived, the revenue moved, and the obligations did not. That asymmetry is the oldest fact in Alberta public finance, and this week’s surplus does not repeal it.

Source: UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates volume 311, 21 April 1936.

Data Corner

Alberta’s population growth has very nearly stopped. Quarterly growth peaked at 1.36 per cent in the third quarter of 2023, when the province added 63,597 people in three months. It has fallen in every quarter but one since. The province added 7,280 people in the fourth quarter of 2025, a growth rate of 0.14 per cent, and 8,926 in the first quarter of 2026, a rate of 0.18 per cent. That is a decline of roughly seven eighths in two and a half years. Alberta crossed five million residents between the estimates for October 2024 and January 2025 and has added fewer than 70,000 people in the six quarters since.

This counters the fiscal update. The province forecasts real growth of 2.3 per cent in 2026, but with the population flat that growth must come from productivity or from prices rather than from more workers and more households. It also reframes the unemployment rate of 6.6 per cent: a labour force that stops expanding makes a stubborn jobless rate harder to explain away, not easier. Two cautions. These are quarterly estimates dated the first day of each quarter, so the latest reading covers January to March 2026 and was published in June; the next release is due in the autumn. And a slowdown driven by federal immigration policy is a national phenomenon, with the Canadian population falling for three consecutive quarters, not something Edmonton chose.

Sources: Statistics Canada, table 17-10-0009, retrieved via the Government of Alberta economic dashboard, updated 17 June 2026.

The Take

1. The most revealing Alberta number published this week was 2.45 per cent, and almost nobody printed it. Equifax Canada released its second quarter consumer credit report on Monday. Alberta’s ninety-day non-mortgage delinquency rate, measured by dollars owed, was 2.45 per cent against 1.76 per cent nationally; measured by number of accounts, it was 2.15 per cent. Average non-mortgage debt per Albertan was $25,082, and $38,074 in Fort McMurray. To Equifax’s credit, the national story is one of slowing delinquency growth, and Alberta’s own dollar-weighted rate fell slightly over the year. But a province forecasting a $2 billion surplus and 2.3 per cent real growth in the same week is carrying household balance sheets in visibly worse shape than the rest of the country. Treasury prosperity and household prosperity are different series, and only one of them shows up in a mortgage renewal.

2. The cheapest growth policy available to Canada was agreed in Iqaluit, and it cost nothing. Federal, provincial and territorial trade ministers ratified amendments to the Canadian Free Trade Agreement establishing a thirty day service standard for labour mobility applications, committed to an agreement by year end permitting free trade in services across the country, and undertook to reach an agreement in principle on model mutual recognition legislation by the end of the fall. Set that beside the $7.5 billion federal relief package announced the same week. One creates a new fund, a new initiative and a new set of application processes; the other deletes a waiting period. Internal barriers are the one form of protection against Canadian producers that Canadians impose on themselves, and removing them requires no money, no new agency and no American consent. We would rather see this file finished than another envelope opened.

3. Ottawa’s retaliation is loaded onto the goods the West must buy. The counter-tariff schedule names agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, wood, steel, and appliances. No chapter of mineral fuels appears on it. We do not object to leaving energy alone; taxing our own most valuable export would be self-harm, and Premier Smith is right about that much. The objection is to what was chosen instead. A Prairie farmer replacing a combine three weeks into a harvest that is running at a fifth of its normal pace, and a British Columbia mill buying inputs, will pay this tariff themselves, because a counter tariff is collected at the Canadian border from a Canadian buyer. A narrower list aimed at consumer goods with ready domestic substitutes was plainly available and was not taken.

Worth Watching

• British Columbia will hold a by-election in Abbotsford-Mission on 26 September, in a seat vacated on 22 August; press coverage reports that BC Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who does not sit in the legislature, intends to run. (BC Gov News, 29 August 2026)

• Trade ministers met in Iqaluit and set a thirty-day service standard for labour mobility applications, with an agreement on free trade in services targeted for the end of the year. (BC Gov News, 28 August 2026 and Government of Nova Scotia, 26 August 2026)

• Saskatchewan’s rate review panel warned that SaskPower bills could rise as much as 6.4 per cent next February, well above the 3.9 per cent the utility proposed, and deferred its final recommendation until updated financial statements are filed by 2 November. (650 CKOM, 28 August 2026)

• More than 7,000 Alberta Safeway workers return to bargaining on 15 September after mediation ended without agreement on a contract that expired a year ago; the union has floated Thanksgiving as a strike date. (The Alberta Worker, 25 August 2026)

• Alberta named its second Designated Industrial Zone, roughly 75 square kilometres of the Municipal District of Greenview near Grande Prairie, with no investment figure attached to the announcement. (Government of Alberta, 26 August 2026)

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

In September 1937, a group of farmers in the provincial riding of Okotoks-High River filed the paperwork to remove their own Member of the Legislative Assembly. They paid the $200 deposit. They wrote out their grounds: the member had failed to keep the promises he made before the election, and had lost the confidence of the electorate. The member in question was William Aberhart, Premier of Alberta, and the recall law they were using had been passed by his own government eighteen months earlier. His government repealed it, retroactively, and Aberhart kept his seat.

Alberta’s democratic tradition produced that petition. Alberta’s governing class killed it. Both halves of that story belong to us, Albertans, and anyone who wants to understand the 10-question ballot Albertans will mark on 19 October should start there, not in May of this year.

Indeed, the ballot will include ten questions. Five concern provincial policy on immigration and elections, four propose constitutional amendments sought jointly with willing provinces, and the tenth asks whether the government should begin the legal process toward a binding vote on separation from the Canadian State.

Commentary from Laurentian Canada has treated the exercise as an eruption, a novelty, an anomaly, a stunt engineered by one premier in one bad season. But that reading fails miserably against the historical record. The instrument predates the province’s paved roads.

The 1913 statute nobody mentions

Alberta’s legislature passed the Direct Legislation Act in March 1913, eight years after the province’s founding. The Act let citizens force the hand of their own government: gather signatures equal to ten per cent of the vote in the last general election, and the legislature must pass the requested law or put it to the people. Temperance organizers used it almost immediately, delivering a petition of roughly 24,000 names, and Alberta held its first province-wide plebiscite in June 1915. Eight years later, a petition of some 56,000 names produced a second vote, which went the other way and buried prohibition by a wide margin.

That the same instrument produced opposite results eight years apart speaks to the oft-used action-reaction of this province’s politics. Nothing is ever settled with finality here, not the climate, not the science, not the policies of government. We like to revisit and re-examine things.

Consider what that sequence demonstrates. Albertans built a mechanism for putting questions to themselves, used it, lost with it, used it again, and won. The mechanism did not serve one faction. It served whoever could organize, which is the whole point.

The practice isn’t entirely foreign to the Rest of Canada. Ottawa put conscription to the whole country to a plebiscite in 1942 and did the same with prohibition in 1898. The last time this country asked its citizens a direct constitutional question was the Charlottetown referendum of 1992; every province voted, and Alberta and Quebec both said no. Quebec has held two sovereignty referendums, and the second posed a question so tangled and mangled that Parliament later passed a statute to prevent a repeat.

Against that standard, Alberta’s tenth question is a model of plain drafting: stay a province, or begin a legal process. Whatever one thinks the answer is, nobody needs a lawyer to understand what is being asked.

What the word means out here

Contemporary progressive usage has flattened “populism” into a term of abuse, roughly synonymous with demagoguery, nativism and contempt for expertise. That usage would puzzle anyone who has read the literature on the Canadian prairies, which is substantial, and which nobody in the national commentariat appears to consult.

C. B. Macpherson, the notable Marxist scholar from the University of Toronto, opened the file in 1953 with Democracy in Alberta, a study written from the political left and hostile to much of what it described, yet clear that Alberta had generated a distinctive form of representation rather than a pathology. Macpherson’s farmers wanted delegates who carried instructions, not trustees who exercised independent judgment on their behalf from a great distance.

David Laycock’s Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies mapped the terrain properly in 1990, and found four separate strands rather than one: crypto-Liberal, radical democratic, social democratic, plebiscitarian. Note where he placed them. Henry Wise Wood’s United Farmers supplied the radical democratic strand, the Farmer-Labour movement and the CCF the social democratic, and Aberhart’s Social Credit the plebiscitarian. Three of the four grew on prairie soil, and they pointed in different ideological directions. Tom Flanagan’s Waiting for the Wave traced how the impulse organized itself into the Reform Party and then into national government. Jared Wesley’s Code Politics examined the durable political cultures of the three prairie provinces and why campaigns here sound the way they do.

Something curious happens to that scholarship when the thing it describes walks into the room. Studied at a century’s remove, prairie populism becomes a respectable object: a political culture, a delegate theory of representation, a set of variants worth cataloguing. Encountered in the present tense, on a ballot, in one’s own province, the same phenomenon gets reclassified as a crisis. Macpherson wrote about the quasi-party system as a defect requiring explanation. Laycock catalogued four traditions and left the reader to judge. Wesley documented why prairie campaigns speak the way they do, and has since helped assemble a group whose founding statement calls the present moment a separatist crisis and argues against putting the question to a vote at all. One register for the academy and one for political activism.

No need to assign hypocrisy is required to explain this. Distance flatters and power distorts. The UFA convention of 1921 reads as folk democracy at a hundred years; the town hall of 2025 reads as a mob at ten months. Progressive scholars share the same instinct as everyone else: to treat the past as finished and the present as dangerous, and the instinct grows stronger the closer the subject sits to one’s own commitments. Recognizing a tradition in the archive costs nothing. Recognizing it at the door costs something, and that price separates description from understanding.

Read the literature rather than its authors’ recent commitments, and one fact becomes impossible to avoid. Prairie populism has never exclusively belonged to the right.

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was founded in Calgary in 1932 and issued the Regina Manifesto the following year. Tommy Douglas built the first social democratic government in North America out of Saskatchewan grain country using exactly the organizing methods, the hall meetings and the delegate conventions, that Aberhart’s Social Credit used to win Alberta in 1935. The United Farmers of Alberta took power in 1921 on Henry Wise Wood’s theory of group government, an idea considerably stranger than anything on the October ballot. Alberta’s New Democrats won in 2015 and now campaign under a leader who made his name in municipal politics wrapped in purple and speaking directly past the press gallery to a crowd.

The machinery came out again in the autumn of 2025, and it came out swinging at a conservative government. Some 51,000 teachers left their classrooms on 6 October in the first province-wide teachers’ strike this province has seen, and the government ended it with back-to-work legislation carried on the notwithstanding clause. Fury at that manoeuvre produced twenty-six recall petitions against members of the legislature, nearly all of them United Conservatives, the Premier included, filed under a Recall Act the United Conservatives themselves passed in 2021.

Gil McGowan of the Alberta Federation of Labour told his members that if the government would not shrink the size of their classrooms, they would shrink the size of its caucus. By the end of March, every petition had failed or been withdrawn, the strongest gathering roughly 6,500 signatures against a threshold above 16,000. Whether they succeeded is a separate matter from what they demonstrate. Teachers and union locals in 2025 reached, it seems unwittingly, for the same instrument farmers used in 1937, and they did so against a government of the right. The idiom is identical. Only the policy content changes.

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The lineage of the protest

The Prairie’s habit of protest runs continuously from before the provinces existed. Louis Riel’s people at Red River and along the South Saskatchewan pressed grievances against a distant capital that did not consider itself obliged to answer, and Riel won election to the House of Commons three times without ever taking his seat. The United Farmers replaced a party system they judged captured. Social Credit rose out of the Depression on a monetary theory that was wrong and an anger that was not. The Western Canada Concept elected Gordon Kesler in Olds-Didsbury on 17 February 1982 by better than a thousand votes, and nine months later the party ran a near-full slate, took close to twelve per cent of the provincial vote and elected nobody, Kesler included.

Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report gave the sentiment a printed voice and a steely spirit for thirty years. Preston Manning built Reform around similar discontent with the slogan, “the West wants in,” which conceded federalism while demanding a renewed place inside it. Six conservatives published the Firewall Letter in January 2001. Wildrose formed, merged, and reshaped the governing party. The truckers’ convoy gathered its momentum here in 2022, and much of the organizing that carried it to Ottawa started with Tamara Lich, a woman of Métis heritage living in Medicine Hat.

Each of those movements failed on its own terms. Each of them changed the country anyway. That is what a healthy protest tradition does, and a political culture that produces one every generation is not sick. It is awake, and it is alive.

The most recent demonstration required no new party. On 18 May 2022, Jason Kenney learned that 51.4 per cent of his own members approved of his leadership: 17,638 yes against 16,660 no, out of 34,298 mailed ballots. Party rules let him stay, but he resigned that evening. A sitting premier with a majority government, once a popular federal MP and minister elected in his riding with massive majorities, the architect of the merger that created his party, was removed by ordinary members who bought memberships, filled in a card and posted it. The machinery was constituency associations and kitchen tables, and it worked precisely as the tradition intends.

In 1937, Premier Aberhart escaped the wrath that Kenney could not in 2022. Aberhart survived his members by repealing the law they used. Kenney could not attempt the equivalent. In essence, it was the same event separated by eighty-five years. Whatever else divides those two men, the spirit that came for both was recognizably the same spirit.

The Laurentian puzzlement

Alberta’s practice looks bizarre from Ottawa and from Halifax for a reason worth naming honestly. The dominant Canadian theory of representation descends from Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol: the elected member owes his constituents his judgment, and betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion. Burke was largely right. Parliamentary government requires deliberation, and referendums decide nothing about the questions they do not ask.

The prairie answer to Burke is narrower than its critics allow. Delegate democracy claims authority on the questions a governing class refuses to put on any agenda at all. Alberta voted 61.7 per cent to remove equalization from the constitution in October 2021, and Ottawa never opened a single discussion. Albertans have elected Senate nominees since 1989 under provincial legislation, and prime ministers have honoured the results when convenient and ignored them otherwise.

None of this means that the Alberta populist spirit gives us perfection. The same Aberhart government that killed the recall law pushed the Accurate News and Information Act through the legislature in October 1937, a bill that would have forced newspapers to print government corrections and to surrender their sources on demand. The Lieutenant Governor withheld assent and referred it, and in March 1938 the Supreme Court held it beyond Alberta’s power. The bill never became law. Plebiscitary enthusiasm can turn on the press, on minorities of different sorts, on procedural restraint, and the machinery that stopped it in 1938 was the federal state.

The tradition survives the memory. Alberta’s instinct, tested and occasionally disgraced across eleven decades, remains that a government which will not ask has stopped governing by consent. Albertans will keep asking the questions. Ten questions will be asked on 19 October, and Albertans will answer them in numbers, and the answers will be recorded.

Laurentians, especially upper Laurentians, may find the exercise unfamiliar. Alberta does not.

More next week.

Alberta’s data centre debate runs on three claims: that the province regulates nothing, that political turbulence is driving investment away, and that an AI bust would leave Albertans holding the wreckage. Each claim collapses on inspection. Each collapse is instructive.

One of the largest private investments in Canadian history landed this summer in a rural county north of Edmonton. The people who spent the past decade demanding exactly this kind of investment now want it stopped.

Progressives and the Alberta NDP have opened a campaign to torpedo the data centre projects taking shape across the province. Their objections repay a close reading because the arguments tell us a great deal about the movement’s neuroses. Less than a decade ago, these same voices clamoured incessantly for exactly what has now arrived: diversify the economy, attract technology, end the dependence on hydrocarbons.

Three claims carry their campaign: Alberta regulates nothing, political turbulence is scaring capital away, and an AI bust would leave Albertans holding the wreckage. Each claim refutes itself. Watch.

I. The demand that dared not come true

What does a political movement do when its demand comes true? Naheed Nenshi delivered the demand personally. As mayor, he flew to Toronto’s Collision conference in 2019 to pitch Calgary to the industry: “If we actually get the next great big app in Calgary, we’d be thrilled,” he said. “But we are actually looking at tech, AI and machine learning to enable other sectors in the economy.”

He advertised the city’s “tons of engineers, tons of data scientists.” A collection of people in what is now his party matched him. Under Rachel Notley’s name, the Alberta NDP caucus declared that “Alberta’s tech and AI sectors have enormous potential to create jobs and grow our economy” and demanded a stable funding environment to “further diversify Alberta’s economy.” The party even tabled legislation for a public technology venture fund, lamenting that Ontario drew $7.4 billion in venture investment in a single year while Alberta managed only $561 million.

Then the investment came. On July 8 this year, Meta committed more than $13 billion to a one-gigawatt campus in Sturgeon County, its first Canadian data centre and its largest anywhere outside the United States. It comes paired with a $4.6 billion privately financed power plant. Premier Danielle Smith stated the terms in four short sentences: “No subsidies. No grants. No discounted power. No taxpayer backstop.” No public money for it. The project promises roughly 3,000 construction jobs, 300 permanent positions and about $250 million a year in royalties, taxes, levies and fees.

It is clear to everyone that this project brings diversification in the exact sector progressives had specified, on terms no subsidy-hunting battery plant, gaming company or film studio has ever offered this country.

But the movement that demanded it, if you ask progressives, seems to have vanished. Nenshi now calls the file a “Wild West free-for-all” with “no regulations in place to protect Albertans.” His technology critic, Nathan Ip, describes a “concierge service for foreign billionaires.” They want Meta and all similar or related projects to pause, and eventually scrapped.

Let’s test the free-for-all Nenshi claim against the statute book first. The Alberta Electric System Operator capped large-load connections at 1,200 megawatts in June 2025 precisely because it refused to let data centres become a risk to grid reliability. Bill 8, the Utilities Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, built a tailor-made regulatory framework for the industry and makes every data centre pay for its own transmission upgrades rather than pushing the cost onto the province’s ratepayers.

The Data Centre Regulation, Alberta Regulation 117/2026, in force since June this year, prioritizes projects that bring their own generation ability and leaves the rest waiting. Bill 12, the Financial Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), imposed a levy on any facility drawing 75 megawatts or more from the grid.

Proposed power plants still face full Alberta Utilities Commission hearings; the Indus project spent this very August before the commission. Municipal permits, Water Act licences and Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act approvals all continue to apply. A politician may argue these instruments are miscalibrated. But Nenshi cannot credibly say they do not exist. His claims of a free-for-all fail miserably when they meet the work of the legislature, where he also now sits.

Nenshi has long sold himself as the professor, the policy wonk, the smartest man in the room. Yet the regulation he says does not exist is numbered, published and already in force. He sits in the Legislature whose laws created the framework. Either he has not read it, or he has read it and chooses to describe Alberta as having “no regulations in place.” Neither explanation flatters the wonk.

A harder question follows. Set the gas plant aside for a moment and ask what remains of the opposition. The official objection is environmental: data centres burn natural gas, and gas means emissions. If that were the true complaint, it would vanish the moment the fuel changed. So apply a simple test. Imagine every data hall in Alberta running on some emissions-free miracle, on unicorn flatulence if you like. Would the NDP stand down?

Their own town halls answer the question. Participants cited “the disruptive cultural effect of generative AI” as a reason to oppose the projects. Others objected to foreign control of data, or to the personalities of the billionaires involved. They never mentioned these when they championed the AI tech they wanted to bring. And notice that none of these grievances burns a single molecule of gas. The objections would survive the greenest power source on earth, which means the power source was never the true objection. The emissions argument is the respectable costume. Underneath it stands a plain dislike of the industry and of the people building it.

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II. The exodus that keeps not happening

A second inconsistency concerns political predictions of failure, even advanced by some conservatives. Through the spring, three choirs sang the same warning: Alberta’s political turbulence was strangling investment. Jason Kenney called the referendum question “kryptonite for investor confidence” and accused the government of “playing with fire,” warning that Quebec “has paid the price for the uncertainty created by separation for 50 years.” By May he had escalated: separation would be “the single most dramatic act of economic suicide in modern history.”

Nenshi wrote that “just the talk of separation is putting a freeze on investment, scaring businesses away,” and accused Premier Smith of “doing generations of economic harm to Alberta.” The Calgary Chamber of Commerce supplied some numbers: 28 per cent of surveyed businesses said separation talk was already affecting them, and a commissioned analysis by UofC economist Trevor Tombe modelled that Alberta could forgo $10 billion to $15 billion in investment in the first year if investment responded to a separation process as it did after Brexit.

Note the grammar of the warnings. Could forgo. Would be. A freeze that an unnamed someone is putting on. It is all done in the conditional, sometimes with great hyperbolic drama.

Now set the speculation beside the ledger. The referendum date, October 19, was public knowledge by early June. On July 8, five weeks later, Meta announced. A corporation whose planning horizon spans decades, whose lawyers even price the political risk of eating a bagel for breakfast, and which had never built in Canada before chose Alberta this year, with that question on the ballot. Its dedicated power plant enters service in 2030 and will run for decades past it. Every dollar of the commitment assumes Alberta remains a jurisdiction where property is secure, contracts hold and electricity flows, straight through the vote Kenney and the autonomy alarmists said would freeze capital in its tracks.

The private conversation matches the public ledger. When The Logic canvassed Alberta’s corporate heavyweights this summer, Ensign Energy chief executive Bob Geddes reported: “Not one single person said, ‘Oh, I’m worried about investing in Calgary, or in Advantage, or Alberta, because of the separatist thing.’” The S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index climbed more than 30 percent between late August 2025 and late February 2026, and the foreign capital that stayed away when PM Trudeau wanted to leave it all in the ground now has started to arrive in the oilpatch.

We can grant the alarmists their strongest ground. One hyperscale commitment cannot disprove hesitation at the margin, and Tombe’s figure describes a counterfactual nobody can observe. Fair enough. But the burden now runs the other way. The forecasters predicted a freeze but one of the largest private investments in Canadian history arrived in the middle of it. Surveys measure an ethereal anxiety. Final investment decisions measure judgment. A poll asks a business owner how the headlines make him feel; a long-term tolling agreement asks him to commit for decades. Between the Chamber’s forgone billions and Meta’s committed billions, only one is a fact.

Kenney governed this province for a bit. Nenshi wants to. Both told Albertans capital was fleeing while capital was signing in. When the announcement came, neither said a word. A man who diagnoses economic suicide owes the province a note when the patient walks out of the hospital alive.

One more plank of the alarm needs some scrutiny: the Quebec analogy itself. Yes, capital fled Montreal after 1976. Sun Life announced it would move its head office to Toronto in 1978, and dozens of firms followed. But those head offices fled a hostile language law that imposed significant burdens and liabilities, as much as they fled a referendum. They also fled a government: the Parti Québécois came to office as the most left-wing socialist party ever to govern a Laurentian province, and business was as genuinely concerned about its socialism as about its separatism. A head office, besides, is the most portable asset a province holds. Alberta’s wealth does not fit in a moving van. Nobody relocates an oilsands mine, a gas field or a petrochemical complex to Bay Street.

History elsewhere is just as unkind to Kenney’s analogy. Czechs and Slovaks parted in 1993 and both economies grew. Singapore left its federation in 1965 and became one of the richest places on earth. Norway left its union with Sweden in 1905, and nobody in Oslo mourns. Separation carries real costs and real risks, and this piece takes no position on the October question at the moment (it deserves a full discussion that would only sidetrack the argument here). My point is narrower: economic ruin follows bad policy, not the mere act of a people voting to govern itself.

III. Heads Alberta wins, tails Alberta keeps the turbines

The naysayers may hold one strong card. No one can guarantee business success. Artificial intelligence may be a bubble. Meta will spend between US$130 billion and US$145 billion on capital projects in 2026 alone, nearly double last year’s outlay; its free cash flow shrank below one billion dollars last quarter, and Wall Street has punished the stock, down roughly 12 per cent on the year and nearly 30 per cent from its peak. If model progress stalls, or the revenue never matches the compute, the hyperscalers will slash their spending. Alberta, the argument goes, will then inherit ghost warehouses on 1,750 acres. A monument to a gold rush that ended the way gold rushes end.

So suppose it all happens. Now inventory what Alberta holds on the morning after.

A data centre is two assets wearing one name. The first is the computing hardware: servers that depreciate in three to five years, belong to Meta, and become Meta’s write-down in any bust. The second is the power plant, which endures. Greenlight will deliver 932 megawatts of modern combined-cycle generation, expandable to 1,864 megawatts, built by Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor for roughly $4.6 billion of private money, under fixed-price contracts, with Siemens equipment reserved years in advance. Combined-cycle plants run for roughly forty years. Servers come and go. Turbines remain.

Recall January 2024. Emergency alerts lit up phones across the province on a brutally cold night because the grid stood within a rounding error of rolling blackouts. The system lacked one thing: power plants that run on demand, in any weather. Alberta’s rules now make the data centres solve that problem at their own expense. Before a large project can jump the connection queue, it must bring its own generation that covers everything it consumes. The rule works as a priority system rather than a ban, but the grid’s spare room is already spoken for, so self-supply is in practice the only door in. Every campus that walks through it adds more reliable power to Alberta than it takes out.

The AESO is also designing contracts that let it pause a data centre for an hour on the coldest evening of the year, and here the computers hold an advantage no heavy industry can match. Pause a smelter, and the metal freezes in the pots. Pause a training run and the machines simply wait. The bottom line for anyone paying a power bill is worth repeating: each data centre arrives carrying its own power plant, the province gains the right to interrupt the computers in an emergency, and the lights in Alberta homes sit more securely than they did before the industry came. That is a net benefit in potentia.

So run both branches of the future. If AI succeeds, Alberta hosts a new industry, collects its levies and taxes, sells its gas into a domestic market and pockets transmission relief. If AI busts, the shareholders of Meta, Pembina and Morgan Stanley absorb the losses, exactly as the premier framed it: “If it fails, the investors lose the money, not you.” And Alberta’s market keeps a modern generating fleet the public purse never paid for, wired into a grid that nearly failed without those very machines. Name another industrial policy in this country’s history whose failure mode is surplus electricity. I can’t think of one.

The critics demanded diversification and, when it arrived, called it a menace. They predicted flight and watched one of the largest arrivals in the country’s history. They warned of a bust whose principal legacy would be cheap, abundant, dispatchable power. Three objections, three self-refutations. The debate Alberta deserves begins where these end.

One question remains for Nenshi and the progressives: What happened?

After trade talks with Washington collapsed, Ontario’s premier and Alberta’s most recent former premier would use Alberta energy as a bargaining chip. That is a dangerous game. There is worse.

The Sierra Club, no friend to Alberta, sent a fundraising letter to Canadian inboxes four days after the collapse. It calls for the federal government to impose an export tax on the oil and natural gas we ship to the United States.

The proposal belongs to the economist Seth Klein, who set it at 15 per cent and costed it at “close to $25 billion” a year. What the letter adds is a sentence of its own. An export tax, it says, is “a Federal choice (not a provincial one) and one the Alberta Government has no grounds to oppose.”

No grounds?

In fact, there are three, and each is a matter of public record.

The first is a Supreme Court of Canada judgment. In 1980 Ottawa proposed a tax on exported natural gas as part of the National Energy Program. Alberta challenged it through a constitutional reference, on the basis that the province itself owned the gas the levy would capture. In Re Exported Natural Gas Tax, [1982] 1 S.C.R. 1004, the Court struck the tax down as it applied to Alberta’s own gas, on the plain words of section 125 of the Constitution: “No Lands or Property belonging to Canada or any Province shall be liable to Taxation.”

That is not ancient history. The Crown owns 81 per cent of Alberta’s mineral rights, some 53.7 million hectares. The Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, created out of the 1973 oil-pricing fight, still takes the Crown’s conventional crude royalty in kind and markets the barrels itself. How much royalty Alberta takes that way is a policy choice made in Edmonton, and the barrels the province owns are the barrels Ottawa cannot tax.

The second is section 92A of the Constitution Act, 1982, the resources amendment, which exists because of this quarrel. In plain language, Alberta decides how much comes out of the ground. Peter Lougheed improvised that power under fire in 1981, cutting output in stages toward 180,000 barrels a day. Ottawa’s grab backfired: it had to levy a special charge of $1.15 a barrel on Canadian consumers to help pay for the costlier imported crude that replaced Alberta’s. Today the power is written into the Constitution.

The third is a treaty Canada signed. Article 2.15 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement reads, in full: “No Party shall adopt or maintain any duty, tax, or other charge on the export of any good to the territory of another Party, unless the duty, tax, or charge is also applied to the good if destined for domestic consumption.” Annex 2-A exempts Canadian logs, unprocessed fish, coasting trade and ethyl alcohol. Mexico secured a carve-out for hydrocarbons. Canada did not. A 15 per cent levy on barrels bound for Chicago is lawful only if the same 15 per cent lands on every barrel burned in Hamilton, which is not the policy being sold. Ottawa would argue that American tariffs have suspended the obligation. That is an arguable position, not a settled one, and it would be fought alongside the constitutional case.

Then there is the arithmetic. The letter assumes the tax lands chiefly on Americans. Largely, it would not. Alberta sells a heavy sour barrel into a narrow market of refineries built to process it, from a landlocked position, at a discount that exists precisely because the seller has nowhere else to go. As energy analyst Heather Exner-Pirot puts it: “Just like Americans pay the tariffs, if we impose an export tax, it’s our companies that are responsible for paying the export tax.” Much of that cost would work its way back to the wellhead, cutting producer revenue and the royalties that pay for Alberta schools and hospitals.

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None of this required special access. It required opening the file.

Nobody did in the 1970s, and the country paid.

On 13 September 1973, nine days after the producing provinces declined a voluntary price freeze, Ottawa announced a 40-cent-per-barrel charge on exported oil. The Trudeau government’s budget of May 1974, delivered by finance minister John Turner, then made provincial royalties non-deductible against federal income tax. The Alberta Law Review worked the arithmetic at the time: a producer could pay federal tax and provincial royalty exceeding one hundred per cent of income. What followed, in that journal’s words, was “a massive exodus of drilling and exploration companies and equipment from Canada.” Alberta cut its own royalty to 35.2 per cent in December 1974 to keep the industry alive. The province paid for Ottawa’s tax.

The escalation came six years later. The Liberals won the election of February 1980 holding two seats west of Ontario, both in Manitoba, and eight months later, with nobody from Alberta at the table, brought in the National Energy Program and held Alberta oil below world prices. The government shelved Cold Lake in July 1981. Alsands was cancelled in May 1982. Active drilling rigs in western Canada fell from about 550 to 120 in two years.

On 17 February 1982, the voters of Olds-Didsbury elected Gordon Kesler of the Western Canada Concept, a party nine months old, running on an independent western nation. He was the first separatist elected to the Alberta legislature, and the first elected anywhere outside Quebec in living memory. Lougheed, who had spent a decade fighting Ottawa, was outflanked by people who thought he had not fought hard enough.

Now the calendar. Albertans vote on 19 October, eight weeks from now, on ten questions, one of which asks whether the province should begin the legal process toward a binding referendum on separation. Ipsos found support for separation at 28 per cent in January, falling to 18 or 19 by early June, with 72 per cent saying they would stay.

Into that eight-week window, a national environmental organization proposes to drop a federal tax on Alberta’s principal export, justified in writing on the ground that Alberta has no standing to object. It is a reckless policy, urged with no evident regard for the unity of the country its authors claim to be defending.

They are not alone in liking it. Klein’s brother-in-law, Avi Lewis, now federal NDP leader, backs the idea too. With his wife, Naomi Klein, Lewis helped produce the 2015 Leap Manifesto, the document that Rachel Notley, then Alberta’s premier, called “naive and ill-informed.” A decade on, the same instrument is back, and one of its authors leads the party Notley belonged to.

Alberta’s own government has already answered. Asked in July about withholding the energy that goes south, Premier Danielle Smith called it “not a viable option.” The Prime Minister has likewise declined the invitation. Asked the same month about using energy as leverage, Mark Carney said: “I don’t see the value of it.”

They are right, and for a reason larger than trade tactics. The question was tried once, in court and on the ground, and Alberta won both. What Ottawa got for the attempt was a wrecked drilling sector, a constitutional amendment written against it, and a separatist in the legislature inside sixteen months.

That was against a province with no referendum on the calendar. There is one now.

In their haste to punish Donald Trump, who will not feel it, Laurentian environmentalists would damage the country they claim to defend. Happily, the file is already full. The Constitution shielded Alberta’s own petroleum in 1982, a treaty bars the tax now, and Alberta’s voters have answered this kind of federal adventure before. You cannot save the country by giving Alberta more reasons to leave.

Sources

• Seth Klein, “Canada should hit Trump where it hurts the most — oil and gas,” Canada’s National Observer, February 2025. sethklein.ca

• Re: Exported Natural Gas Tax, [1982] 1 S.C.R. 1004. decisions.scc-csc.ca

• Constitution Act, 1867, ss. 92A and 125. laws-lois.justice.gc.ca

• Nigel Bankes, “Peter Lougheed’s Section 92A,” ABlawg. ablawg.ca

• Mineral ownership in Alberta, Government of Alberta. alberta.ca

• Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, “Petroleum Marketing.” apmc.ca

• CUSMA, Chapter 2, Articles 2.11 and 2.15, Global Affairs Canada. international.gc.ca

• Graison Foster, “Ontario premier wants Canada to withhold oil exports to the U.S. Here’s what that would mean,” Edmonton Journal, 25 August 2026 (Exner-Pirot and Smith quotations). Edmonton Journal

• “Carney vows Canada will remain reliable oil supplier despite U.S. tariffs,” World Oil, 29 July 2026. worldoil.com

• B. Tyerman, “The Pricing of Alberta’s Oil,” Alberta Law Review (1976). albertalawreview.com

• Robert G. Skinner, “The Liberalization of Canada’s Oil and Gas Markets” (2023), on the $1.15/bbl Special Compensation Charge. thinkingenergy.ca

• “The Notorious NEP,” CBC News Interactives. newsinteractives.cbc.ca

• UPI archive, 18 February 1982, on Gordon Kesler and the Western Canada Concept. upi.com

• “Alberta separatism support drops sharply from early 2026: Ipsos poll,” Global News. globalnews.ca

• “Rachel Notley calls Leap Manifesto naive and ill-informed,” CBC News. cbc.ca

Intergovernmental Affairs

Trade talks collapse, Washington imposes 50 per cent tariffs, and Alberta breaks from the national front

Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations with Washington on 21 August and recalled Canada’s negotiators. The United States then imposed 50 per cent tariffs on roughly US$20 billion of Canadian goods, and Ottawa will match them from 8 September.

Why it matters: We read the split among premiers as the more durable fact. Every other first minister, including Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and British Columbia’s David Eby, endorsed matching tariffs. Premier Danielle Smith alone questioned them, warning on her radio program that “I know emotionally it feels good to retaliate. I get that, but let’s remember what happens when we retaliate.” She is right that counter-tariffs tax Canadian buyers, and right that Alberta’s exposure is not the same as Ontario’s. She is also isolated at the moment Ottawa is trying to use Western energy, 60 per cent of American crude imports, as the country’s leverage.

Sources: Prime Minister of Canada, 21 August 2026; Prime Minister of Canada, 22 August 2026; 620 CKRM, 22 August 2026; CP24, 22 August 2026.

Politics & Government

Calgary-Shaw by-election set for 14 September

Order in Council 302/2026 issued the writ on 17 August for Calgary-Shaw, vacant since former Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz resigned her seat in May. Voting is 14 September, nominations close 27 August, and four candidates have declared.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we take by-elections seriously as evidence and lightly as prophecy. Calgary-Shaw is a suburban seat the United Conservatives have held comfortably, and it is the only ballot Albertans will cast before the referendum on 19 October. What makes it worth watching is not the winner but the composition of the vote. A four-way field that includes a Progressive Tory candidate contesting the same ground as the governing party may show whether the centre-right coalition Premier Smith assembled is holding or fragmenting under the strain of the independence question. Turnout in a September by-election is normally poor. If it is not poor, that is itself the finding.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 17 August 2026; Elections Alberta, 17 August 2026.

Elections Alberta scales up for a ten-question referendum as Smith floats a binding vote in 2027

Elections Alberta is recruiting tens of thousands of officers for the 19 October referendum, which carries ten questions and will be hand-counted. Premier Smith told a closed party town hall a binding independence vote would follow in spring 2027.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we think the administrative design deserves more scrutiny than it has drawn. Ten questions on one ballot, hand-counted, with unofficial results promised within 48 hours, is a heavy load for an agency that has had to ask counterparts in other provinces for help filling senior specialist roles. A former chief electoral officer estimated in June that it will cost about $130 million, roughly three and a half times the $37 million spent running the 2023 general election. That is a defensible price for a genuine constitutional consultation and an indefensible one for a poll that binds nobody. Whether it is depends entirely on what the government intends to do with the answer, and voters are entitled to know before they mark the ballot, not after.

Sources: Elections Alberta, accessed 23 August 2026; CP24, 19 August 2026; Alberta Politics, 20 August 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Regulator rejects the power plant behind a $10 billion data centre at Olds

The Alberta Utilities Commission, the province’s independent energy regulator, refused Synapse Real Estate Corporation’s bid on 17 August for 1.4 gigawatts of gas-fired generation beside Olds, finding the site “simply not suitable.”

Why it matters: We regard this as a regulator doing precisely the job it exists to do, and we will say so as readily as we criticize. The Commission did not rule on data centres, which it does not regulate, or on Alberta’s appetite for artificial intelligence investment. It ruled on siting: 1.4 gigawatts of gas generation plus 1.8 gigawatts of backup diesel, proposed across the road from homes, shops and hotels in a town of about ten thousand, with no compelling justification offered for that location. Roughly 1,500 parties sought standing and more than 900 received it. A process that lets affected landowners be heard and then produces a reasoned refusal is not an obstacle to investment. It is what makes the next approval credible.

Sources: Red Deer Advocate, 17 August 2026; Global News, 17 August 2026; Lethbridge Herald, 21 August 2026.

The oil sands carbon capture decision slips to 2028

Kendall Dilling, president of the Oil Sands Alliance, the five-producer group formerly called Pathways Alliance, said a final investment decision on the Pathways carbon capture project will come in “late 2027 into early 2028.” Fiscal terms are targeted for mid-November.

Why it matters: The project’s first phase has already shrunk from 22 million tonnes a year by 2030, as proposed in 2021, to roughly 6 million tonnes by the mid-2030s, with a further 10 million by 2045. Cenovus chief executive Jon McKenzie put the cost at up to $30 billion in June. A decision in 2028 puts construction and any emissions benefit well beyond the life of the current federal and provincial mandates. Governments that have promised each other performance should be candid that neither can now deliver inside the deal they signed.

Sources: Reuters, via WHBL, 18 August 2026; Government of Canada, 13 July 2026.

At least six proposed pipelines, and no producer committing the barrels to fill them

A Reuters analysis published 18 August found proposed projects would lift Canadian export capacity by 45 per cent, some 2.25 million barrels a day by 2035, while Suncor and Canadian Natural declined to accelerate expansion and Enbridge shelved a Mainline phase.

Why it matters: We think this is the most useful corrective published all week. Alberta’s political argument treats export capacity as the binding constraint, and for a decade it genuinely was. The industry’s own capital behaviour now says otherwise. Oil sands investment fell from $35 billion at its 2014 peak to $14.2 billion in 2024, the last major new project started up in 2018, and shippers would not sign for Enbridge’s expansion. Wood Mackenzie analyst Mark Oberstoetter observes that the growth-at-all-means mantra at some producers “seems quite different today.” Pipelines built ahead of supply are stranded assets that somebody pays for. Before Ottawa or Edmonton underwrites new capacity, both should state publicly which barrels they expect will fill it.

Source: Reuters, via WTVB, 18 August 2026.

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Economy & Finance

Alberta housing starts fall 19 per cent while the energy economy runs hot

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the federal housing agency, reported on 18 August that Alberta housing starts are down 19 per cent so far this year, with Calgary off 23 per cent, even as crude trades near US$87.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we note that Alberta has spent three years telling the country it is the place Canadians can still afford to live. That claim rests on supply, and supply is contracting: 12,855 Calgary starts through July, down from 16,601 a year earlier. Statistics Canada separately recorded Alberta as posting the largest retail sales decline of any province in June, down 1.3 per cent. High crude prices aren't translating into houses. Part of this is interest costs and construction wages, which no province controls. Part of it is municipal levies, approval timelines and skilled labour supply, which provincial policy does control. The province should say which of the three it believes is binding because those answers point to very different remedies.

Sources: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 18 August 2026; Statistics Canada, 21 August 2026.

Business & Investment

Studies find year-round shipping from Churchill is possible without icebreakers

Manitoba, Ottawa and the Indigenous-owned Arctic Gateway Group released three studies on 21 August concluding that existing ice-class vessels could keep the Hudson Bay port open all year, against a current shipping window of about four months.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we think Prairie producers should read this closely, especially as American tariffs went to 50 percent. Churchill is the only saltwater port the Prairies effectively own; it is majority Indigenous-owned, and it already moves grain, potash and zinc. But it should not be the only one. Extending a four-month window toward twelve would change the arithmetic for Saskatchewan potash and Alberta grain now routed south or through congested West Coast corridors. A plan exists to open a corridor to Nelson.

Sources: Government of Manitoba, 21 August 2026; Global News, 21 August 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

A late Prairie harvest meets a tariff on farm machinery

Alberta’s harvest stood at one per cent complete and Saskatchewan’s at four per cent, both well behind average, though Alberta crops are rated in unusually good condition. Canada’s retaliatory tariff list, effective 8 September, includes agricultural equipment.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would flag the timing rather than the tonnage. Alberta’s crop is in genuinely good shape, rated 59 per cent good to excellent with yields estimated a fifth above the five-year average, a welcome reversal after the drought years. The difficulty is the calendar. Combines are barely moving, and Ottawa’s counter-tariffs on agricultural equipment take effect on 8 September, in the middle of harvest and the autumn machinery cycle. A tariff on farm equipment is a tax on Prairie producers, not on American manufacturers, and it falls on the sector least able to pass costs forward to a buyer. If Ottawa wants Western support for retaliation, exempting the machinery farmers must buy this month would be a cheap and obvious place to begin.

Sources: Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation crop report, via Big West Country, 17 August 2026; Government of Saskatchewan, 20 August 2026; Al Jazeera, 22 August 2026.

Health

Ottawa signals concern as Alberta’s dual-practice health law takes effect

Provisions of Alberta’s Bill 11 allowing physicians to work in both the public system and a privately paid one take effect on 1 September. The federal health ministry said on 18 August it is “listening” to Albertans’ concerns.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we would separate the legal question from the political one. The Canada Health Act lets Ottawa withhold transfer cash, about $7 billion for Alberta in 2026-27, where extra-billing or user charges are found. Whether dual practice, physicians working in both systems, amounts to extra-billing has never been squarely tested, and a departmental spokesperson saying officials are listening is not a finding. Alberta is entitled to test the boundary of a federal spending condition; Ottawa is entitled to enforce the statute. Neither should do this through press releases while patients guess what they will be charged. The province has still not published what a privately paid consultation costs or how public wait times will be measured against it. It should, before 1 September.

Sources: CUPE Alberta, 18 August 2026; Sylvan Lake News, 18 August 2026; Legislative Assembly of Alberta, Bill 11, 23 October 2025.

Municipal Affairs

Province accepts recommendations on unpaid oil and gas taxes, without numbers or dates

Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams and Energy and Minerals Minister Brian Jean accepted in principle the Property Tax Accountability Strategy working group’s recommendations on unpaid oil and gas municipal taxes. No dollar figures, timelines or enforcement details accompanied the announcement.

Why it matters: We would call this the oldest unpaid bill in rural Alberta. The Rural Municipalities of Alberta, the association representing the province’s counties and municipal districts, surveyed its members and found at least $253.9 million in municipal taxes unpaid by oil and gas companies as of the end of 2024. A county cannot withhold the roads and emergency services those well sites consume, so the shortfall is made up through the residential and farm mill rate. Accepting recommendations in principle costs a government nothing. What would make this real is a figure, a date, and a stated consequence for companies that do not pay. Until those three appear, the counties carry it.

Sources: Rural Municipalities of Alberta, 21 August 2026; Rural Municipalities of Alberta, unpaid oil and gas taxes survey, March 2025.

Alberta History

One hundred and fifty years since Treaty 6

On 23 August 1876, at Fort Carlton on the North Saskatchewan River, Crown commissioners and Cree, Assiniboine and Saulteaux leaders signed Treaty No. 6, with further signings there on 28 August and at Fort Pitt on 9 September. The treaty covers roughly 121,000 square miles across what is now central Alberta and central Saskatchewan, running west to the Athabasca River and the Rocky Mountains, and including the ground Edmonton stands on. Treaty 6 is distinctive among the numbered treaties for two clauses: a promise that a medicine chest would be kept at each Indian agent’s house, and an undertaking of relief in the event of famine or pestilence. Those two sentences have been at the centre of litigation and negotiation over treaty health rights ever since.

The 150th anniversary fell this past Sunday. Governor General Louise Arbour marked it at Fort Carlton Provincial Historic Park alongside Premier Scott Moe and Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak. Alberta’s Indigenous Relations Minister Rajan Sawhney issued a written statement; the province had been absent from an Edmonton commemoration six days earlier, and Grand Chief Joey Pete of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations said so publicly. Whatever one makes of that, the anniversary is a useful reminder that Alberta’s constitutional position rests on two sets of instruments rather than one. The 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Agreement gave the province the minerals that fund it, and that agreement itself carried forward obligations to the treaty nations whose signatures came fifty-four years earlier.

Sources: Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Treaty Texts No. 6; Government of Alberta, 23 August 2026; Calgary Journal, 18 August 2026.

Data Corner

Alberta’s wholesale power price averaged $17.36 per megawatt hour in June, which the Market Surveillance Administrator, the province’s independent market monitor, describes as the lowest monthly average on record once adjusted for inflation. July recovered to roughly $31.30. The direction of travel is the story. The pool price averaged $43.68 across 2025 and $62.78 in 2024, against $162.46 in 2022. Three years ago Alberta had the most expensive electricity in the country and a political emergency to match. It now has some of the cheapest, and a quite different problem.

Inexpensive power is precisely what is drawing artificial intelligence data centres to Alberta, and it is also what makes new generation hard to finance. The Alberta Electric System Operator reported in June 2025 that 29 proposed projects representing more than 16 gigawatts of demand were seeking connection, against an interim limit of 1,200 megawatts to 2028. A market clearing at $17 sends no signal to build the supply those loads would need, which is why so many proponents arrive with their own generation attached, and why the binding constraint has turned out to be siting, as at Olds, rather than price. Two cautions on the chart: June and July are shoulder-season months and soft even by that standard, and the July point is a trade estimate rather than a published MSA average, marked hollow.

Sources: Alberta Market Surveillance Administrator, Wholesale Market Report Q2 2026, August 2026, and the Q3 2025, Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 reports in the same series; Alberta Electric System Operator, 2025 Annual Market Statistics, March 2026; AESO interim approach to large load connections, June 2025; July 2026 average via DNE Resources, 12 August 2026.

The Take

1. Alberta’s job numbers are real. The way the government is presenting them is not.

Jobs, Economy, Trade and Immigration Minister Joseph Schow’s team put out the claim that Alberta accounted for 81.2 per cent of all new jobs created in Canada in the first seven months of 2026. The arithmetic holds, and that is the problem. National employment grew by only about 71,000 over those seven months, so Alberta’s share of a very small number is indeed very large. A share of a near-zero denominator measures how weak the rest of the country was, not how strong Alberta is. In July itself Alberta shed 7,300 jobs while Ontario added 52,000, and Alberta’s unemployment rate of 7.0 per cent remains well above the national 6.4 per cent. The underlying record is good enough without the framing: Alberta added 91,000 jobs year over year, the largest proportional gain of any province. Governments that dress up decent numbers invite the suspicion that the numbers are not decent.

Worth Watching

• Teachers’ association warns members over a public reporting website. The Alberta Teachers’ Association told members that a third party is building a site inviting the public to identify and comment on individual teachers’ conduct, said it is working with legal counsel, and directed those targeted to its member support line. The organizer told a Western outlet the project is about accountability. Alberta Teachers’ Association, 20 August 2026.

• Springbank reservoir diverts the Elbow for the first time. The province reported that the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir, built after a decade of litigation and land disputes, was used for the first time to divert high Elbow River flows upstream of Calgary, part of a $125-million flood and drought program. Government of Alberta, 21 August 2026.

• A day with no wildfires in Alberta’s forest protection area, the first in August in about 40 years, with 177.2 square kilometres burned this season against 6,705 a year ago. British Columbia, meanwhile, extended its provincial state of emergency to 29 August. CP24, 18 August 2026.

• Federal release, then an Edmonton stabbing. A 27-year-old man released from federal custody on 20 August, who failed to report to his assigned Edmonton halfway house, was arrested after two worshippers aged 75 and 51 were stabbed at a northeast Edmonton gurdwara the following morning. Global News, 21 August 2026.

• Express Entry tilts further toward French. The 19 August draw issued 5,000 invitations restricted to French-language candidates at a score of 382, the year’s lowest cutoff in that category, continuing a selection pattern that historically directs newcomers away from the West. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 19 August 2026.

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

Chinese-run ships using Russia’s Northern Sea Route comply with rules rooted in a Canadian legal principle that also governs Hudson Bay. Ottawa has the law to assert sovereignty on Manitoba’s Arctic coast, but keeps too few of its ships, charts and crews within reach.

Canada has the law on its side, but keeps too little of its fleet, ports and infrastructure in the North to exercise real authority

Churchill sits just under 59 degrees north, below the Arctic Circle and south of Yellowknife. But under federal vessel traffic regulations that took effect on March 31, any ship of 300 gross tonnes or more entering Hudson Bay, James Bay or Ungava Bay is subject to Canada’s northern vessel traffic rules. It must file a sailing plan with the Coast Guard and report its position.

But while Canada has the law, it lacks the infrastructure to make its authority meaningful.

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The container ship Dubai Tower was to leave Ningbo, China, for England over the top of Russia on Aug. 15 until its operator moved the date because of weather. What matters is not the ship. It is the paperwork.

Ships using Russia’s Northern Sea Route operate under a detailed system of state control. The captain applies to Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation and the designated infrastructure operator of the route, up to 120 days in advance, meeting criteria based on ice class, season and 28 numbered zones. Every day he is up there, he reports position, fuel and ice at noon, Moscow time. Moscow can cancel its permission outright.

Russia does not merely claim authority over its Arctic route. It exercises it under Article 234 of the Law of the Sea Convention, a provision Canada helped create. After the American tanker Manhattan crossed the Northwest Passage in 1969 without Canada’s permission, Parliament passed the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, and Canadian negotiators helped secure the treaty provision. That provision governs shipping rules, not ownership. Canada’s claim that the Passage is internal waters rests separately on historic title and straight baselines.

Beijing’s own Arctic navigation guide tells Chinese operators that Canada treats the Northwest Passage as internal waters and directs them to the Canada Shipping Act and Canada’s reporting rules. Canadian Arctic sovereignty scholar Adam Lajeunesse highlighted those instructions when he examined the guide in 2016.

But while China tells its ships to follow Canadian rules, Canada still lacks the infrastructure to exercise real authority in the Arctic.

At Churchill, the Coast Guard facility is little more than an unstaffed equipment depot. Vessel traffic is monitored from Iqaluit until mid-December, when that work moves 2,500 km south to Les Escoumins, Que. Even the waters themselves remain poorly mapped. Hydrographers rated just 15.8 per cent of Canadian Arctic waters adequately surveyed in 2023, and that measurement stops at the 60th parallel, leaving Churchill out of the count.

In May, Ottawa announced an $816-million maritime security package spread over seven years. It includes a year-round intelligence hub in Iqaluit, four new Arctic long-range marine radar sites and drones. Those are the means to watch a ship go aground, not to chart the shoal or pull her off.

Sovereignty in this country’s North is not a legal opinion. It is steel: survey ships, icebreakers, a deepened harbour, reliable rail, power and communications infrastructure.

Churchill is already moving zinc from mining company Hudbay’s operations at Snow Lake, and on July 17 prairie grain was to roll north over the Hudson Bay Railway for the first time since 2020. Yet Ottawa referred Churchill to its Major Projects Office in September 2025 and aimed to publish a strategy in the spring. What appeared was a $248,600 market-sounding study.

The Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link would bring hydroelectric power and fibre-optic internet from Manitoba into Nunavut. Yet the project was never referred to the Major Projects Office.

Ottawa could publish its Churchill strategy and refer the Kivalliq link this month, at almost no cost.

Canada has spent decades establishing its legal authority in the Arctic. Other countries increasingly recognize it. Now Canada needs to build the infrastructure that makes that authority real.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is vice-president of research and policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which will host Reclaiming the North in Winnipeg on Sept. 14 and 15, featuring retired lieutenant-general Michel Maisonneuve, former Norway House Cree Nation chief Ron Evans and Frontier president David Leis. Marco is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper

I slowed down this week. I took a few days of vacation in the splendour of the Cypress Hills with my two teenagers, in that elevated island of lodgepole pine rising out of the dry prairie where Saskatchewan meets Alberta. It is one of my favourite places. The Hills reward the unhurried. They also hold one of the most instructive chapters in our relationship with our American cousins and with the aboriginal peoples of this continent. On our last day in the Hills, we visited the Fort Walsh National Historic Site.

The fort is located on the East side of the hills, in Saskatchewan. Why does Fort Walsh exist at all? In plain language: Because Americans were behaving badly on fresh Canadian soil 150 years ago. In the early 1870s, whisky traders ran their trade north from Fort Benton, Montana, into a West with law on paper and none on the ground (not unlike the Canadian Arctic today).

In June 1873, a party of American and Canadian wolf hunters, inflamed by drink and a quarrel over stolen horses, attacked an Assiniboine camp in these hills and killed a score or more of its people. The massacre scandalized Ottawa and hastened the dispatch of the newly formed North-West Mounted Police. Fort Walsh rose in 1875 and served as the force’s headquarters from 1878 to 1882. It is the kind of history we should work harder to remember. From this ground, Superintendent James Walsh managed Sitting Bull and thousands of Lakota who crossed the Medicine Line after Little Bighorn, seeking a peace the American cavalry would not give them.

Nothing in the national iconography is more proudly Canadian than the scarlet tunic. The 1972 recreation of the fort during the reign of Pierre Trudeau was a nationalist act: it is a monument to the historical proposition that Canada would be governed differently.

In the middle of a trade war, as some call it, there might have been some anti-Americanism on display, I thought. But what did I spot sitting there, amid all the interpretive talk of booze-running bandits from Montana? A John Deere Gator, manufactured in Horicon, Wisconsin, parked on the far south grass in the summer sun. Behind the fort on the West side sat a Parks Canada van, a Ford, assembled south of the border.

Perfectly good Canadian alternatives exist. Yet the federal agency curating a most Canadian site imaginable buys the iconic American brand. Is this a scandal? A failure of patriotic procurement demanding an inquiry and a directive?

It is nothing of the kind.

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Consider how that Gator likely reached the Cypress Hills. Brandt, a quintessential Prairie company headquartered in Regina, sells and services John Deere equipment across Canada to farmers and builders and has grown into one of the largest Deere dealership networks in the world. Brandt employs thousands of Canadians in good jobs. Through its community program, the company has given millions to children’s hospitals, MS charities, Alzheimer organizations and many other causes that never make a press release. An American brand, a Saskatchewan dealer, Canadian paycheques, Canadian philanthropy.

That is what the real economy looks like.

Canadian and American commerce has been woven together for generations for mutual benefit. The whisky traders were the pathology of that integration; Brandt is its health. What the Mounties established at Fort Walsh was never economic separation from the United States. It was the rule of law within which exchange with the United States could proceed honestly. The distinction matters, and it is precisely the distinction the “elbows up” crowd will not see.

Canada’s prosperity and well-being are tied to the United States by geography, history and the accumulated choices of millions of ordinary people on both sides of the line, regardless of who occupies the White House. No single occupant of Rideau Cottage, equally temporary, can redefine what hundreds of years have shaped.

But he can damage it.

Governments cannot conjure prosperity, yet they retain a formidable capacity to destroy it. Retaliatory procurement rules, buy-Canadian theatrics and the moral licensing of anti-American sentiment do nothing to the White House. They land instead on companies like Brandt, on the dealership mechanic in Swift Current, on the charity counting on next year’s corporate gift.

Chauvinistic nationalism is as destructive today as it was a century ago, when it helped wreck the trading order of the Atlantic world and impoverished everyone it claimed to protect. The “elbows up” nationalists flatter themselves that they stand on guard. In truth, they swing at the fabric of exchange that pays for the things they claim to love about this country.

The Gator at Fort Walsh is a better teacher than the slogan. Wisconsin iron, sold by a Regina company, cutting grass at the headquarters of the Mounted Police, on ground where Canadian law was first raised against American lawlessness. Trade under honest rules built this country.

Resentment dressed up as patriotism will not preserve it.

Vol. 1, No. 33 | Wednesday, August 19, 2026

A Haultain Research publication

The Haultain Brief is a weekly compilation of the news that matters for Alberta and Western Canada. Each Wednesday, we cover the prior week’s political, economic, energy, legal, and institutional developments, organized by theme, with links to primary sources. The editorial perspective will be familiar to Haultain Research readers: evidence-driven, skeptical of fashionable orthodoxies, unapologetically Western Canadian. The Brief complements rather than replaces the longer analytical essays published here. If you find it useful, consider subscribing to support the work.

Intergovernmental Affairs

Tariff deadline arrives with the two sides still far apart

Dominic LeBlanc, Ottawa’s lead minister on Canada United States trade, met trade representative Jamieson Greer on Sunday, three days before Washington’s threatened 50 per cent tariff on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports. Sources said both sides remained far apart.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research we read the published priority lists rather than the press conferences, and they say something uncomfortable. Ottawa’s stated order of business is relief on steel, aluminum, autos and then lumber, which places British Columbia’s forest sector last behind three Central Canadian and Quebec industries. The concessions on offer run the same way: dairy quota access, the return of American alcohol to provincial shelves, and an end to counter-tariffs on non-compliant vehicles. Western Canada supplies almost none of what Ottawa proposes to trade away, yet carries plenty of the exposure. Alberta alone produced over 34.2 million pounds of honey last year, more than any province, into a market where the United States takes 52.9 per cent of Canadian honey export value by dollar.

Sources: CP24, 16 August 2026; Global Affairs Canada, 14 August 2026; Manitoba Co-operator, 13 August 2026.

Producers line up behind the west coast pipeline as Ottawa’s clock runs

Energy Minister Brian Jean publicized a letter from the Explorers and Producers Association of Canada, whose members produce more than 40 per cent of the country’s oil, backing a pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta to a deepwater port near Delta, British Columbia.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we treat shipper commitment as the only real test of a pipeline proposal, because political enthusiasm costs nothing and volume commitments cost a great deal. The federal notice opening the listing of the West Coast Oil Pipeline as a project of national interest sets a comment deadline of 18 September, which is now the operative date on the file. Two cautions are worth stating plainly. The Assembly of First Nations has told Parliament that the fixed statutory timelines underpinning the approvals regime are coercive, and that objection goes to the mechanism rather than the route. A duty owed to identified rights holders is real, bounded and dischargeable, and discharging it properly is what makes a project survive judicial review.

Sources: Government of Alberta, 14 August 2026; Canada Gazette, Part I, Supplement, 1 August 2026; Blacklock’s Reporter, 12 August 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Ottawa proposes to repeal the electric vehicle sales mandate outright

Environment and Climate Change Canada published draft regulations repealing the zero emission vehicle sales requirements introduced in 2023, which mandated 20 per cent of model year 2026 light duty sales rising to 100 per cent by 2035.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we note first what the government’s own arithmetic concedes. The regulatory impact statement books $57.6 billion in avoided vehicle and charger costs against $53.8 billion in forgone energy savings and 326 megatonnes of forgone emissions reductions valued at $94.2 billion, for a net societal cost of $90.3 billion to 2050. That is Ottawa publishing a negative cost benefit result for its own proposal and proceeding anyway, which tells you the decision was made on trade grounds after Washington rescinded its vehicle standards. The mandate deserved to go, but a government that can produce a $90.3 billion figure and not address it is not governing by evidence either.

Source: Canada Gazette, Part I, Vol. 160, No. 33, 15 August 2026.

Trans Mountain asks to reserve nine tenths of the pipeline for contract shippers

Trans Mountain has asked the Canada Energy Regulator to lift the share of its 890,000 barrel a day system reserved for long term contract shippers from 80 to 90 per cent. Uncommitted spot capacity would roughly halve, to about 89,000 barrels.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we care about who gets access, not only about how much pipe exists. Only investment-grade producers can sign the long-term contracts this change rewards; smaller Alberta operators would be pushed toward third-party marketers or back to Edmonton and Hardisty pricing, forgoing the overseas premium. Sixty four per cent of the 528 tankers loaded since the expansion opened in May 2024 have gone to Asia, and the Business Council of Alberta puts the improved market access at roughly $5 billion in additional provincial revenue this year. The regulator must decide by 1 October for a January 2027 start. This is a genuine efficiency case against a genuine access case, and the small producer side deserves an actual hearing rather than a filing deadline.

Source: EnergyNow, carrying the Edmonton Journal, 14 August 2026.

Court lets Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation’s water licence challenge proceed

Court of King’s Bench Justice P.K. Johal dismissed O’Leary Digital Limited’s bid to quash Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation’s judicial review of a Water Act licence, and refused the company standing. The licence allows diversion of six million cubic metres from the Smoky River.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we distinguish between process that has an endpoint and processes that do not, and this is the first kind. The licence went to the Municipal District of Greenview, not to the developer, and Johal held the company’s connection to it “both contingent and speculative.” The Nation’s claim that Alberta failed to consult at all now goes to a full hearing in December. Alberta has attached its $70 billion Wonder Valley proposal to a water allocation whose consultation record has never been tested, which is a self-inflicted risk. A court insisting that the province meet a duty it already owes is the rule of law working, and the province is better off finding out now than in 2029.

Source: APTN News, 14 August 2026.

Business & Investment

Alberta’s grid, not its gas, is the limit on the data centre boom

Requests to connect data centres to Alberta’s grid total about 19,565 megawatts, more than the province’s highest recorded hourly demand. The Alberta Electric System Operator capped its first allocation round at 1,200 megawatts, awarding 970 to Meta and 230 to Keephills.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we take the Premier at her word and then check it. Danielle Smith says these are “100 per cent private projects. No subsidies, no grants, no discounted power, no taxpayer backstop,” and if that holds it is the right posture: let capital build its own generation and pay its own transmission. The numbers behind the claim are narrower than the billing. The roughly $200 million a year in transmission fees is attributed to Meta specifically, and the projected saving is up to six per cent of the transmission portion of a household bill, not six per cent of the bill. Ontario has just moved the other way, charging large facilities above standard industrial rates, which hands Alberta a real competitive advantage worth defending honestly.

Sources: EnergyNow, carrying the Financial Post, 14 August 2026; Global News, 11 August 2026; Alberta Counsel, 13 August 2026.

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Economy & Finance

Alberta’s booming quarter is a refining margin, and the housing numbers show it

Statistics Canada put Alberta manufacturing sales up 21.0 per cent in the second quarter, the strongest provincial gain in the country, driven primarily by petroleum and coal products. Housing starts over the first half fell to 22,077 units from 27,902.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we separate price effects from volume effects, because governments rarely do it for you. Alberta’s manufacturing surge is a global diesel squeeze showing up in refinery margins, not new plants or new shifts. The domestic economy underneath is telling a different story: housing starts down about 21 per cent, unemployment at 7.0 per cent against 6.4 per cent nationally, and population growth that has fallen from roughly 205,000 in the four quarters to October 2024 to about 47,000 in the four quarters to April 2026. June building permits of $1.8 billion, up 19.6 per cent, are the one genuinely encouraging number. A budget built on the manufacturing headline would be built on the oil price.

Sources: Statistics Canada, Monthly Survey of Manufacturing, 14 August 2026; Statistics Canada, Building permits, 12 August 2026.

Politics & Government

Alberta postpones the school flag and anthem rules it passed in May

Three measures in Bill 25, the spring statute amending the Education Act, will not take effect on 1 September as planned: restricting school flags to the Canadian and Alberta flags, a weekly national anthem requirement, and the minister’s power to approve school names.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we count a government’s retreats as part of its record, and this is a retreat from the most symbolic provisions of its own statute, three months after Royal Assent and two weeks before classes begin. The measures that survive are the substantive ones: the requirement that teachers present curriculum neutrally, the bar on school boards issuing political or social statements, and the mandatory board level code of conduct addressing bullying. Those are defensible on accountability grounds. Flags and anthems were never going to improve a single reading score, and legislating them created an implementation problem the department could not answer when asked which flags would be permitted. Governing by symbol has an administrative cost like anything else.

Sources: Global News, 14 August 2026; Legislative Assembly of Alberta, Bill 25.

Health

Payment failures persist six weeks into Alberta’s new disability program

Albertans moved on 1 July from AISH, the long-standing disability benefit, to the new Alberta Disability Assistance Program and have kept reporting missing and short deposits into August. Roughly 46,000 of about 80,000 recipients transferred, on the figures reported.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we ask three questions of any new provincial body or program: what does it replace, who answers for it, and how would anyone know if it failed. On the third question this one answers itself, because the people it failed are the ones least able to absorb a missed rent payment. Opposition critic Marie Renaud reports constituents “shorted $400, some people only got $400,” and others still on AISH receiving nothing. The ministry gave three different correction deadlines. Alberta’s own program page publishes no caseload figure at all, which means the only numbers in public circulation come from a newspaper. A government that reorganizes a benefit for 80,000 people owes the public a monthly count of who has been paid.

Source: Medicine Hat News, 14 August 2026.

Paid plasma collection pauses nationwide, including three Alberta sites

Grifols, which collects plasma from paid donors in Canada under an exclusive agreement with Canadian Blood Services, paused collection at all its Canadian centres on Friday. Two people died after donating at its Winnipeg site; the Calgary site was found non-compliant.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we support private provision of services the state need not deliver itself, and precisely because we do, we insist that private providers meet the standard. Alberta banned payment for plasma in 2017 and the current government repealed that ban in 2020, on the reasonable argument that Canada imports most of its plasma products and domestic collection is thin. That argument has not been refuted by these events, but it has acquired a condition. The regulator found a problem and the company stopped, which is the system working rather than failing. What is missing is the public record: neither Health Canada nor the province has published the inspection finding, and Albertans are learning the details from an advocacy group’s statement.

Sources: Medicine Hat News, 15 August 2026; Friends of Medicare, 14 August 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

Tyson closes three American beef plants as the US herd hits a 75-year low

Tyson Foods will close plants at Joslin, Illinois and Eagle Mountain, Utah and sell its Pasco, Washington facility. The company cited a 75-year trough in American cattle supply and forecast an adjusted operating loss of up to $650 million in beef this year.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research, we watch American packing capacity because Alberta feeders live on it. The United States is the major destination for Canadian beef cattle, and every plant that closes narrows the bid on fed and feeder animals moving south, widening basis at exactly the moment tight supply should be rewarding Alberta producers. The January closure at Lexington, Nebraska alone took roughly 5,000 head a day out of the system. This strengthens the commercial case for domestic processing capacity in Alberta, and the case should be made on those terms. A shortage of American packing capacity is a market signal to private investors; it is not by itself a reason for a provincial cheque.

Source: Manitoba Co-operator, carrying Reuters, 14 August 2026.

Municipal Affairs

Calgary, Rocky View and the federal infrastructure bank sign on to an inland port

Calgary, Rocky View County and the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the federal project financing agency, signed a memorandum advancing the Prairie Economic Gateway, a 1,300 acre rail served industrial district on the CPKC mainline east of Calgary. The first phase is targeted for 2031.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research we prefer trade infrastructure to trade rhetoric, and this is the former. The projection is more than $7 billion in economic activity over ten to twelve years and more than 30,000 regional jobs, on land that already sits on a Class I railway. Two things are worth watching. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has a mixed record and its involvement should be measured by private dollars actually committed rather than by the size of the announcement.

Sources: City of Calgary, 11 August 2026; Global News, 11 August 2026.

Alberta History

The 1894 statute that still decides who gets the water

Alberta announced this week that its hundred-year water review will not reopen the province’s allocation priority system. That system is 132 years old, and it was not made in Alberta.

In July 1894 Parliament passed the North-West Irrigation Act (S.C. 1894, c. 30), drafted by William Pearce, then superintendent of mines in the federal Department of the Interior. The Act transferred ownership of water throughout the North-West Territories to the federal Crown, in terms strengthened by amendment the following year, and swept away the common law doctrine of riparian rights that tied water use to land abutting a stream. In its place came a licensing system borrowed from the American doctrine of prior appropriation: where a river could not satisfy every licensee, water was distributed by licence seniority, and the most junior holder was cut off first.

That is first in time, first in right, and it is still the backbone of Alberta’s Water Act. Note who owned the water in 1894. Alberta did not acquire its lands, minerals and water until the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement of 1930, twenty five years after it became a province. Frederick Haultain, who had sat in the Territorial assembly since 1887 and became the Territories’ first premier after 1897, spent much of his public life arguing that the West should own what lay upon and beneath its own ground. On water, the rule he inherited from Ottawa is the rule Alberta chose to keep.

Sources: David R. Percy, “Seventy-Five Years of Alberta Water Law,” Alberta Law Review 35:1 (1996); Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Pearce, William”; Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, University of Regina.

Data Corner

The read: The headline oil price is not the price Alberta gets, and the gap has been widening through the very rally that was supposed to help. Western Canadian Select traded at an average discount of $9.95 a barrel to West Texas Intermediate in June 2025, the tightest month in this series. By May 2026 the discount had reached $18.99, and June 2026 was barely narrower at $18.91. Over the same stretch West Texas Intermediate ran from $68.17 to $84.81, peaking above $102 in May. Alberta captured less of that move than the headline suggests, and the differential is what the province is really selling into when it books royalty revenue. It is also the clearest single argument for the market access files above: a discount that widens when prices rise is a capacity problem, not a quality problem. Figures are calculated from the Government of Alberta’s published monthly WCS and WTI series; July 2026 WCS is not yet published.

Source: Government of Alberta economic dashboard; July 2026 WTI confirmed against the US Energy Information Administration.

The Take

1. The story almost nobody covered: Ottawa spent the week quietly raising the cost of Western drilling and Western housebuilding.

While the country watched the tariff deadline, two trade notices went the other way. The Canada Border Services Agency determined on 4 August that oil and gas well casing from Austria had been dumped, sending the question of injury to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal for a decision by 1 September (Canada Gazette, Part I, 15 August 2026). Well casing is an input in every drilling program in Alberta, Saskatchewan and northeast British Columbia, and duties would raise costs across the basin to protect a small number of domestic mills. Published the same fortnight: a 25 per cent provisional safeguard surtax on imported wood cabinets and vanities, in force from registration on 31 July for up to 200 days, after imports rose 25 per cent in value between 2023 and 2025 to $340 million in 2025 (Canada Gazette, Part II, 12 August 2026). That is a direct addition to the cost of finishing a house, in a housing affordability crisis, applied by the same government asking Washington to drop its tariffs.

2. The best policy idea in the file came from a city, and it is the cheapest housing money Alberta has spent.

Calgary’s secondary suite registry has gone from 431 units in 2015 to 13,000 in 2024 to 26,000 today, with roughly half of the recent additions coming through an incentive of up to $10,000 per qualified homeowner. Chief Housing Officer Reid Hendry: “At less than $10,000 per door, this program has been the most efficient and cost-effective way to create thousands of new homes across Calgary” (City of Calgary, 13 August 2026). Compare that to the per-unit cost of almost any purpose-built affordable housing program in the country. The intervention is small, temporary, local, and it pays private owners to add supply inside existing infrastructure rather than paying an agency to build it. We should say so as readily as we say the opposite when it is true.

Worth Watching

• Elections Alberta pushes back on voter registration rumours. Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure states that no registrations have been removed without consent and that the Voterlink tool cannot delete anything, nine weeks before the 19 October referendum. Elections Alberta, 14 August 2026

• Alberta’s hundred-year water white paper. $400,000 from the TIER water availability budget, due spring 2027, with basin models from Kerr Wood Leidal and Aquanty due in March. The review explicitly excludes first in time first in right, licence transferability and inter-basin transfers. Government of Alberta, 13 August 2026

• The Berland sub-regional plan opens for comment. A draft land use plan covering 19,529 square kilometres southeast of Grande Prairie, governing forestry, grazing, energy, recreation and caribou habitat. Consultation closes 12 November. Government of Alberta, 14 August 2026

• The federal fuel excise holiday expires 7 September. Ottawa has not said whether it will extend the suspension, worth 10 cents a litre on gasoline and four on diesel. Reinstatement lands on Prairie trucking and grain hauling at the front end of harvest. EnergyNow, 15 August 2026

• Alberta’s immigration allocation rises by 200 against a queue of nearly 37,000. The provincial nominee allocation went to 6,603 for 2026, with 4,184 issued as of 12 August and roughly 36,948 worker expressions of interest waiting, 62.4 per cent of them in a single stream. CIC News, 15 August 2026

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

Even a brief glance at the economies of the Atlantic provinces in early 2016 indicates that a time of reckoning is at hand. Deficits are growing and threaten to become solvency crises. Regional outmigration has slowed down but continues. Remittances from western Canada are almost certainly falling rapidly.

For these reasons, it is time to consider how to rescue Atlantic Canada from the disastrous consequences of the large subsidies that have been provided to them for 50 years and are one of the principal causes of the difficulties currently being experienced. They are “the help that hurts” in the words of one regional commentator.

These subsidies have come in the form of equalization, benefits from Employment Insurance (EI) that are much easier to access than in other provinces, disproportionate public employment far beyond the levels required to serve local populations, and the many subsidies targeted at this region incorporated in federal operating programs.

• The economies of these provinces are public-sector driven and are out of phase with the rest of the developed world. Atlantic region public sectors are larger than in Greece before the financial crisis impacted that country. The sense of entitlement felt by Atlantic Canadians is deeply rooted, as it was in Greece.

• Debate about the extent to which the economies of these provinces — and Manitoba — are supported by other Canadians is dangerously ill-informed. Discussion of subsidy arrangements is usually limited to equalization, which understates the extent to which the Atlantic provinces are dependent on many different subsidies from other Canadians to support anything close to North American standards of living.

• Federal subsidies have compounded regional disparities. While personal incomes have risen in the region, much of that is due to the scale of the subsidy arrangements themselves. The subsidies crowd out the private sector by making it difficult to compete for talent, by enabling excessive government expenditures and sometimes by cronyism in the way governments behave.

• The public finances of each Atlantic province are out of control, in part because the subsidies from other Canadians have been used to support program structures that are far more expensive, on a per person basis, than in Alberta, Ontario or Quebec.

To save the region from continued decline, several changes should be considered.

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First, Atlantic Canada’s problems should be decoupled from those in Quebec.

While Quebec receives the largest share of equalization, that share is much smaller in relation to its economy than in Atlantic Canada or Manitoba. Also, Quebec receives much less, in relation to its size, from disproportionate federal employment or generous EI arrangements than the other eastern provinces. Quebec has issues but they are less intractable than in Atlantic Canada.

Second, equalization in Atlantic Canada should come only with conditions.

The first is that independent expenditure reviews along the lines of the Drummond Commission in Ontario should be completed for each Atlantic province. Provincial auditors should certify the independence of these reviews. The second is that delivery of provincial programming in the four Atlantic provinces should be by a common services commission operating under contract with each of them. Four separate public services for four provinces with a total population of two million is extravagant.

Third, the government of Canada needs to reinvent equalization if it is to become a unifying rather than a corrosive force.

The reform effort should begin with measuring program comparability among provinces. This is the stated goal of equalization and, presumably, other subsidy efforts, but the federal government makes no effort to compare provincial programming across Canada. Equalization should also be changed so that the needs of populations in each province are considered in determining equalization entitlements. Failure to factor demographics, labour market conditions, educational issues and many other matters in determining equalization entitlements means that the program is disconnected from the everyday lives of all Canadians.

For several decades, Atlantic Canadians have sought help from other Canadian taxpayers. The help was provided but as a well-intentioned afterthought with carelessly planned programs and little transparency. Winston Churchill once said that learning how to say no is an essential part of the political process. It is time to say no to more of the same for Atlantic Canada. The region is running out of time, and the rest of Canada, particularly Alberta and Ontario, has run out of capacity to support badly managed and opaque subsidies that promise to grow without end unless a different path is chosen.

Fortunately, such a path is available. We only need to take it.

David McKinnon and Marco Navarro-Genie are senior fellow and president, respectively, of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS).

Originally published by National Post Jan 25, 2016.

A sermon in Mexico City

In certain quarters, it has been a year of wrath. On the first day of August 2025, a retired member of Parliament from Northern Ontario appeared in Mexico City before an assembly of the hemispheric Left and called for a global boycott of the United States. The occasion was the Second Pan-American Congress, a gathering of some sixty legislators from twelve countries, welcomed by Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. The agenda carried resolutions against American migration enforcement and against Israel. The hyperbolic Canadian guest told the delegates that his country’s consumer boycott against the US had drawn blood, and that the world should follow its example.

Charlie Angus Calls for Global Boycott of USA,” Meidas Canada, YouTube.

The speaker was Charlie Angus, and the scene distills a remarkable second act. For twenty-one years he represented Timmins-James Bay in the House of Commons. Today he answers to no voters, no caucus whip, no Speaker, and no disclosure regime. He commands instead a Substack called The Resistance, a YouTube operation run ironically under the banner of an American partisan network, and a touring revival show that has crisscrossed the country under the slogan, wait for it,…Elbows Up. One cannot make this up!

What does a man do with a pulpit like that? Following his virtual trail, compiling the record of the past eighteen months, supplies an answer, and the answer deserves closer inspection than Canadian media have given it.

The formation

The first half of the biography commands respect. Born in Timmins in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Angus co-founded the punk band l’Étranger, named for the Camus novel, at seventeen, with Andrew Cash, writing songs shaped in equal parts by the Clash and by Catholic social teaching.

In the 1980s Angus and his wife, Brit Griffin, opened a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Toronto, sheltering homeless men, refugees, and former prisoners in the tradition of Dorothy Day. He wrote a long-running column for the Catholic New Times. He moved north to Cobalt in 1990, published a magazine devoted to Northern Ontario life, fronted the folk band Grievous Angels, and wrote books on mining history and the betrayal of Treaty 9. When he won his seat in 2004, the House gained one of its more textured members: a man formed by a tradition that saw the face of Christ in the unwanted.

That tradition was radical about hospitality. It kept no enemies lists. Holding the two halves of this biography together is the task of everything that follows.

The rupture

In 2005, the two authorities in Angus’s life collided. His party lined up behind Bill C-38, the same-sex marriage legislation. His parish priest at St. Patrick’s in Cobalt, Father John Lemire, warned him, with the public backing of Bishop Paul Marchand of Timmins, that a vote for the bill would place him outside the communion of the Church. Angus voted with his party on June 28, 2005, and was refused the Eucharist. He called the refusal a “shocking and improper action on the part of a lone priest” and objected that no priest had any business instructing his vote in the House. Not exactly an accurate depiction of what took place.

The priest was no freelancer. Canon 915 of the Church’s universal law directs that communion be refused to those who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, and in 2004 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Church’s chief doctrinal officer, had set out for the bishops how that rule reaches Catholic politicians who campaign on the basis of the faith while legislating against its teachings. A politician who draws votes as a Catholic and then defies the Church on a defining question puts his pastor in an impossible position, and the pastor’s duty in that position is written down.

The Church in Mexico has managed this species of politician for a century and knows the manual by heart. In Canada, the rule may not be applied consistently, but so few politicians draw on their Catholicism. Justin Trudeau is Roman Catholic, and while he does not hide it, he does not campaign on it and does not pretend to live a public sacramental life. Father Lemire applied the rule to Angus, with his bishop behind him, to a longtime columnist of the Catholic press who knew the manual perfectly well himself.

Whatever one makes of the merits, the episode marked a transfer of allegiance. The parish had asked him to choose, and he chose. The moral community that ordered his conscience would henceforth be political.

The party of Tommy Douglas and Ed Broadbent or the Church of Saint Francis of Assissi and Saint John Paul of Krakow? That was his personal choice.

The exit

The parliamentary career ran another two decades without a second act. In 2017, Angus ran for the federal NDP leadership and traumatically lost to Jagmeet Singh, taking under a fifth of the vote. By 2024, the party he had served was collapsing nationally, and the writing on the wall in Timmins-James Bay was legible to anyone who could read the statistical tea leaves. He saw what was coming and chose an exit on his own terms, announcing his retirement and resolving, by his own account, to stop asking questions about bills nobody read and to spend his remaining time in the chamber on speeches about fascism as a warm up prelude to his new vocation.

The verdict of his riding arrived in April 2025 without him on the ballot: the Conservative candidate took roughly half the vote in the successor riding, and the NDP fell to a distant third, below four thousand votes, in a seat Angus had held since 2004. Not much of a political legacy to bequeath to his party.

Unless you’re Jagmeet, retirement, for most parliamentarians, means memoirs and a board seat or two. Angus built something more interesting. He built a new congregation.

The toolkit

Consider the campaigns in sequence; the sequence reveals the method.

In February 2024, while still an MP, Angus tabled Bill C-372, the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act, announcing that “the Big Tobacco moment has finally arrived for Big Oil.” The bill went far beyond billboards. Section 8 prohibited promoting a fossil fuel in any manner suggesting it “would lead to positive outcomes in relation to the environment, the health of Canadians, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples or the Canadian or global economy.”

Producers faced fines up to one million dollars and imprisonment up to two years; other persons faced fines up to half a million. Defenders pointed to a clause exempting opinion and commentary, and the bill died at first reading when Parliament dissolved. The precedent it sought to plant remains on the record: criminal penalty, including prison, for asserting the economic benefit of the commodity that funds Confederation. What kind of democrat drafts that?

One year later came the citizenship campaign. Elon Musk had lived rent-free in Angus’s head for some time. In January 2025 the MP wrote to Elections Canada demanding an investigation of the “American oligarch,” accusing him of rigging his platform’s algorithm and of endorsing what Angus called fascist leaders around the world, and telling an interviewer that Canada could not allow “men like Elon Musk, the broligarchy of the United States” to interfere in the country.

Days earlier he had posted that Musk had given “a fascist salute,” appending a two-word obscenity to the world’s richest man by way of analysis. Then a British Columbia author launched a parliamentary e-petition demanding the government revoke Musk’s Canadian citizenship and passport, and Angus, still sitting as an MP, gave it his formal sponsorship. More than three hundred thousand people signed.

Legal experts noted throughout that no government can lawfully strip on a whim a citizenship acquired by descent, and Musk holds his by descent, through his mother, born in Regina. The impossibility troubled the sponsor not at all.

The point, Angus explained, was to let Canadians “express their disgust” at what Musk had become. Citizenship, in Angus’ conception of Canada, is a licence revocable for holding the wrong views and advising the wrong men, and a member of Parliament lent the machinery of the House of Commons to the proposition.

In the traditions of this country, Parliament is the guarantor of the rights of its citizens.

CBC News clip: “Petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship allowing Canadians to ‘express their anger.’”

Then came the ambassador. Pete Hoekstra may have given Canadians legitimate grievances, and a serious critic would document them soberly and press for proportionate answers. Angus instead declared on his Substack that the ambassador is “a foul-mouthed wrecking ball with no sense of diplomacy,” a man sent to sabotage trade and inflame the Canadian far right, and he directed his readers to write to the foreign minister demanding Hoekstra’s immediate expulsion from Canada.

A parliamentary petition to declare the ambassador persona non grata, initiated by a Calgary resident and sponsored by Elizabeth May, gathers signatures under his continuous promotion. He is not its author. Angus is its evangelist.

Beneath the campaigns runs the rhetoric, and the rhetoric deserves quotation rather than summary. At a Sudbury rally in April 2025, Angus described the American president as a “grifter, narcissist psychopath who’s also a convicted criminal and a sexual predator.” In March, he vowed that “Canada will never kiss that gangster’s ring” and urged Canadians against travel to the United States altogether, warning that they risked being kidnapped by American agents and shipped to a Salvadoran concentration camp; those were his nouns.

By June, at an Ottawa press conference, the United States had become a “full-on police state tyranny.” The word gangster now does service in nearly every one of his sermons: gangster president, gangster regime, and the phrase he has made his network’s mission statement, gangster fascism.

“Charlie Angus: Travel Warning Against United States,” YouTube.

Notice the word that surfaces every time the ledger is read. Musk gives a fascist salute and endorses fascist leaders. Washington practises gangster fascism. Travellers face a rising fascist threat. His farewell speeches in the Commons were devoted to fascism; the congress in Mexico City assembled against fascism; the tour exists to fight fascism.

Orwell warned in 1946 that the word had already decayed into meaning little beyond “something not desirable.” In Angus’s mouth the decay is complete. Fascism names whatever he opposes this week, which spares him the labour of thought, argument, flatters every audience into an army of Resistance fighters, and quietly issues the permissions that follow from the label. A man who finds fascists everywhere has licensed himself to do nearly anything, because nearly anything is justified against fascists. The usage is facile, and the facility is the point. A war requires an enemy worthy of one.

Pause on the war sentence itself for a moment. It has not received much attention. At that same Sudbury rally, Angus told the crowd: “This is a war, and we know in a war that people get hurt.” A former parliamentarian, addressing crowds night after night, tells them they are in a war and that in wars people get hurt. Wars have enemies. Wars suspend the ordinary rules. An audience told it is at war has been told, by implication, what the moment licenses. War is a violent endeavour. No responsible public figure lets that sentence leave his mouth by accident, and Angus composes his sermons too carefully for accident to explain it. A man who brands his opponents fascist has adopted the mobilizing grammar of the movements he claims to resist: the enemy within, the traitor class, the existential emergency that makes ordinary politics contemptible and extraordinary measures thinkable.

That is the language of a provocateur.

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The collection plate

Who pays for all this radical rhetoric? By Angus’ own solicitation page, the congregation does. Readers upgrade to paid subscriptions. Supporters send e-transfers to an address in his own name, or mail cheques made out to Charlie Angus, with The Resistance noted on the memo line, to a post office box in Ottawa. PayPal is available. Ball caps sell for thirty dollars by e-transfer.

The team, he writes, consists of himself and two others. On Labour Day 2025, the operation merged with MeidasTouch, the American anti-Trump media network of the Meiselas brothers, to launch Meidas Canada; by his own December accounting, the channel drew nine million views in under three months and reached two hundred thousand subscribers, which he advertises as the top independent news analysis operation in Canada. The tour stops that feed it charge five dollars at the door, are hosted by labour councils and riding associations, and sell out. The door is an on-ramp. The destination is the subscription page.

A note of precision is owed here: none of this is illegal, and none of it is hidden. Angus discloses the mechanics himself, cheerfully. The point is structural. Canada built elaborate regimes to keep political money accountable. Elections Canada caps and audits candidates’ money. The charities directorate disciplines the money of charities. Parliament discloses the money of members. A retired MP with a post office box and a PayPal account answers to none of them, and the product he sells is the gaseous emotional temperature he generates.

In this business model, anger is inventory, and the man who spent an election year warning Canadians about unaccountable foreign-linked political money now runs a Canadian political operation under the brand of an American media network, financed through channels no Canadian regime examines. Elbows up!

His alarm about foreign hands in Canadian politics has a selective history besides. Through 2022 and 2024 his party propped up, under a formal supply-and-confidence agreement, a Liberal government whose elections the Hogue Commission found Beijing had targeted with sustained interference, and whose own intelligence review committee reported that some parliamentarians had wittingly assisted foreign states. No petitions issued. No expulsions were demanded. Foreign meddling stirred Angus to fury only when the supposed meddler had a South African accent.

One must also point out that Charlie's taxpayer-backed parliamentary pension is worth more than $100,000 a year, and estimates put his lifetime payments at roughly $3.9 million. Socialism for the 21st century.

What expulsion would cost

Return, then, to the demand he presses hardest: that Canada declare the American ambassador persona non grata and remove him. Under Article 9 of the Vienna Convention, a receiving state may do this at any time, without explanation. Between close allies it is the gravest formal step short of rupturing relations, and Canada has never taken it against an American chief of mission.

Look at the calendar. On August 19, less than a week from today (this is posted Aug 15), an American tariff of fifty percent under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 lands on roughly twenty billion dollars a year of Canadian trade, with no expiry date. The CUSMA review has collapsed into annual renewals; Mexico is four rounds deep in bilateral talks while Ottawa has barely begun formal negotiations.

Every channel between Ottawa and Washington now carries real weight. Expelling the ambassador guarantees the reciprocal expulsion of Canada’s own, likely the expulsion of all provincial legations and freezing of those channels too, and a fresh grievance handed to a White House that has shown every willingness to convert grievance into tariff.

The cost would land on lumber towns, auto workers, and canola farmers. The cost would never land on a Substack in Ottawa, where confrontation is the product and escalation is the growth strategy. The cost would land on the ordinary people Angus once served, much harder than on the elbows-up boomers who support him now.

Would a man who expected to bear the consequences of his own counsel give this counsel? The question answers itself, and it separates the patriot from the pensionable entrepreneur.

The verdict

The tragedy of the case is that the younger man would have recognized the older one. The Catholic Worker movement he joined in the 1980s refused to divide the world into the saved and the damned; its whole discipline was to see a person where the world saw an enemy. The movement he leads today runs on the opposite spiritual nourrishment. It names enemies weekly: the oligarch whose citizenship must be revoked, the ambassador who must be expelled, the industry whose defenders belong in prison, the neighbour recast as a war adversary. It collects its offerings by e-transfer through profit-hungry banking institutions he once condemned. It calls this resistance, and it calls the other side fascist.

A caring democratic position defends even the citizenship of individuals it despises, tolerates the speech it detests, and keeps the peace with the neighbour it must live beside. Angus once understood all three. The younger Angus fed strangers at his door. The older one sells tickets to sdvance a war of wrath. The Resistance pays better.

Intergovernmental Affairs

Ottawa starts the clock on a national interest designation for the West Coast pipeline

A Canada Gazette notice issued on the Saturday of the long weekend began designating the proposed Alberta to British Columbia oil line a national interest project under the Building Canada Act, the federal statute that fast-tracks major projects. Comment closes 18 September.

Why it matters: The line would run about 1,250 kilometres from Bruderheim, northeast of Edmonton, to a deepwater port near Delta, British Columbia, carrying roughly a million barrels a day. Trans Mountain Corporation (the federally owned pipeline company), the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission (the province’s crude marketing agency) and Pembina Pipeline Corporation (the Calgary energy infrastructure company) would form a jointly owned entity to build it. At Haultain Research we have argued for years that Alberta’s single largest economic vulnerability is egress, and this is the most serious federal move on it since 2018. But a designation that shortens timelines by shortening process buys speed at the cost of durability. The Gazette notice is the easy part. What determines whether shovels move in 2027 is the consultation record now being built.

Canada Gazette, Part I, “Notice, West Coast Oil Pipeline”, 1 August 2026; ownership terms via Calgary Journal, “Ottawa moves to list Alberta-backed West Coast pipeline as national interest project”, 4 August 2026.

B.C. chiefs tell Carney and Smith the consultation is not real

The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, that province’s oldest First Nations political organization, wrote to the Prime Minister and the Premier on Sunday demanding the pipeline be halted, arguing the route, partners and economic case were settled before anyone was consulted.

Why it matters: The operative sentence is precise: “Consultation cannot be meaningful if First Nations are invited only to discuss how a predetermined project will proceed.” At Haultain Research we recognize the court-imposed duty to consult, and the practical case for meeting it properly is the same as the legal one: consultation done badly is the most reliable way to lose a pipeline in court, as Northern Gateway demonstrated in 2016. Ottawa and Edmonton have five weeks of comment period to build a record that survives judicial review. That is the whole project.

Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, open letter on wildfires and floods, 9 August 2026; reported by EnergyNow, 9 August 2026.

Politics & Government

Smith tells police to stop enforcing hate speech law

After the Edmonton Police Service posted a video urging the public to report hate, Premier Danielle Smith said Alberta will not police “unpopular or religious-based statements even if they are controversial,” and told her public safety minister to redirect police priorities.

Why it matters: Two things happened here and they deserve separate verdicts. The first is defensible: the criminal threshold for hate propaganda is high, and a police service publishing a list of reportable opinions invites the chilling effect critics feared. The second is a governance problem. Smith reportedly said: “The federal government does have the power of criminal law. We have the power of non-enforcement.” At Haultain Research we think a premier instructing an operationally independent municipal police service on which Criminal Code provisions to ignore is a precedent Albertans are forced into. Bill C-9 is bad law from a fabricated majority in Parliament, which does not account for regional cultural differences. Do not build a convention where provinces enforce federal criminal law selectively to please voters in particular regions of the country.

Medicine Hat News, “Premier calls out police force for anti-hate campaign”, 6 August 2026; APTN News, “Alberta premier posts video on her government’s stance on free speech”, 6 August 2026; Western Standard, “Edmonton Police Service scrubs part of its controversial ‘hate crimes’ examples”, 7 August 2026.

Supreme Court will hear Alberta’s appeal on the lawyers’ oath to the King

The Supreme Court of Canada will hear Alberta’s appeal of a December 2025 Court of Appeal ruling that the Oath of Allegiance required of new lawyers unjustifiably infringes religious freedom. Prabjot Wirring, an Amritdhari Sikh, brought the challenge in June 2022.

Why it matters: This is the courts working exactly as they should. A century-old statutory requirement was tested against the Charter, an Alberta court found it could not be justified, and it offered the legislature three ways to fix it: make the oath optional, remove it, or reword it. Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Yukon have already made the oath optional, and British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island have eliminated it, so this is neither novel nor destabilizing. At Haultain Research we hold that judicial enforcement of constitutional limits is the rule of law functioning. What is harder to defend is Alberta’s choice to spend public money appealing to Ottawa’s highest court over a formality its own legislature could amend in an afternoon.

Global News, “Supreme Court to hear case on constitutionality of requiring oath to the Crown”, 6 August 2026; Western Standard, “Supreme Court to hear challenge of Alberta lawyers’ oath to King”, 7 August 2026.

The nine referendum questions nobody is talking about

Alberta’s 19 October ballot carries ten questions: five on immigration, four on constitutional change, and the separation question added last. Edmonton lawyer Avnish Nanda, co-founder of the pro-immigration group Our Alberta Advantage, calls the immigration questions harmful and unnecessary.

Why it matters: The immigration questions contemplate withholding health care, education and social services from people who lack Canadian citizenship, permanent residency, or an “Alberta-approved immigration status” that does not currently exist. At Haultain Research we take seriously the argument that Alberta absorbs population growth it did not choose and cannot fund, and Smith’s line that “not every newcomer is a net contributor” is defensible as fiscal accounting. But a referendum question is not a policy. These proposals are part and parcel of the grassroots traditions of Prairie politics. What voters endorse in October, the province must then actually be able to build, and on that question the ballot itself is silent.

Global News, “Alberta lawyer says referendum questions about immigration ‘harmful,’ ‘unnecessary’”, 5 August 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Canadian Natural is holding 340,000 barrels a day in reserve until Ottawa signs

Alberta’s largest producer reported record second quarter results and, in the same release, disclosed that four growth projects totalling roughly 340,000 barrels a day stay on hold until definitive agreements under a trilateral memorandum with Alberta and Ottawa are finalized.

Why it matters: The deferred projects are specific and large: 30,000 barrels a day at Jackfish, 70,000 at Pike 2, 150,000 at a new Jackpine mine at Albian, and 90,000 in extraction and froth treatment upgrades at Horizon. This is the most important number in Alberta this week and it appeared almost nowhere outside the trade press. At Haultain Research we read it as a clean measurement of what policy uncertainty actually costs: not a think tank estimate, but a company with record cash telling its shareholders in writing that it will not deploy capital until governments finish a document. November is now a real deadline with a quarter of a million barrels a day attached to it.

Canadian Natural Resources Limited, “2026 Second Quarter Results”, 6 August 2026; Daily Oil Bulletin, “CNRL growth projects remain on hold until trilateral MOU finalized”, 6 August 2026.

A new panel to look at a compensation bill taxpayers keep paying

Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction Minister Dale Nally appointed a Surface Rights Advisory Panel, chaired by Kris Bower of the land firm 2G Land Ltd., to review how landowners are compensated when energy companies stop paying rent on their land.

Why it matters: The numbers are the story. The Land and Property Rights Tribunal, which absorbed the old Surface Rights Board in 2021, took about 9,000 surface rights applications in 2025 and 2026, the most on record, and the province paid landowners more than $44 million, up from $29.8 million the year before. That is a taxpayer backstop for unpaid private obligations, and it is growing fast in a year when producers are reporting record profits. At Haultain Research we would ask of any new body what it replaces, who it answers to, and how anyone would know if it failed. On the public record so far, the panel’s size, budget, reporting line and deadline are not stated.

Red Deer Advocate, “Alberta establishes new surface rights advisory panel”, 6 August 2026.

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Economy & Finance

Record profits, falling production: the windfall is a price story

Suncor Energy reported second quarter net earnings of $3.732 billion, more than triple the $1.134 billion of a year earlier, on upstream production that fell to 760,900 barrels a day from 808,100. Canadian Natural posted $4.5 billion. Price, not volume.

Why it matters: Writing on the industry site EnergyNow, William Lacey calculated that Canadian Natural, Cenovus, Imperial Oil and Suncor together paid about $15.5 billion in royalties and taxes in the first half of 2026, against $9.2 billion in the same period of 2025. That is an enormous number and it is entirely a function of the Strait of Hormuz disruption. Brent and West Texas Intermediate both fell more than seven per cent in the week just ended on nothing more than progress in negotiations to reopen the waterway. At Haultain Research we would treat every dollar of this windfall as non-recurring until proven otherwise. A budget built on a blockade is a budget built on a ceasefire it does not control.

Suncor Energy via BOE Report, “Suncor Energy reports second quarter 2026 results”, 4 August 2026; EnergyNow, “Commentary: the royalties and taxes being paid by the Canadian upstream sector”, 7 August 2026.

Business & Investment

Data centre consultation arrives after the announcement

Hundreds protested outside the Sturgeon County office at Morinville on Sunday against Meta’s proposed data centre north of Edmonton, a project the province values above $13 billion. Four days later, the government announced four town halls and an information website.

Why it matters: The sequence matters. The project was announced in July, the protest came in August, and the consultation was scheduled after that. At Haultain Research, we think the town halls are the right call and the province deserves credit for scheduling them rather than dismissing the objection, but arriving third in that order costs credibility that meetings do not fully recover. The substantive questions are answerable and specific: who pays for the transmission the load requires, whether existing ratepayers are exposed if a hyperscaler leaves, and what the site actually draws. Premier Smith says the facility uses closed-loop cooling and less water annually than a golf course. That claim is checkable, and the town halls are the place to check it.

Lethbridge News Now, “Alberta government announces town hall series, new website on AI data centres”, 7 August 2026; Government of Alberta, AI data centres; protest reported by 980 CJME, 3 August 2026.

Labour & Employment

WestJet and its flight attendants settle in a day

A strike by roughly 4,400 WestJet flight attendants represented by CUPE Local 8125 began early on Sunday and produced a tentative agreement by Monday. The three-year contract runs to December 2028; the bargaining committee unanimously recommends ratification.

Why it matters: A long weekend strike at Canada’s second largest airline ended in about thirty-six hours through collective bargaining, without back-to-work legislation, ministerial referral, or a federal intervention of any kind. At Haultain Research, we note this because the opposite outcome has become the norm: three of the last several major Canadian transport disputes were resolved by Ottawa rather than by the parties. The central issue, compensation for cabin crew hours worked on the ground, is a genuine grievance about how airline pay has been structured for decades, and the parties fixed it themselves. Members have not yet voted, and the wage terms remain undisclosed. But the process worked, and that deserves saying.

CUPE, “Union launches ratification process on tentative agreement with WestJet”, 7 August 2026; CP24, “WestJet, CUPE reach tentative agreement”, 3 August 2026.

Health

Alberta’s pay your own way scans meet an arithmetic problem

Alberta’s new self-referral program lets patients book diagnostic imaging without a doctor’s requisition if they pay, with reimbursement only if the scan finds a previously undiagnosed cancer. Technologists say the province is short about 202 positions, with the shortfall doubling by 2028.

Why it matters: The policy premise is not unreasonable. Waiting for a requisition is itself a rationing mechanism, and people who want to buy a scan currently drive to another province to do it. But a shortage of technologists is a hard constraint that no payment model relaxes. Gina McRae of the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists put it plainly: “We’re very curious about how we’re going to be able to meet the new demands as more and more people are able to self-refer.” At Haultain Research, we would want the province to publish, quarterly, what happens to publicly funded wait times as private volume grows. If they lengthen, the policy is shifting queue position rather than adding capacity, and that is a different thing from what was advertised.

Global News, “Clinics, technicians unsure of Alberta’s new self-referral method for health tests”, 6 August 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

The cattle rally meets the consumer

Alberta packers cut dressed bids by $8 to $15 per hundredweight, to $535 to $542, while Western Canadian feeder cattle traded steady to $10 lower. The United States begins a phased reopening of southern ports to Mexican cattle on 24 August.

Why it matters: Two years of record cattle prices have finally reached the point where buyers change behaviour. Australian beef is turning up on Alberta shelves at price gaps of more than $40 a kilogram against comparable domestic cuts, and Sylvain Charlebois of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab says some regions saw local ground beef rise 18 per cent within July alone. At Haultain Research, we expect calls for import restrictions to follow, and we would resist them. Import competition arriving when domestic prices reach records is the price mechanism doing its job, and it is the same mechanism that delivered ranchers two extraordinary years. Producers who plan for a cycle rather than a plateau will come through this better than producers who lobby.

Manitoba Co-operator, “Klassen: feeder market focus turns to feedlot margins”, 4 August 2026; Global News, “Lower-priced Australian beef could help stabilize Canadian market”, 4 August 2026.

Alberta History

7 August 1930: a Calgary MP takes the oath as Prime Minister

On 7 August 1930, Richard Bedford Bennett was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada. He sat for Calgary West. He had come to Calgary in 1897, built a large legal practice with the Canadian Pacific Railway as a client, and served as a director and solicitor of the Calgary Petroleum Products Company, the venture whose Turner Valley well opened Alberta’s oil industry. The Conservatives had won the general election of 28 July 1930 with 137 seats to the Liberals’ 91.

The timing is the point. The memorandum of agreement transferring control of Crown lands and subsurface resources from Ottawa to Alberta had been made on 14 December 1929, and the Canadian statute confirming it received assent on 30 May 1930, taking effect once the United Kingdom Parliament confirmed it later that year. The handover that ended federal ownership of Alberta’s minerals was therefore completed with a Calgary oil company director sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair.

The better question is why it took twenty five years. Alberta and Saskatchewan entered Confederation in 1905 without the one thing every other province had held from the moment it joined: ownership of its own lands, mines and minerals, guaranteed since 1867 by section 109 of the constitution. Ottawa kept the prairie lands for the purposes of the Dominion, which in practice meant using them to finance railways and settlement schemes decided elsewhere. Bennett’s swearing in did not mark an outbreak of federal generosity. It marked the end of an arrangement under which two provinces were admitted on inferior terms and then spent a quarter century negotiating for standing that Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes were never asked to earn.

At Haultain Research, we note that Frederick Haultain made a version of this argument before 1905, and lost it. The grievance is older than the province.

Primary sources: Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Bennett, Richard Bedford”; Justice Canada, The Alberta Natural Resources Act, S.C. 1930, c. 3; Justice Canada, Constitution Act, 1867, section 109.

Data Corner

Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, released Friday, is the clearest single picture of the Alberta paradox. Employment in the province is up 91,000 over the year, a gain of 3.5 per cent and the largest proportional increase of any province. And the unemployment rate has not moved: 7.0 per cent in May, 7.0 in June, 7.0 in July. Alberta is now tied with New Brunswick for the second highest unemployment rate in the country, behind Newfoundland and Labrador, and sits 0.6 points above the national 6.4 per cent.

Both facts are true at once because the labour force is growing about as fast as employment is. Alberta is absorbing people faster than any other province and creating jobs faster than any other province, and the two roughly cancel. That is not a failure of job creation; a province adding 91,000 jobs in twelve months is not failing at job creation. It is a statement about the denominator, and it explains why an unemployment rate that would signal a downturn elsewhere coexists here with record corporate profits and severe shortages in trades and health care. It also means the rate is a poor instrument for judging Alberta’s economy, and anyone using the 7.0 figure to argue either that the boom is illusory or that the labour market is tight should be asked which side of the fraction they are talking about.

Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, July 2026, released 7 August 2026, Table 14-10-0287-01.

The Take

1. The pipeline will be won or lost on the consultation record, not the Gazette notice.

Designation under the Building Canada Act is a scheduling tool. It shortens the federal process; it does not shorten the Crown’s constitutional obligations, and it cannot immunize the project against judicial review. Northern Gateway had its approval and lost it in the Federal Court of Appeal in 2016 on precisely this ground. The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs has now put its objection on the record on the first weekend of the comment period, with the specific complaint that the corridor and the partners were fixed before engagement began. That is the argument that killed the last one, and Alberta is right to be wary of where it leads. This province has watched environmental review turn from a process with an answer into a process without one, and nothing prevents consultation being put to the same use by people whose actual objection is to the oil. The distinction worth holding is between two things now travelling under one word. The Crown owes a real and bounded duty to the Nations whose rights the corridor touches, and a bounded duty can be discharged. The letter that landed Sunday is something else: it is an open letter about wildfires and floods, and its objection is to expanded production as such. That is a policy argument, and it deserves a policy answer, not a procedural one. Alberta’s interest is therefore not a fast designation and not an open-ended one. It is a designation with funded consultation capacity, a defined endpoint and a decision date, so that a record built honestly in 2026 cannot be reopened indefinitely in 2029.

2. The week’s biggest economic number appeared only in the trade press.

Canadian Natural told its shareholders that roughly 340,000 barrels a day of growth projects will not proceed until definitive agreements under the trilateral memorandum with Alberta and Ottawa are finalized, targeted for November. Suncor has signalled it wants similar certainty. This is a rare thing: a direct, company-audited measurement of what unresolved policy costs in barrels, disclosed in the same quarter both companies reported records. It is more informative than any modelled estimate of regulatory burden, and it went almost entirely uncovered outside the Daily Oil Bulletin. If the November deadline slips, that is a quarter of a million barrels a day of deferred investment, and readers should hold both governments to the date.

3. Ottawa is defending the sector that is not the West’s.

United States tariffs of 50 per cent on some Canadian goods take effect 19 August, and the Washington round now turns on what Canada is willing to trade away. The Prime Minister used a stop in Saguenay last week to reaffirm that supply management stays. Dairy Farmers of Canada put its position plainly: “Our food sovereignty is not for sale; a bad deal is not worth the cost.” Nobody in Ottawa said anything comparable about beef, pork, canola or wheat, none of which are protected by statute, all of which sell into export markets, and all of which will absorb whatever tariff survives the round. This is the standing shape of Canadian trade policy: the sector defended by legislation is defended, and the sector that actually earns the foreign exchange is asked to carry the adjustment. At Haultain Research we would rather that trade-off were priced publicly before 19 August than explained after it.

Worth Watching

• South Bow signs twenty year commitments out of Hardisty. The Keystone operator secured binding twenty-year commitments from nine customers totalling 465,000 barrels a day of firm service from Hardisty to United States delivery points, a substantial vote of confidence in existing southbound egress. BOE Report, 5 August 2026

• British Columbia declares a state of emergency as Alberta stays quiet. Premier David Eby declared a provincial emergency Saturday with 105 active fires and more than 20,000 people evacuated ahead of the Bald Range fire near Summerland. Alberta reported no wildfires of note in its Forest Protection Area. Global News, 8 August 2026

• Calgary raises its natural gas franchise fee 37 per cent. The increase is designed to raise $98.2 million and will add roughly $29 a year to a typical household’s bill from 2027, a municipal tax collected through a provincially regulated utility rather than through property assessment. Western Standard, 7 August 2026

• The regulator approves a coal mine expansion without a hearing. The Alberta Energy Regulator approved expansion of the Vista coal mine near Hinton, operated by Coalspur Mines Ltd., extending operations more than a decade, without holding a public hearing. Expect a judicial review application. Western Standard, 5 August 2026

• Alberta’s crop is well ahead of average but drying in the south. The provincial crop report rated major crops 58 per cent good to excellent against a five year average of 43 per cent, with conditions slipping in the south and centre and sub-surface moisture down six points on the week. Alberta Crop Report via rdnewsnow, 7 August 2026

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

Reading the Fauci papers brought a great deal of it back, and has prompted me to think a few new things with the benefit of three and a half years of distance. [1]

The COVID experience was shockingly authoritarian and anti-human, notwithstanding its rhetoric and its claims about saving lives. The Fauci diaries confirm what many of us documented at the time: school closures ordered by telephone and later denied, mask guidance the man himself privately found indefensible, transmission claims sustained in public months after they had collapsed in private. [2] Hardly any different from what we saw in Canada.

The abuses notwithstanding, I feel fortunate to have been in Alberta at the time. That may be easy for me to say, given that I was neither a jailed preacher nor one of the persecuted Coutts Albertans. Pastors sat in remand cells in this province for holding church services. [3] Men from Coutts sat in remand for years awaiting trial on charges a jury ultimately rejected in their gravest part. [4] Alberta’s record contains real casualties, and gratitude must never become amnesia about them.

Fortunate ....because Alberta is unique in this country, and the COVID contrast demonstrates it. The difference can be measured.

The measurement

Many deny that Alberta possesses a distinct political culture. The denial usually arrives dressed as Laurentian sophistication: Albertans, we are told, vote like other Canadians, consume the same media, and hold roughly the same opinions, plus a pickup truck. Some of us have long argued otherwise. The Alberta disposition toward government, and toward personal autonomy in particular, differs in kind, formed by settlement patterns, by an economy that rewards self-reliance, and by a century of instruction in what Ottawa’s benevolence costs. [5]

None of this means one must be Albertan to care about liberty or individual conscience, or that these commitments are exclusively Albertan. Canadians elsewhere hold them, sometimes at real personal cost. The point concerns critical mass: the concentration of a value sufficient to make it part of a political culture, to give it electoral weight and institutional consequence, and that concentration does not seem present in the rest of the country. The objection that such values exist elsewhere does no harm to the claim, any more than the millions of French speakers around the world who are not Quebecois disprove that the French language sits at the heart of being Quebecois. A political culture rests on what a community holds in common and acts upon together; a monopoly on the value is never required.

Skeptics demand a test. The pandemic supplied one. Every province ran a restriction regime, often inhuman and brutal. Every premier made the same category of decisions: ditch the emergency plans, closures, mandates, passports, curfews in one case. The regimes varied in severity, and the political consequences varied with the political culture that received them. So here is the test in a single sentence.

Alberta was the only province in Canada where a premier lost his job as a direct political consequence of his government’s COVID regime.

The ledger, province by province

Consider the record from west to east. In British Columbia, John Horgan resigned in 2022, citing his health after cancer treatment, at high popularity; his government’s regime cost him nothing. [6] In Saskatchewan, Scott Moe imposed a vaccine passport in October 2021 and survived comfortably, winning again in 2024. His survival is instructive rather than inconvenient, and I return to it below.

In Manitoba, Brian Pallister resigned in September 2021 amid collapsed polling; pandemic fatigue contributed, but the proximate storm was the backlash to his remarks on residential schools, and the anger at his regime cut in both directions at once, some punishing him for a catastrophic third wave, others for the restrictions themselves. No single directional line runs from the COVID regime to his exit, and his party’s 2023 defeat mostly turned on healthcare and Wab Kinew’s appeal. [7]

Ontario is where the thesis should fail if it were false. Doug Ford imposed some of the longest school closures on the continent and won renewed majorities in 2022 and 2025. Quebec is stronger still. François Legault ran the harshest regime in North America, including a nighttime curfew enforced by police checkpoints, and voters rewarded him with a subsequent landslide in October 2022. [8] His later troubles concern software procurement, immigration, and the economy; none concern the curfew.

In New Brunswick, Blaine Higgs called a snap election in September 2020 and won a majority on the strength of his pandemic management; his 2024 defeat turned on Policy 713, healthcare, and caucus revolt against his style. In Nova Scotia, Stephen McNeil retired voluntarily at the peak of “stay the blazes home” popularity, and his successor lost in 2021 to a Progressive Conservative promising more health spending, with no anti-restriction dimension whatever. Prince Edward Island returned Dennis King with a landslide in 2023. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Dwight Ball announced his exit in February 2020, before the pandemic mattered, and Andrew Furey won in 2021. [9]

Where COVID regimes moved votes at all outside Alberta, they moved them toward the premiers who imposed them. Legault, Higgs in 2020, and arguably Ford were rewarded for stringency. The Canadian norm was gratitude for restriction, though less in the Prairies.

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The Alberta exception

Jason Kenney announced his resignation on 18 May 2022 after receiving 51.4 per cent in his party’s leadership review: 17,638 members voted yes, 16,660 voted no, and a premier who had said fifty per cent plus one would suffice concluded that the number before him would not. [10] Scraping by is never good enough here.

The line from the COVID regime to that number is short and well lit. The revolt began with the restrictions. Sixteen of his own MLAs signed a public letter against renewed measures in April 2021. The caucus expelled Drew Barnes and Todd Loewen the following month for saying aloud what much of the membership believed. [11] In September 2021, facing a fourth wave, Kenney introduced the Restrictions Exemption Program, a vaccine passport by another name, after months of promising Albertans he would never impose one, and apologized on television for having been wrong about his Open for Summer. [12]

Arrogance compounded the breach. Kenney had already placed protesting Albertans beyond the pale in the spring of 2021; I wrote about the insult at the time. [13] By March 2022, on a recording of a staff meeting leaked to the press, he dismissed his internal opponents as lunatics trying to take over the asylum, as kooky people, as bugs drawn to a bright light, and he refused to apologize for any of it. [14] He wagered openly that he could trade the base that built the party for a new and tamer one if the old base no longer wanted him. [15]

The passport broke the base’s trust in a way no fiscal quarrel ever could. His polling never recovered, the party’s nomination lists filled with his opponents, and the review vote followed.

Then came the part no other province can match. The contest to replace him was fought explicitly on COVID accountability. Danielle Smith won the leadership and, at her first press conference as premier on 11 October 2022, called the unvaccinated “the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime” and pledged to amend the Alberta Human Rights Act accordingly, [16] although that did not happen. [17] The membership removed a premier for the regime and then selected his successor on a promise to repudiate it. Political scientists call this a revealed preference. Albertans call it Tuesday. Since Ralph Klein, no premier has served two full consecutive terms in office. [18]

The objection, taken seriously

Careful observers will object that Kenney’s fall was multivariate, and they hold real cards. Duane Bratt argued at the time that the caucus revolt was “not about COVID-19” so much as Kenney’s top-down governance, with the pandemic merely magnifying tensions. [19] Jared Wesley’s focus groups found that Albertans had simply tired of a personality they once found useful. [20] The scholarly volume Blue Storm spreads the causation wider still: the energy war room, the Keystone XL write-down, the curriculum fight, the war with the doctors, Sky Palace, the December 2020 staff vacations. [21]

Each of these grievances was real. None of them survives as an alternative explanation. Kenney’s style was largely a constant; he told his party’s founding convention in 2018, “I hold the pen,” and won sixty-three seats months later. A constant cannot explain a change, and what changed after 2019 was the regime’s form. The two flagship “non-COVID” scandals, the Hawaii vacations and the Sky Palace dinner, were both scandals of COVID hypocrisy; they belong in the regime’s column, not against it. And the war room annoyed left-wing columnists, the curriculum annoyed teachers, the doctors’ fight annoyed doctors and became connected to COVID. Only the restriction regime united rural members, urban libertarians, dissenting MLAs, and tens of thousands of new party members into a single coalition with one demand.

The honest formulation is this: the COVID regime was the necessary condition and the organizing grievance, the pole around which every other complaint may have arranged itself. Remove it, and Jason Kenney is premier through 2023.

Saskatchewan proves the point from the other direction. Scott Moe faced the identical regional pressures, imposed a passport of his own, and survived. The difference was posture. Moe never insulted or lectured his base, publicly sympathized with the truckers, and buried his passport in February 2022 with a confession that it had “effectively created two classes of citizens.” [22]

Kenney fought his political culture (just last week he was still praising the vaxx on Twitter for its supposed effectiveness in saving lives) [23]; Moe bent to his. One premier formed government again; the other watched the review count from Spruce Meadows. Similar pressures, opposite outcomes, and the deciding variable was the relationship between a leader and the disposition of his electors. That is what political culture means.

There was no new base to acquire.

What followed the firing

The distinction did not end with the leadership review. In July 2023, in Ingram v Alberta, the Court of King’s Bench found the CMOH orders ultra vires the Public Health Act because cabinet, and never the statutory decision-maker, had made the final calls. [24] Candour requires the second half: the court also held that, had the orders been validly enacted, their limits on Charter rights would have been justified. [25]

That sequence tells the judicial story of the period. During the emergency, the courts failed massively, from Queen’s Bench to the Supreme Court, deferring to the orders while the orders ran. The Chief Justice of Canada himself, with convoy litigation alive in the system, described the protest outside his own court as “the beginning of anarchy where some people have decided to take other citizens hostage”; thirteen lawyers complained to the Canadian Judicial Council, and the complaint died at the screening stage. [26]

Relief on the law arrived only after the danger had passed: Ingram in 2023, on vires rather than rights, and in January 2024 the Federal Court’s finding that invoking the Emergencies Act had been unreasonable. [27] The courts, it seems, are waking up. They slept through the fire. The correction that mattered came from elsewhere.

Alberta struck the Manning panel to review its public health emergency governance, the only province to commission such an examination of its own conduct. [28] In 2024, the legislature amended the Alberta Bill of Rights to entrench medical consent. [29] Accountability arrived through party democracy and statute, through the political culture itself, rather than through judges defending Albertans’ rights and freedoms.

The same culture marked the national resistance. The trucker protest was no exclusive Alberta invention, and its grievances were federal. Yet its leadership carried a heavy Prairie and Alberta imprint, Tamara Lich of Medicine Hat foremost, and the legal defence of the protesters has been substantially an Alberta production, from the Calgary-based organization that helped pay for Alberta counsel in the Ottawa courtrooms. [30] Coutts, with all its cost, was Alberta’s own.

One irony completes the picture. Among the premiers, the loudest objector to the invocation of the Emergencies Act was Kenney, who called it unnecessary and disproportionate and announced the only provincial court challenge against it. [31] The instinct belonged to his province; the timing belonged to him. Too little, too late.

What comes next

None of this settles whether Alberta’s regime was gentler in its worst moments; a jailed pastor would rightly dispute any such claim. What it settles is narrower and more important. When the emergency passed, only one political community in this country presented the bill to their leader. Ten provinces ran the experiment. One returned a clear verdict.

That verdict is the datum. A political culture that treats personal autonomy as a condition of legitimate government, rather than a generous concession from it, behaves differently when government forgets.

The rest of the country largely thanked its restrictors; many still do. Alberta fired hers.

In the coming weeks I will turn from diagnosis to prevention. The Fauci diaries show how the machinery of emergency runs when nobody can stop it. The next question is how to build effective brakes, given the massive failure of the courts during COVID: not only what statutes, what sunset clauses, what personal liability for officials, and what constitutional protections would make a repetition impossible, but what parts of the culture and civil society to activate when all these fail.

Alberta has begun that work. It remains unfinished.

More on that soon.

Endnotes

[1] U.S. Senate HSGAC document releases of 24-27 July 2026; Fauci testimony of 29 July 2026.

[2] Diary entries of 15 March 2020 (pp. 55-56), 5 May 2021 (p. 727), 18 July 2021 (p. 811); citations per the 31 July 2026 Haultain brief.

[3] Pastor James Coates, GraceLife Church, remanded February-March 2021; Pastor Tim Stephens, Fairview Baptist, jailed June 2021.

[4] Coutts trials: jury acquittals on conspiracy to commit murder, August 2024, with convictions on lesser counts.

[5] The argument is developed across the Haultain corpus; see also Cooper and Navarro-Genie on the pandemic state.

[6] Horgan resignation announcement, June 2022, citing health.

[7] Pallister resignation, September 2021; Manitoba PC defeat, October 2023.

[8] Quebec general election, 3 October 2022, CAQ 90 seats.

[9] New Brunswick 2020 and 2024; Nova Scotia 2021; PEI 2023; Newfoundland and Labrador 2020-2021.

[10] CBC News, 18-19 May 2022; Globe and Mail, 18 May 2022. Vote totals per party announcement.

[11] Sixteen-MLA open letter, April 2021; Barnes and Loewen expelled 13 May 2021.

[12] REP announced 15 September 2021; Kenney: “it is now clear that we were wrong, and for that I apologize.”

[13] Marco Navarro-Genie, “Kenney places Albertans ‘beyond the pale’,” Haultain Research, April-May 2021.

[14] Leaked recording of a 22 March 2022 staff meeting, reported by CBC News (24 March) and the Globe and Mail (25 March): “The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum. And I’m not going to let them”; “kooky people”; “a bright light attracts a few bugs.” Kenney declined to apologize on 25 March 2022.

[15] Marco Navarro-Genie, “Kenney may be down, but not out,” Haultain Research.

[16] Globe and Mail and CBC News, 11-12 October 2022.

[17] Vaccination status was never added to the Alberta Human Rights Act; the 2024 reforms proceeded instead through the Alberta Bill of Rights.

[18] Premiers since Klein: Stelmach, Redford, Hancock, Prentice, Notley, Kenney, Smith. None has completed two full consecutive terms.

[19] Duane Bratt, quoted in CBC News, May 2022 (“this is not about COVID-19”).

[20] Jared Wesley, quoted in Canada’s National Observer profile of Kenney.

[21] Bratt et al., eds., Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (University of Calgary Press, 2023).

[22] Government of Saskatchewan news release, 8 February 2022; Moe remarks as reported by CBC and Global.

[23] Kenney’s recent social media defence of the vaccines.

[24] Ingram v Alberta (Chief Medical Officer of Health), 2023 ABKB 453, at para 3.

[25] Ibid., Charter analysis.

[26] Richard Wagner, interview with Le Devoir, published 9 April 2022; quote as reported in English-language coverage of the interview. Thirteen lawyers, including Bruce Pardy and Karen Selick, complained to the Canadian Judicial Council on 16 May 2022; the CJC dismissed the complaint at the screening stage as not concerning judicial conduct.

[27] Canadian Frontline Nurses v Canada (Attorney General), 2024 FC 42 (Mosley J), 23 January 2024: the invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and ultra vires.

[28] Final Report of the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel (Manning panel), November 2023.

[29] Alberta Bill of Rights Amendment Act, 2024.

[30] Lich (Medicine Hat) and Barber (Swift Current, Saskatchewan); the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, Calgary; Alberta counsel including Keith Wilson KC and Eva Chipiuk.

[31] Global News, 19 February 2022: Kenney announced Alberta would file a court challenge, calling the invocation “an unnecessary and disproportionate measure that can violate civil liberties, invades provincial jurisdiction and creates a very dangerous precedent for the future.”

The Haultain Brief is a weekly compilation of the news that matters for Alberta and Western Canada. Each Wednesday, we cover the prior week’s political, economic, energy, legal, and institutional developments, organized by theme, with links to primary sources. The editorial perspective will be familiar to Haultain Research readers: evidence-driven, skeptical of fashionable orthodoxies, unapologetically Western Canadian. The Brief complements rather than replaces the longer analytical essays published here. If you find it useful, consider a paid subscription to support the work.

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Intergovernmental Affairs

Ottawa and Alberta sign $938 million water and wastewater agreement

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith signed in Red Deer: $510 million federal over eight years, with Alberta funding at least a third of eligible costs, up to $428 million, for the water and sewer lines new subdivisions need. One Airdrie pipeline reportedly enables 45,000 homes.

Why it matters: Servicing capacity is a genuine constraint on Alberta homebuilding, and the money will build real infrastructure. But this is conditional cost-shared funding that obliges the province to cover at least a third of eligible costs, which means Alberta’s own capital plan now bends toward the projects Ottawa has agreed to co-sign. At Haultain Research we would ask two questions before calling this a win: whether Albertans have simply bought back their own tax dollars on someone else’s terms, and whether the binding constraint on new housing was ever money rather than the municipal permitting and servicing queues that no federal cheque can shorten.

Sources: Prime Minister’s Office and Government of Alberta, July 29, 2026; reporting by The Canadian Press.

Politics & Government

Elections Alberta’s signature standards are headed to court

Organizers of the anti-coal petition fronted by country musician Corb Lund filed for judicial review after Elections Alberta verified 172,088 of 207,435 signatures against a threshold of 177,732, leaving the petition 5,644 short. They argue the standard applied exceeds what the law requires.

Why it matters: The Citizen Initiative Act was sold as a way for Albertans to put questions to their own government without waiting for a party to adopt them. That promise is worth only as much as the verification process behind it, and two separate campaigns from opposite ends of the political spectrum are now both alleging the process is stricter than the statute. At Haultain Research we take no position on coal leases or on any petition’s subject matter, and we think that is precisely the point: the rules for counting a signature should be the same regardless of what the signature is for, published in advance, and applied identically. This is now a matter for the Court of King’s Bench, which is the right forum, but the legislature should not need a judge to tell it whether its own Act is being read correctly.

Sources: Elections Alberta verification result, July 3, 2026; judicial review filing reported by Calgary Journal, July 31, 2026; independence petition figures from Elections Alberta, July 24, 2026.

Economy & Finance

Canada’s economy grew 0.3 per cent in May, and oil and gas did the work

Real GDP rose 0.3 per cent in May, a second consecutive monthly increase. Mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction was the strongest sector at 1.0 per cent, and support activities for the industry jumped 7.3 per cent.

Why it matters: That 7.3 per cent in support activities is the number worth keeping. It covers drilling, servicing and rigging, which is to say the work that happens before production shows up in anyone’s statistics, and it was the largest monthly gain in that category since March 2024. It is a leading indicator, and right now it points up. The wider picture is an asymmetry that Alberta should state plainly rather than resentfully. The sector that three provinces would like to see placed on the tariff bargaining table is the one currently holding up the national average, while the manufacturing that the tariffs actually target is not. At Haultain Research we would add the necessary caution: monthly GDP is volatile, one month is not a trend, and Statistics Canada’s June advance estimate of 0.2 per cent suggests the pace is already easing.

Source: Statistics Canada, July 31, 2026.

Energy & Resource Development

Pembina Pipeline commits $4.6 billion to a power plant that will run Meta’s Alberta data centre

Pembina Pipeline, the Calgary energy infrastructure company, approved the 932 megawatt Greenlight Electricity Centre, a gas-fired plant dedicated to the data centre Meta is building in Alberta, plus a $570 million processing plant in the Industrial Heartland northeast of Edmonton.

Why it matters: Alberta’s artificial intelligence build-out is being financed by companies constructing their own on-call generation rather than trusting the public grid to supply it, which is about as clear a market verdict as one could ask for on what actually powers a data centre. Three Alberta power companies pointed at the same demand in second quarter results: Capital Power has 250 megawatts under contract to Meta, ATCO is building the $2.9 billion Yellowhead gas pipeline and cites a projected $100 billion of Alberta data centre investment by 2030, and TransAlta mothballed a coal-converted unit at Sheerness while reporting weaker earnings. At Haultain Research we would watch one file above all others: whether Alberta’s electricity market redesign lets this scale on private capital, or whether it ends in negotiated subsidies and transmission costs spread onto ordinary ratepayers.

Source: Pembina Pipeline Corporation, July 30, 2026.

Business & Investment

A record quarter for Alberta producers, and still no greenfield boom

Cenovus posted its best ever quarter at $5.0 billion in cash from operations. Imperial Oil’s profit more than doubled to $2.2 billion while it cut refinery guidance. ARC Resources’ $22 billion sale to Shell closes this quarter.

Why it matters: Two quarters of strong prices have produced debt repayment, share buybacks and raised guidance rather than new megaprojects. The telling detail sits in Athabasca Oil’s results: its Corner Phase 1 project, which would be the first brand new oil sands mine-equivalent sanctioned in the McMurray formation since 2013, is explicitly waiting on Alberta’s new oil sands royalty framework before proceeding. At Haultain Research we read that as the signal worth keeping. At US$80 oil the binding constraint on Alberta investment is no longer the commodity price or the cost of capital. It is confidence that the rules governing a thirty year asset will still be the rules in five years.

Sources: Cenovus Energy, July 29, 2026; Imperial Oil, July 31, 2026; Whitecap Resources, July 29, 2026.

Health

Albertans can now buy their own MRI or CT scan without a referral

From July 31, adults may pay out of pocket for MRI, CT, ultrasound and X-ray scans at participating private clinics without a doctor’s referral. Patients later diagnosed with cancer can claim the cost back at public rates within a year.

Why it matters: This is a real market experiment inside a system that has only one buyer, and it deserves to be judged on measured results rather than on the phrase “two-tier.” The province projects privately paid testing rising from about half a per cent of all scans to roughly two per cent. If it works, public queues shorten because paying patients leave them. If it does not, scarce radiologists and technologists shift to the private side and public waits lengthen. Both are plausible, and only data settles it. At Haultain Research we would hold the government to a simple discipline: publish public diagnostic wait times every month, by health zone and by scan type, and let the numbers make the argument.

Sources: Red Deer Advocate, July 27, 2026; Government of Alberta, July 27, 2026.

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Labour & Employment

Calgary’s top pay band rises 29 per cent as the city rewrites its salary structure

The chief operating officer maximum pay band rose 29 per cent for 2026, and every director level role was consolidated into a single maximum of $290,700, under the city’s first new job evaluation system in more than twenty years.

Why it matters: Compensation is the largest single line in almost every municipal budget, and it is set with less public scrutiny than any comparable sum. Calgary employs 16,846 people across more than 2,000 positions, and some individual bands moved sharply: Preventative Maintenance Leads went from a maximum of $128,548 to $189,822. At Haultain Research we would be fair about two things before drawing conclusions. Bands are ceilings rather than salaries, so a band increase is not by itself a payroll increase, and consolidating dozens of accumulated classifications into a coherent structure is sound administration rather than largesse. What ratepayers are entitled to is the number that follows: the actual paid distribution against the new bands. Bill 28 will require individual disclosure above $130,000 from 2027, which will settle the argument. The reason to raise it now is that it lands in the same season as a council decision to plan its next four year budget around higher property tax revenue, and those two facts belong side by side.

Sources: City of Calgary 2026 Compensation Disclosure List, effective April 30, 2026; band-by-band figures obtained from the City by LiveWire Calgary, July 27, 2026.

Crime & Justice

Alberta’s crime severity keeps falling, and rural Alberta is falling fastest

Statistics Canada puts Alberta’s 2025 Crime Severity Index at 90.6, down 6.6 per cent. The Alberta RCMP separately reports a 10.4 per cent decline across the 149 jurisdictions it polices, its lowest since 2014, with break-ins down 19 per cent.

Why it matters: The two numbers are worth separating, because almost everyone quotes the second one as though it were the first. The provincial figure covers every police service in Alberta including the cities. The 10.4 per cent figure covers only the jurisdictions the RCMP polices, which is most of rural Alberta and most of its small towns. That the rural decline is steeper than the provincial average is the reverse of the assumption underpinning a decade of rural crime politics. At Haultain Research we do not read this as evidence that policing is solved. We read it as evidence that a $2 million policing decision in a small town, or a request for 660 new officers in Calgary, should begin with the measured trend rather than the public mood, and that anyone citing the 10.4 per cent should say which Alberta they are describing.

Sources: Statistics Canada, Police-reported crime statistics, 2025, July 22, 2026; Alberta RCMP figures reported by rdnewsnow, July 28, 2026.

Municipal Affairs

Rocky View County becomes the first Alberta municipality to halt data centre applications

Rocky View County, the rural municipality wrapping Calgary’s north and east, voted 5 to 2 in late July for a moratorium on new data centre proposals. Days later dozens protested Meta’s $13 billion Sturgeon County project over water and grid strain.

Why it matters: Alberta’s largest inbound investment wave has found its real constraint, and it is not electricity. It is municipal land use. Residents raising water allocation, road wear and property values are asking legitimate questions about their own property, and they are entitled to a hearing. A blanket moratorium, however, substitutes uncertainty for rules, and uncertainty is the one thing a fifteen year capital commitment cannot price. At Haultain Research we would far rather see clear published standards a developer can read, cost, and either meet or walk away from, than a pause that quietly hands the decision to whoever lobbies hardest while it lasts.

Sources: Medicine Hat News, August 1, 2026; Global News, August 2, 2026.

Agriculture & Agrifood

A province split in half: dry south thriving, Peace and northwest drowning

Alberta Agriculture rated crops 85 per cent good to excellent in the South and 81 in the Central region, against 54 in the Peace, 48 in the North East and just 31 in the sodden North West.

Why it matters: The provincial average of 63 per cent conceals two entirely different harvests. Edmonton has just recorded its wettest summer on record, 580 millimetres between June 1 and July 28, against a full season June to August record of 417 millimetres set in 1953. Aggregate statistics are precisely how regional distress gets overlooked in Edmonton and Ottawa alike. At Haultain Research we would ask whether crop insurance and AgriStability, the federal and provincial farm income support program, are calibrated to regional conditions or to a provincial mean that describes almost no actual farm, and whether a producer in the Peace can get help this year without waiting for a province-wide number to deteriorate first.

Source: Government of Alberta crop report for conditions as of July 21, 2026, published through Alberta crop reports; regional figures as reported by Alberta Seed Guide, July 27, 2026.

Environment & Infrastructure

Alberta adds detection dogs and a record twelve watercraft inspection stations

Two new conservation dogs join the veteran Hilo on Alberta’s invasive mussel programme, which is running a record twelve inspection stations this year. Six fouled watercraft have been intercepted in 2026, against thirteen in 2025 from 21,995 boats inspected.

Why it matters: At Haultain Research we spend most of our time asking whether a government programme justifies its cost, so it is worth saying clearly when one does. Zebra and quagga mussels foul irrigation headworks, hydro intakes and municipal water systems, and once established they are effectively permanent. The Alberta irrigation network alone represents billions of dollars of infrastructure serving the province’s most productive farmland. Against that, a dozen seasonal inspection stations, a handful of dogs and penalties of $4,200 for failing to stop are close to trivial. This is what a defensible intervention looks like: narrow, cheap, aimed at a specific and irreversible harm, and measurable. The programme’s problem is that its success is invisible, and invisible success is what gets cut first when a budget tightens. Alberta has kept mussels out while neighbouring jurisdictions have not. That record is worth protecting.

Source: Government of Alberta, July 29, 2026.

Education

Alberta opens $107 million in scholarships and bursaries

More than $107 million in scholarships, awards and bursaries for 2026-27 opened for application on August 4, with the New Beginnings Bursary expanding from 1,000 to 2,400 recipients on a $7 million funding increase.

Why it matters: Alberta now moves more than $1 billion a year in total student aid to roughly 50,400 students, which makes this one of the larger transfer programmes the province runs and one of the least examined. Two questions deserve asking, and neither is hostile to the programme. The first is whether broadly available aid raises attainment or is quietly captured by institutions in higher tuition, which is a well-documented pattern in the American literature and an open question here. The second is the mix. The Rutherford Scholarship, which is merit based, paid nearly $50 million to more than 24,000 students last year, while need based bursaries remain a much smaller share. At Haultain Research we would want the province to publish completion and labour market outcomes by award type before expanding any of them further. A cheque that goes to a student who would have enrolled anyway is a transfer, not an investment, and the two should not be reported as the same thing.

Source: Government of Alberta, July 29, 2026.

Seen From Abroad

OPEC+ completes the rollback of its voluntary cuts with a September increase

Seven OPEC+ producers agreed a 188,000 barrel a day increase for September, finishing the unwinding of the 1.65 million barrels a day of voluntary cuts agreed in 2023. Reuters reports a pause in further increases through the fourth quarter.

Why it matters: This is the machinery by which Alberta’s windfall unwinds, and it turns in Vienna rather than in Edmonton. Roughly 2 million barrels a day of the 2022 cuts remain in place through the end of 2026, which is the only reason the rollback has not already pushed prices down harder; the analysts Reuters quotes are now discussing how to manage a surplus rather than a shortage. Alberta’s budget assumed US$60.50 oil, the first four months of the fiscal year have averaged closer to US$92, and the difference is a windfall the province did nothing to earn and cannot control. At Haultain Research we draw the obvious conclusion. Revenue set by a cartel’s quota meetings is not a basis for permanent spending commitments, and a government that treats it as one will be cutting in eighteen months. That is precisely the argument Peter Lougheed made in 1976, and it is below in this issue.

Sources: OPEC Secretariat statement, August 2, 2026; Reuters, August 2, 2026.

Alberta History

The Heritage Fund turns 50, and the anniversary is a rebuke

The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund Act received Royal Assent on May 19, 1976. Thirty per cent of the province’s non-renewable resource revenue was directed into the Fund, some $620 million in the first year, alongside a special transfer of $1.5 billion in cash and financial assets. The contribution rate was cut to 15 per cent in 1983, and in 1987 transfers of resource royalties into the Fund stopped altogether. They were never systematically restored.

Peter Lougheed’s premise was simple and correct. A one-time inheritance converted into current consumption is not income; it is liquidation. Norway began saving its own oil revenue in 1990, fourteen years after Alberta did, and its fund is now larger by more than an order of magnitude. On the Heritage Day weekend just past, with oil averaging roughly US$92 through the first four months of this fiscal year against a budget assumption of US$60.50, Alberta faces the same question Lougheed asked in 1976. The province answered it wrongly in 1987, and every Albertan born since has paid for the answer.

Source: Government of Alberta, Heritage Fund historical timeline.

Data Corner

West Texas Intermediate, the North American benchmark crude against which Alberta’s royalty revenue is forecast, averaged US$102.13 in May 2026 and US$80.18 in July. Budget 2026 assumed US$60.50, and on that assumption the province projected a $9.4 billion deficit, $74.6 billion in revenue and bitumen royalties falling to $9.7 billion.

Through the first four months of the fiscal year, the benchmark has averaged roughly US$92, some $31 above assumption. Alberta’s first quarter fiscal update, due at the end of August, will therefore report a very large positive variance that has nothing whatever to do with anything the government did. The interesting question is not the size of the number. It is where the number goes.

Sources: Alberta Economic Dashboard; monthly WTI averages via countryeconomy.com; RBC Economics on Alberta Budget 2026.

The Take

1. The biggest political development of the week was administrative, not electoral.

An application for judicial review landed in the Court of King’s Bench over Elections Alberta’s rejection of roughly 35,000 signatures on the anti-coal petition, on grounds the organizers say are stricter than the Citizen Initiative Act requires. A second, entirely unrelated campaign lost some 64,000 signatures to the same verification method. Nothing binds those two groups together except the rulebook, and both now distrust it. When the referee’s discretion is the only thing the contestants agree to complain about, the referee’s rules are the story. The legislature wrote this Act four years ago and can clarify it in an afternoon. It should not need a court to do that work.

2. The biggest economic signal is that Alberta’s marginal energy buyer is now a data centre.

Pembina Pipeline committed $4.6 billion to dedicated gas generation for Meta. Capital Power has 250 megawatts under contract to the same customer. ATCO is building a $2.9 billion gas pipeline and citing $100 billion of projected Alberta data centre investment by 2030. TransAlta, in the same week, mothballed a Sheerness unit and reported weaker earnings on a soft Alberta power market. Read together, those results describe a wholesale power market that is oversupplied at the margin while private generation built behind the customer’s fence is booming. That is capital routing around a market structure it does not trust. If Alberta wants this investment without subsidy, the province’s electricity market redesign is now the most important file in Edmonton, and it is receiving almost no coverage.

3. The story the media largely missed was good news, which is very likely why they missed it.

Alberta’s Crime Severity Index fell 6.6 per cent in 2025, and across RCMP-policed Alberta it fell 10.4 per cent to its lowest level in eleven years, with break-ins down 19 per cent. It received a wire brief. The same week produced extensive coverage of policing structure, bail and municipal police budgets, nearly all of it conducted on the premise that things are getting worse. Evidence that cuts against the prevailing narrative is not less newsworthy for being inconvenient. It is more.

Essay of the Week

Trevor Tombe, “Doug Ford is wrong: why doing nothing at all is Canada’s best response to Trump’s tariffs”

Macdonald-Laurier Institute, published in The Hub, July 30, 2026

Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, makes the unfashionable free trade case that Canada should not retaliate. He grounds it in Adam Smith’s test, that retaliation is justified only when there is a real prospect it procures the repeal of the other side’s duties, and argues that condition is plainly not met here. The empirical core is his own analysis of roughly 51,000 tariff lines, which finds Canadian goods face rates broadly comparable to those other countries face. Canada is not being singled out, which undercuts the grievance driving the retaliation politics. He estimates provincial exposure once the 50 per cent tariffs take effect on August 19, with Quebec worst hit at roughly 13 per cent, and notes that about three quarters of Canadians initially backed counter-tariffs. His prescription is entirely domestic: credential recognition, internal competition reform, infrastructure, tax reform and the end of supply management.

Why we are recommending it: It is the rare piece that tells its own audience its instincts are wrong and then does the arithmetic rather than asserting it. For Western readers it also reframes the tariff fight as an argument about barriers Canadians impose on themselves, which is the agenda Alberta has been pushing for a decade. The strongest objection is one Tombe underweights: retaliation may carry bargaining or deterrent value that his framework prices at zero, and Ottawa’s 2018 steel counter-tariffs are the usual case for the other side. Read it anyway. It is the week’s most rigorous argument on the file.

Source: Macdonald-Laurier Institute, July 30, 2026.

Worth Watching

• Carney ruled out using Canadian oil as leverage in the trade war, standing beside Smith in Red Deer: “Being a reliable supplier is important. People trust us.” Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick want energy on the bargaining table. Energy is currently carved out of the 50 per cent tariffs due August 19. (Reuters, David Ljunggren, July 29; also CP24)

• TD Economics put the proposed West Coast pipeline at roughly half the economic benefit governments advertise, 0.3 per cent of national GDP and 2 per cent of Alberta’s against official figures of 0.6 and 3.5. The line would be built and operated by a federally owned corporation, so taxpayers carry the risk. (TD Economics; The Canadian Press)

• A technical failure sent wrong or missing August payments to about two per cent of disability recipients as 50,000 AISH clients moved to the new provincial disability programme, which pays roughly $200 a month less. The province says it was corrected by July 29. Tens of thousands of files remain to be moved. (Red Deer Advocate)

• WestJet’s 4,400 flight attendants struck on August 2, grounding the Calgary based airline at the peak of summer travel over unpaid ground work, since pay begins only once the aircraft is airborne. Watch whether Ottawa refers it to the Canada Industrial Relations Board rather than letting the parties settle. (Global News)

• The Alberta Energy Regulator permitted the Vista coal mine expansion near Hinton without a public hearing, covering 630 hectares, a twelve year extension of the mine’s life and up to 5.4 million cubic metres of annual water diversion in the Athabasca headwaters, over formal objections. The water licensing and process questions here will outlast the coal debate. (Alberta Energy Regulator decisions register, decision dated July 20, 2026)

• Calgary council voted 8 to 7 to build its next four year budget around higher property tax revenue, against a stated $49 billion decade-long infrastructure need and a police request for 660 officers. Deliberations begin in November, alongside the new compensation structure above. (Global News)

• Alberta’s first quarter fiscal update lands at the end of August, and on current prices it should show a dramatic improvement on the budgeted $9.4 billion deficit. Watch whether the windfall goes to debt, to the Heritage Fund, or quietly into base spending.

Published Wednesdays. Follow the links above to primary sources. A Haultain Research publication: www.haultain.org

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On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, chaplains will stand before a cenotaph somewhere in Canada and face a choice no chaplain of the last century faced. The crowd will have just finished singing an anthem that asks G-d to keep our land glorious and free. The ceremony will close, as these ceremonies typically do, with G-d Save the King, a prayer set to music and sung by the whole assembly. Between those two invocations, chaplains, under written orders, may not say what everyone around them is permitted to sing. The word itself has been struck from the order of service by the very institution that sends men and women to die.

The order is real, recent, and in force. On July 29, the Commander of Military Personnel Command issued Canadian Armed Forces Military Personnel Instruction 03/26, replacing the Chaplain General’s 2023 direction on public prayer. Where the old direction bound only chaplains, the new one binds every member of the Forces, along with defence employees, contractors, students and volunteers who provide spiritual services. Where prayers were once offered at graduation parades, change of command ceremonies, ship commissionings, mess dinners and Remembrance Day, the instruction now requires a “spiritual reflection” instead. The definition is explicit: spiritual reflections use no religious language, and the document names references to G-d as the first example of what must go.

Consider what the instruction does with the prayers our regiments have carried for generations. Section 4.9 permits regimental prayers, graces and patron saints to be taught in a classroom, as history, so that members may learn about them in “an educational context.” Members may study the prayer. They may not say it at the ceremony where it was said for a hundred years. A prayer studied but never spoken is an exhibit. The Canadian Forces have turned their own devotional inheritance into a museum piece and posted a bureaucrat guard at the case.

The profession of arms has never talked the way this instruction talks. The most famous battlefield address in the English language, Shakespeare’s Henry V’s speech at Agincourt, turns on the feast of a saint and on an appeal to Providence: “God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.” Generations of officers have taught it to soldiers; Olivier filmed it in 1944 to steel a nation at war. Strike the saint and strike the prayer and the speech collapses into a staffing complaint about being outnumbered. Soldiers have always been led with the very vocabulary the Forces now forbid.

Neutrality, the document insists, demands all this. Then the document lists its exceptions. Indigenous practices, “some of which contain spiritual elements,” may be included in military settings for cultural, historical and educational purposes, and the instruction assures us that their inclusion endorses no system of belief. Read those clauses side by side, please, and a question forms that the drafters never answer. What principle bars the Naval Prayer at a ship commissioning yet admits “a spiritual” ceremony under an educational label at the same event? The stated principle is state neutrality. The operative principle is the self-induced delusion that one tradition counts as a Charter hazard and another counts as a reconciliation asset. The instruction performs a distinction it cannot defend.

The legal footing is thinner still. The directive rests its authority on a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay, in which a mayor opened municipal council meetings with prayer and the Court found the practice coerced citizens attending a civic assembly.

Chaplains are another matter entirely. The chaplaincy exists because the Canadian state judged, generations ago, that people facing death need spiritual care, or at the very least the freedom to seek it. Stretching a ruling about a praying mayor into a gag on the one office created to pray converts a shield for conscience into a sword against it. No court ordered this. A bureaucrat at a command office chose it.

Six weeks before Ottawa struck God from its ceremonies, Regina heard a different sound. On June 19, the downtown Jamia Masjid broadcast the Islamic call to prayer over rooftop loudspeakers for the first time, three minutes across the city core, under a permit issued by the Regina Police Service through the ordinary noise bylaw process. No council debated it. Threats followed, ugly and real, and the congregation, to its credit, paused the broadcasts on its own and invited the neighbourhood in to talk.

The mosque is not the story. The story sits in the official response: the same police statement that affirmed the permit warned critics that threats would be investigated under Canada’s newly enhanced hate crime provisions. The bylaw served as the broadcast’s shield and, in the same breath, as a sword pointed at its objectors.

Compare the two episodes and the new scaffolding of the progressive Canadian state comes into focus. Inherited western religion is a neutrality problem, to be managed out of public life by directive. New religious expression is a diversity asset, to be permitted, protected and policed on behalf of. Notice who is building the scaffolding. A general’s staff and a police chief’s permit desk now settle, between them, the public standing of G-d in Canada. Parliament was never asked. No bill was tabled, no committee heard a witness, no member rose to speak for the constituents whose ceremonies were being rewritten.

Two uniformed bureaucracies made the decisions, and one of them threatened the citizens about the legal risks of objecting. The decisions arrived the way post-national governance prefers to arrive: as administration.

Remembrance Day does not belong to the military command that now presumes to edit it. The eleventh of November is a civic liturgy, and it belongs to Canadians. The parade itself may be military; the mourning is not. Towns across this country raised their cenotaphs by public subscription after the Great War, and the whole community has gathered at them every November since.

Those of us who pray for our soldiers and remember our fallen know that liturgy by heart: the anthem, the Last Post, the silence, the Act of Remembrance, the prayers, the Royal Anthem. We stand our children in the sleet and cold and teach it to them, exactly as Henry promised his soldiers: “This story shall the good man teach his son.” A tradition kept by the whole people, civilian in practice and in spirit, is not the military’s brass to curtail. The order of service at a cenotaph is a part of the constitution of this country’s culture, the part no command office has authority to amend. An instruction signed by a personnel commander can bind soldiers. A country’s civil memory takes no orders.

When King Charles came to read the Throne Speech, Mr. Carney declared that the gesture “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country.” The Crown, the anthem, the chaplain’s prayer: one inheritance, all of a piece. The Prime Minister reaches for that inheritance when Washington threatens and would have it managed out of sight the rest of the time.

Mr. Carney asks Canadians to link arms and defend our sovereignty. Let’s give that request a moment of honest examination. Sovereignty defends something. Borders enclose something. Mr. Trudeau announced in 2015 that Canada had no core identity and was the world’s first post-national state; his successor has kept the premise and added a flag to it.

If the traditions that formed this country cannot survive contact with its own military’s ceremonies, and if no shared identity binds citizens to the state, what exactly is the sovereignty we are summoned to defend? Only one candidate remains. The state itself. Sovereign on its own account, its authority untied from any inheritance and undelegated by any people conscious of itself as a people. That is sovereignty as state-worship, and Canadians are being asked to underwrite it with their loyalty.

Modern history has run this experiment a few times, and the results are uniform. Revolutionary France seized the Church, rewrote the clergy into civil servants, and within four years was staging festivals to a state-invented Supreme Being while the guillotine worked. Plutarco Calles’s Mexico closed the churches and unleashed the Cristero war. The Soviet Union built a League of the Militant Godless and a police state to match. Beijing today rewrites scripture through its program of “sinicization” so that every faith preaches the Party first.

The scale differs in each case. The principle never does. Wherever loyalty to the state is asserted as supreme over religious conscience, the arrangement has proven an aberration and, given time, a tyranny. Religious freedom is the canary in liberty’s coal mine because it is the one freedom that names an authority above the state (without the sedition Mr. Carney denounced in February 2022, or the anarchy Chief Justice Wagner decried that spring). Snuff it, and every other freedom becomes a licence the state may revise.

Burke described a society as a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. Nowhere is that partnership more literal than in the military, where the living wear the badges of the dead and recite what the dead recited before they became the dead. Men went up Vimy Ridge and into the North Atlantic under those prayers. Strip the prayers from the remembrance, and the partnership dissolves into bureaucratic administration: an HR function with rifles, commemorating sacrifice in language vetted to mean nothing.

A country that turns its back on the traditions of its most tradition-bound institution is turning its back on its own identity. Nobody voted for this. It arrived by instruction and by permit.

An institution or state that permits no G-d above itself has already told you what it worships.

Donald Trump has insulted Mexico more crudely and more often than he has insulted Canada. Mexico's negotiators are three rounds into talks and 85 per cent of their exports still cross the border tariff-free. Canada faces a 50 per cent tariff on US$20 billion of its exports starting August 19. The difference deserves a careful look.

Two neighbours share the same difficult customer. Both depend on the American market for the overwhelming share of what they sell abroad. Both are governed by parties of the left that spent the past decade weakening the economies they must now defend. Both have absorbed a stream of public insults from the same White House.

Only one of them still has its market access largely intact. Why?

Start with the insults because Mexico received, arguably, the worst of them. Trump has told the world that “the cartels are running Mexico,” essentially hinting that the presidenta is a narcopuppet. He has said Claudia Sheinbaum is “so afraid of the cartels she can’t even think straight.” He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America by executive order. He designated the cartels foreign terrorist organizations and, in the same January interview that produced the narcopuppet line, promised to start “hitting land” against them on Mexican soil. He revived the wall, the caravans, and the criminality theme he has worked since 2015.

Canada, by comparison, received taunts of the fifty-first state and a running commentary on its prime ministers. Wounding, perhaps. Crude, far less so.

Now compare the results. Mexico concluded its third round of bilateral negotiations with Washington in Mexico City in late July, with working tables on steel, aluminum, automobiles, economic security, labour, agriculture, and electronic payments; a fourth round is already set for September. Roughly 85 per cent of Mexican exports still enter the United States tariff-free, a figure Marcelo Ebrard repeats like the announcement to the mysteries in a rosary asking for the associated grace.

Not much grace for the Northerners, alas. Canada has yet to begin formal negotiations; its minister makes phone calls. Instead, on August 19, Canada becomes the first target of Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 in the statute’s near-century on the books: a 50 per cent duty on roughly US$20 billion in dairy, alcohol, and several hundred other tariff lines, with no expiry date and no relief for CUSMA-origin goods.

The country that swallowed the crudest insults kept the market. The country that performed its outrage got the tariff.

Payment in the right currency

Calm was one half of the Mexican method. Payment was the other. Presidenta Sheinbaum sent ten thousand National Guard troops to the northern border in February 2025. That same month, her government delivered twenty-nine imprisoned cartel figures to American justice in a single night, Rafael Caro Quintero among them, using a national security provision to bypass the formal extradition process (I have written about the extradition process here in my Civitatensis Substack). Twenty-six more followed in August. She accepted deportation flights and raised tariffs on non-free-trade partners, walling off Chinese vehicles and transshipment, instead of travelling to China to bow in front of the Beijing leader, aligning Mexico with Washington’s larger quarrel.

A critic will call this capitulation. The critic misses the intended design. Mexico’s leadership identified what the customer wanted and paid in its cheapest available currency: security cooperation it largely wished to pursue anyway, against cartels that murder Mexicans first and Americans second.

Canada paid in its most expensive currency, taxing its own consumers through counter-tariffs, then handed over its actual concessions free of charge: the digital services tax died in a weekend, most counter-tariffs quietly came off last September, and Washington still counts none of it toward the files it cares about, autos, dairy, and alcohol. One country transacted. The other performed, then paid anyway.

The similarity that sharpens the contrast

Ideology explains none of this. Sheinbaum leads Morena, a left-wing movement allied with Havana and heir to López Obrador’s statism. Her government has loaded PEMEX with debt that keeps it among the most indebted oil companies on earth even after recent paydowns, subjected the judiciary to popular election, and dismantled autonomous regulators, while the federal deficit widened to its broadest since the 1980s and the debt ratio climbed by a quarter. Mexican growth slowed to 0.6 per cent last year and remains weak under the weight, resting on productivity that has barely moved in a generation. She is no Trumpian natural ally.

Canada’s Liberals, for their part, presided over what RBC calls the largest capital exodus in Canadian history, more than one trillion dollars of investment leaving the country between 2015 and 2024, two dollars exiting for every dollar of foreign investment coming in. They more than doubled the federal debt, let productivity decay until the Bank of Canada called it an emergency, ran the merchandise trade deficit to $31.3 billion in 2025, the largest since 2020, and watched Canada lose its place as the top destination for American exports after more than three decades on top. Mexico took the spot.

Two committed left-wing governments, then, each of which weakened its own hand before the game began. The difference lies elsewhere.

The incentive to perform

Sheinbaum does not need anti-Americanism. Her approval ratings sit near seventy per cent (68 per cent in El Financiero’s June national poll), her coalition dominates Congress with a formal supermajority in the lower house, and her voters’ households are bound to the American economy through remittances, family, and factory work.

Mexico possesses the richest inventory of anti-American grievance in the hemisphere, running from 1848 to the present, and its president leaves the inventory in the warehouse. She corrects Trump at her daily morning press conference (the mañanera), perennially invokes sovereignty, and sends Ebrard to Washington the same week. Ebrard himself describes the posture as “modo zen” (zen mode). The style is deliberate. Restraint costs her nothing politically and buys her everything commercially.

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Prime Minister Carney faces the opposite arithmetic. His government owes its existence to the anti-Trump program his party started and his state broadcaster promotes daily. The 2025 election was fought and won on elbows up, and a mandate built on confrontation must be serviced with confrontation. Hence the 25 per cent counter-tariffs on American automobiles. Hence the provincial liquor boards sweeping American bourbon from their shelves to applause. The performances played well at home. They also played in Washington, where the administration cited Canada’s auto tariffs, the liquor purges, and cheese quota administration as the three legal predicates for Section 338. Two of the three are artifacts of Canada’s own internal protectionism. Our provincial liquor monopolies and our supply-managed dairy regime, defended for decades as untouchable, have now handed a foreign power the justification for a tariff wall. Laurentian and Atlantic Canadians are so thinly-skinned anti-American.

Mr. Carney sold himself to Canadians as the man who manages economies and manages crises like no other. He told voters he had steered central banks through the crash of 2008 and through Brexit, and that a moment of rupture called for exactly his talented kind. A year and a half into his tenure, the economy carries its largest trade deficit since 2020 and the crisis has acquired a start date: August 19, at one minute past midnight. Perhaps he will astonish us all and pull a rabbit from the hat at the last minute. The hat, however, has so far mostly produced the bill.

Juan Carlos Baker, a former senior Mexican trade negotiator, put the asymmetry in a single sentence for Reuters: Sheinbaum “has more degrees of freedom to operate than Prime Minister Carney does.” Her freedom flows from a mandate that never depended on fighting Trump. His constraint flows from a mandate he chose to craft that depends on little else.

A front that cannot hold at home

Coherence is the other missing ingredient because a common front abroad presupposes a common front within Canada, and the federation cannot manage one. Last October, Ontario spent seventy-five million dollars airing an anti-tariff advertisement built from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 radio address on free trade. Trump terminated all trade talks within hours of the Reagan Foundation’s complaint. Premier Ford promised to pull the ad, then let it run during the first two games of the World Series anyway, and Washington added ten per cent to every existing tariff on Canadian goods two days later. One province freelanced a trade war. The federation paid the invoice (How many police officers would $75 million buy in Ontario?).

The federal pattern runs quieter and cuts deeper. In June of last year, Trump cut off negotiations over Canada’s digital services tax, a levy Ottawa had defended for months as settled law. Within forty-eight hours, the government rescinded the tax outright, on the eve of first collection, and received nothing in return beyond the resumption of talks. Theatrical resistance followed by uncompensated surrender is worse than either pure defiance or pure accommodation because it destroys the one asset a smaller negotiating partner owns: predictability. Ebrard’s flat, repetitive calm preserves exactly that asset. Ottawa has burned it twice in nine months.

One government in Canada, coincidentally also headed by a woman, did behave like Mexico, and it sits in Edmonton. Alberta paused American liquor purchases in March 2025, thought better of the silly gesture, and by June 6 became the first province, alongside Saskatchewan, to restore them, with the responsible minister framing the reversal as setting the stage for constructive CUSMA negotiations.

When the 50 per cent threat landed this month, Premier Smith declined to repeat the theatre, telling Albertans the approach “has got to be measured” and that “we’ve got to be calm about it” while the province works the sectoral files one by one.

Carney pulled the other way, suggesting the provinces keep American alcohol off their shelves until a broader agreement arrives, preserving as bargaining leverage the very practice Washington cites as a predicate for the wall. Ontario and Quebec keep American alcohol off their shelves, and Washington still cites the fact among its predicates for the tariff wall. The province that behaved like level-headed Mexico is Alberta.

The common front that commits to nothing

What about the counterweight? Ottawa and Mexico City announced a comprehensive strategic partnership and a three-year Action Plan last September. Trade missions crossed in both directions through the winter and spring. In June, Sheinbaum declared that Mexico and Canada had formed a common front. In July, Mexico’s foreign secretary stood beside Anita Anand in Ottawa and promised that his country would never abandon the trilateral pact, while Anand announced twelve million dollars for projects on identity management, human trafficking, and illegal fishing.

Measure the front against the ledger. Canada sells Mexico $8.9 billion a year and buys $53.4 billion, a merchandise deficit approaching $45 billion, roughly the size of New Brunswick’s entire economy. The tangible fruit of the partnership to date consists of eased Mexican import rules for Eastern Canadian apples, electronic certificates for canola and wheat, and a new certificate for Canadian pet food. Apples and pet food do not counterweight a superpower on any side of this galaxy.

And when Reuters asked both governments about coordinating their bilateral tracks with Washington, Canada’s trade minister’s office protested its readiness at length. Mexico’s Economy Ministry prudently declined to comment.

Silence is often a wise position. Mexico will not spend a single peso of leverage defending a partner who barely trades with it, and Sheinbaum’s solidarity costs her nothing precisely because it commits her to nothing. The common front is insulation manufactured for Canadian domestic consumption. The Mexicans know it. Canadians seem to pretend not to.

The objection worth answering

A fair-minded critic will raise one more point. Mexico, the critic will say, had no choice: with more than eighty per cent of its exports bound for one market, restraint was compulsion dressed as wisdom, while Canada could afford a measure of defiance.

The objection inverts its own logic, however. Restraint under greater duress demands more discipline, since Sheinbaum absorbs insults she has less power to answer. Nor does the ledger excuse Canada. Both governments damaged their own economies, yet Mexico negotiates like a country that knows it is weakened, while Canada postures like a country that still believes its own press. Defiance without capacity is just performance. Carney is a fitting heir to Justin Trudeau.

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What restraint would look like

None of this argues for capitulation, and the Mexican file shows the difference between restraint and surrender in practice. A serious Canadian strategy would drop the performances, identify the currencies Washington values, and pay in the cheapest of them: continental defence, Arctic security, critical minerals, alignment on China.

Each costs Canada little that Canada does not already need to do for itself. The strategy would then dismantle the internal protectionism that armed Section 338, since the liquor monopolies and the dairy regime injure Canadian consumers first and supply foreign tariff predicates second. Ottawa controls the dairy regime and the federal levers; the liquor boards belong to the provinces, which means the strategy demands a federal-provincial discipline the past year has not produced. The obstacle is a mandate that rewards elbows.

The bigger difference remains self-knowledge. Mexico knows exactly what it is: a dependent exporter that cannot afford oversized pride at the border. It sends more than eighty per cent of its exports to one customer and negotiates accordingly, with a cool head and a long memory. Canada sends 71.7 per cent of its exports to the same customer while telling itself stories about being superior, a major trading nation. The stories no longer survive the arithmetic. Canada accounts for roughly 2.2 per cent of world merchandise exports and now ranks below Mexico. Yup, the gaslighting is coming from inside the house.

The mature nationalist swallows the insult and keeps the market for the sake of stability and its people. The performing nationalist returns the insult and loses it.

The Courts told British Columbia in 2020 that it could not control the movement of Alberta’s oil. On July 2, a year and a day after the Canada Day by which the Prime Minister promised to free internal trade of federal barriers, Ottawa agreed to negotiate a toll on British Columbia’s behalf. Each step is lawful. The sequence is the scandal.

Two press conferences, one day

On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney held two press conferences. In Vancouver that morning, he stood with Premier David Eby to sign the Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement. In Calgary that evening, he stood with Premier Danielle Smith to announce Alberta’s submission of a million-barrel pipeline to the Major Projects Office.

The Calgary stage supplied the spectacle. The Vancouver document carried the payload: a commitment to negotiate a legally binding revenue framework, grounded in the stated principle that British Columbia must share meaningfully in the “economic upside” of a project the agreement admits the province does not want. An annual royalty payment to British Columbia by the pipeline operator heads the list of mechanisms to be discussed, Annex A sets December 1, 2026 as the deadline for settling the financial commitments, and the same annex schedules a renegotiation of the revenue sharing attached to the existing Trans Mountain Expansion.¹

Jack Mintz named the levy for what it would be. Writing in The Hub on July 7, he called the arrangement “extortion, plain and simple,” a Strait of Hormuz-type tariff collected by a transit jurisdiction on a resource it does not own.² The definitional point holds. A royalty pays for the right to extract a resource the collecting province owns. British Columbia does not own the petroleum and has no right to extract it; Alberta owns the resource in the ground and collects the proper royalty. Whatever a recurring annual payment would purchase, extraction is not it. In the strait that lends the analogy its name, the tolling is done by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, whose gunboats harass and seize foreign tankers whenever Tehran wants leverage or payment.³ Canada’s version arrives by communiqué, which changes the manners rather than the principle. Mintz’s warning that other provinces will copy the model deserves every echo it receives.

His framing needs one correction, and the correction sharpens the charge.

Mintz faults Ottawa for blessing an arrangement it should have resisted. That framing casts the federal government as a weak bystander watching a province misbehave. The record shows an author rather than a bystander. No toll yet exists; no amount is fixed and no operator is bound. What exists is a federal commitment to negotiate one, made by a government whose declared program runs the other way, in a legal environment the Supreme Court cleared in advance. The chronology makes the case.

2012 to 2020: Clark collects, Horgan collides

Christy Clark deserves her due: she thought of it first. In 2012 she set five conditions for any heavy oil pipeline crossing her province, the fifth a fair share of the economic benefits. In January 2017 she collected on it, signing what she called an unprecedented agreement under which Kinder Morgan would pay British Columbia between $25 million and $50 million a year for twenty years, up to $1 billion, routed into a provincial Clean Communities fund.⁴ The company paid for passage, and the payment wore an environmental label. The 2026 agreement remembers her work: the Condition Five revenue sharing it schedules for renegotiation is the arrangement her fifth condition produced. Her successors wanted more than a bargain with a company. They tried to legislate, and the attempt produced the constitutional collision that defines this story.

The Horgan government moved for control directly, and the attempt failed in the most public way available to Canadian law. In 2018 it proposed amendments to the province’s Environmental Management Act that would have required a provincial “hazardous substance permit” for any company moving heavy oil through the province in volume. One undertaking fit the description: the Trans Mountain pipeline. The province referred the question to its own Court of Appeal.

On May 24, 2019, a unanimous five-judge panel answered. The pith and substance of the scheme, the court held, was to place conditions on, and if necessary prohibit, the carriage of heavy oil through an interprovincial undertaking, a matter assigned exclusively to Parliament under section 92(10) of the Constitution Act, 1867.⁵ British Columbia appealed. On January 16, 2020, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal unanimously, from the bench, adopting the Court of Appeal’s reasons in full.⁶ The Attorney General whose office carried that losing appeal was David Eby. The premier who signed the July 2 agreement is the same man.⁷

Politicians contort morally and intellectually, but Eby is a master of depth and consistency.

The 2020 ruling closed the front door, and it should be read for exactly what it held. British Columbia could not aim a provincial law at the pipeline. The judges looked past the environmental wrapping to the target: a permit scheme built to control one federally regulated pipeline is, in substance, an attempt to regulate that pipeline, and only Parliament may do that.

The ruling left ordinary provincial laws alone; a pipeline company still pays provincial property taxes, and its trucks still stop at provincial red lights. And the judges said nothing about transit charges, because no transit charge was before them. Undecided does not mean permitted. A provincial law charging Alberta oil for its passage would invite the same analysis that killed the permit scheme, and everyone advising British Columbia knew it. The safer path was always to have Ottawa do the collecting. That is the path the July 2 agreement opens.

2026: Ottawa opens the side door

What the Constitution denies a province acting alone, a deal between governments can place within reach. Follow the mechanics, because the mechanics are the trick. British Columbia cannot pass a law making the pipeline pay; the courts settled that. Ottawa, which regulates the pipeline, approves the project, and owns the existing line, can make payment part of the arrangement. So the two governments signed an agreement in which Ottawa promises to negotiate a legally binding revenue framework, with an annual royalty to British Columbia listed first among the options.

The same document makes British Columbia’s cooperation on routing and permits conditional on those commitments being kept. And the text recites, in plain words, that the federal government holds the authority to approve and build pipelines across provincial boundaries.⁸ Read the pieces together. Ottawa wrote down that the power is federal, then agreed to negotiate a price for using it, payable to the province that holds no power at all.

Ottawa did not fail to stop the toll. Ottawa agreed to construct it. The distinction between a toll collected and a toll under construction matters in law, and it costs the argument nothing. No money changes hands today. Whatever instrument eventually imposes the payment, a statute, a licence condition, a contract, can be challenged in court when it appears, and signing an agreement does not lift a government above the Constitution. The concession does not wait on any of that. The federal government has adopted, as its own negotiating objective, the very demand the courts told British Columbia it had no power to make, and it has attached that negotiation to the tidewater access Alberta has pursued for a decade.

Ottawa did not merely permit the shakedown. It agreed to draft the terms, schedule the delivery, and bill the victim.

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The promise the deed contradicts

Consider what the same government celebrated one year earlier. On June 26, 2025, Bill C-5 received royal assent as the One Canadian Economy Act. Its first part, the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act, declares its purpose in section 4: to promote free trade by removing federal barriers to the interprovincial movement of goods within Canada.⁹ The operative provisions build a mutual-recognition scheme rather than a general prohibition, so the July 2 agreement breaks no clause of the statute. The contradiction is political, and it is complete. The Prime Minister made the removal of federal barriers to internal trade his signature economic promise, set Canada Day 2025 as the date, and claimed delivery on schedule.¹⁰

A year and a day after that Canada Day, the same Carney government agreed to negotiate an annual charge tied to the movement of Alberta oil across British Columbia to the sea. The man who promised to bring internal barriers down committed himself to building one. The statute lifts paper burdens from goods crossing provincial lines. The agreement contemplates a cash burden on oil doing the same thing. Both measures belong to the same Liberal government. We do not live in a serious country.

Comeau narrowed the challenge

Section 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867 commands that the products of any province “be admitted free” into each of the others. A reader meeting that sentence for the first time would expect it to kill a transit toll on sight. The Supreme Court read it differently in 2018. Gerard Comeau, a retired New Brunswicker, drove into Quebec, bought cheaper beer, and was fined on the way home under a New Brunswick law limiting how much out-of-province liquor he could bring back. He argued the fine violated section 121. The Court upheld it.¹¹

Free admission, the judges held, forbids only measures that work like a tariff and whose primary purpose is to restrict trade across a provincial line. A law that burdens trade while chiefly serving some other end, public health, environmental protection, orderly liquor sales, survives. In practice, the test hands any government with a competent drafting team a road map: recite a purpose other than trade restriction, and the burden on trade becomes incidental.

So a challenge to the eventual payment would run uphill rather than into a wall, and the agreement’s own words cut both ways. Consider what a judge would read. The royalty is grounded in British Columbia’s share of the project’s “economic upside”: money for the passage of oil, stated plainly. Environmental protection sits elsewhere in the same document, in a separate liability and emergency response fund held in trust for the province and First Nations.¹² Yet British Columbia’s press release sells the whole arrangement as compensation for environmental risk.¹³

The two descriptions cannot both be the primary purpose. The inference, and it is an inference, is that the upside language is the deal as the parties understand it, while the risk language is the version dressed for a courtroom. A challenger would enter the agreement itself into evidence, because Comeau preserved one clear rule: a charge collected from goods merely for crossing a border, a levy whose function is to collect funds from passage, remains the very thing section 121 forbids. The guardrail is bent rather than gone. The fight would simply be fought on ground the Court softened in 2018, two years before British Columbia lost its direct route and eight years before Ottawa opened the indirect one.

The sequence is the scandal

Set the three dates in a row. In 2018, the Supreme Court reduced section 121 to a prohibition on openly protectionist measures. In 2020, the same Court confirmed that no province may target a federal pipeline for control. In 2026, the federal government agreed to negotiate a recurring payment to a province for the passage of another province’s oil. Each step was lawful. Assembled, the steps put under construction an outcome the founding bargain was written to prevent: a province positioned to collect rent on its neighbour’s resources as the price of passage to the sea.

The assembly required federal hands at every stage. Ottawa argued for exclusive jurisdiction in the 2019 reference and won it. Ottawa holds the jurisdiction the ruling confirmed, and the July 2 agreement recites it. Ottawa alone could lend that jurisdiction to British Columbia’s demand, and on July 2 it did. Nor does the money travel simply. The federal government owns the existing Trans Mountain system, and the proposed line contemplates Trans Mountain and Pembina as partners with Alberta, so an annual payment could fall in part on entities owned by the federal and Alberta governments themselves.¹⁴

Much of the burden could shift backward onto Alberta producers through higher transport costs and lower netbacks, as Mintz argues, though the final incidence waits on the mechanism.¹⁵ Either way, the direction of the flow is settled: value leaves the province that owns the resource and lands in the province that hosts the pipe.

Guardians of passage

The presumption is already travelling. At the premiers’ meeting in Charlottetown on July 22, Manitoba’s Wab Kinew said he was willing to entertain the Alberta-to-Ontario pipeline proposed by Danielle Smith and Doug Ford, a 3,300-kilometre line from Hardisty to the refineries at Sarnia through Saskatchewan and Manitoba, touching no American soil.¹⁶ Scott Moe was already on board. Kinew attached the familiar conditions, environmental care and Indigenous partnership, demanded no royalty, and copied no agreement. His openness was reported as good news, and by the standards of the moment it was.

Notice what the standards of the moment have become. Parliament holds jurisdiction over the undertaking. Provincial cooperation matters enormously in practice, on lands, permits, and politics, yet it is not the source of the project’s authority. The coverage nonetheless treated a transit premier’s willingness to consider the line as a concession worth a headline. The presumption, rather than any demand, is the tell: passage across a province is now discussed as a favour within that province’s gift. The July 2 agreement gave the presumption a price list. Section 121 promised free admission. Confederation increasingly administers admission premier by premier, corridor by corridor.

Mintz is right about the nature of the thing. The deal is extortion whether or not any court ever says the word. Where his account errs is the exculpation of Ottawa. The federal government convened the parties, accepted the principle, scheduled the negotiation, and fixed its deadline. A bystander does none of those things.

Albertans should resist the temptation to read the episode as one more policy misjudgment awaiting a better minister. The pattern is older than this government and larger than this pipeline. The arrangement that governs Confederation prices Alberta’s access to tidewater and names the price cooperation, and it has done so under administrations of both parties. Confederation promised Alberta admission to a common market. The July 2 agreement opens negotiations over the fare.

The toll booth is federal. We are again wasting the opportunity to become a serious country.

Notes

1. Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement, backgrounder, Prime Minister of Canada, July 2, 2026, pm.gc.ca; Energy Development section and Annex A.

2. Jack Mintz, “The most overlooked aspect of the new West Coast pipeline could be the most consequential,” The Hub, July 7, 2026.

3. Among other incidents, the seizure of the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in July 2019, and repeated IRGC tanker seizures and harassment in and near the Strait of Hormuz reported through 2023 and 2024.

4. The five conditions were announced in 2012; the revenue-sharing agreement with Kinder Morgan was announced January 11, 2017: payments of $25 million to $50 million annually for 20 years, up to $1 billion, directed to the B.C. Clean Communities program. See The Globe and Mail and CBC News, January 11, 2017.

5. Reference re Environmental Management Act (British Columbia), 2019 BCCA 181 (May 24, 2019).

6. Reference re Environmental Management Act (British Columbia), 2020 SCC 1 (January 16, 2020), delivered from the bench, adopting the Court of Appeal’s reasons.

7. David Eby served as Attorney General of British Columbia from 2017 to 2022; the province’s appeal was conducted by the Attorney General’s office (SCC docket 38682).

8. Agreement, note 1, Energy Development section.

9. One Canadian Economy Act, S.C. 2025, c. 2, royal assent June 26, 2025; Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act, s. 4.

10. Prime Minister of Canada, news release, June 20, 2025 (removing federal barriers to free trade by Canada Day); first ministers’ statement of March 21, 2025 committed to legislation by July 1, 2025.

11. R. v. Comeau, 2018 SCC 15.

12. Agreement, note 1, Energy Development section, revenue framework mechanisms.

13. Office of the Premier of British Columbia, news release 2026PREM0046, July 2, 2026.

14. Trans Mountain Corporation is held by the Government of Canada through the Canada Development Investment Corporation (canada.ca); on the Trans Mountain and Pembina partnership with Alberta, see Canadian Press and Resource Works reporting, July 2 and 3, 2026.

15. Mintz, note 2.

16. Jack Farrell, The Canadian Press, “Manitoba premier Kinew willing to entertain Alberta-to-Ontario pipeline,” July 22, 2026.

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