Alberta’s unemployment rate sits at 7.0 percent, tied with New Brunswick for second highest in the country, behind only Newfoundland and Labrador at 9.3 percent. The national rate is 6.4 percent. In a province that pumps more wealth per capita into this country than any other, that gap is worth sitting with.

I hear four explanations floating around. A minimum wage frozen at $15 an hour since 2018, the lowest in Canada. A premier flirting with separatism and scaring off investors. A federal government that supposedly starves us of support. And underneath all of it, more people arriving here than the job market can absorb. I went looking for which one actually carries the weight.

The minimum wage argument doesn’t hold up as the driver.

Alberta’s $15 floor is real and it is now the sole lowest in the country. Saskatchewan used to share that bottom spot but raised its rate to $15.35 last October, leaving Alberta alone at the floor, more than three dollars below British Columbia’s $18.25. A full-time worker at that wage takes home $31,200 a year before tax, roughly $6,760 less than the same job in BC. That’s a policy choice, and I’d call the “paying a living wage steals from the employer” mindset what it is: greed dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

But a low wage floor explains poverty among the employed. It does not explain unemployment. A frozen minimum wage doesn’t destroy jobs, if anything the economic literature on modest minimum-wage gaps points the other way. Alberta’s problem isn’t too few low-wage jobs. Employers here are posting them. The problem is on the other side of the equation entirely.

Separatist uncertainty is doing real, measurable damage.

This one has receipts. The Calgary Chamber of Commerce commissioned economist Trevor Tombe to model the cost, and the estimate lands between $10 billion and $15 billion in forgone investment for 2026 alone if the pattern tracks what Britain saw after Brexit. ATCO’s CEO said Asian partners in a major hydrogen project won’t greenlight final investment until the separation question is settled. A Calgary tech founder told Global News he’s actively considering relocating his company to BC or Ontario to keep investors calm. A summer survey by the Alberta Chambers of Commerce found 71 percent of respondents could name a specific business considering leaving the province, or expanding elsewhere instead of here, because of the uncertainty.

Not everyone agrees it’s decisive. A former Advantage Energy executive told The Logic that not one investor raised the separation question with him directly. But the weight of evidence, from the Chamber’s own economists to companies naming names, says the referendum talk is a real drag on capital formation, even among people who think Alberta should stay in Canada.

The federal government did not cause this one. Alberta is currently leading the country in interprovincial migration for a fifteenth straight quarter. People are voting with their feet, toward Alberta, not away from it. Ottawa’s immigration cuts have actually pulled a different lever, shrinking the international arrivals that used to supplement the labour force, which if anything should be easing the unemployment numbers, not worsening them. Whatever legitimate grievances Alberta has with federal energy and environmental policy, and there are some, they aren’t what’s driving this specific number this year.

Here’s the biggest reason, and it’s the least dramatic one: too many people, too fast, for the jobs being created to absorb them.

RBC’s economics team has been tracking this directly. Alberta added 91,000 jobs in the year to July 2026, the strongest proportional employment growth of any province in the country. And the unemployment rate barely moved, because the labour force grew even faster than the jobs did. TD estimates Alberta needs roughly 57,600 new jobs every single year just to keep the unemployment rate from climbing, purely to keep pace with population growth. Alberta has led interprovincial migration for going on four years running. Add the people still arriving from other provinces to the newcomers still arriving internationally, even at reduced federal targets, and you get a labour force that outruns even historic job creation.

The RBC economists are explicit that this looks like temporary absorption pressure, not structural weakness, and they expect the rate to ease toward 6.5 percent by year’s end as population growth normalizes. It hits younger workers hardest. Youth unemployment climbed to nearly 15 percent last fall, a province with one of the youngest median ages in the country struggling to place its own new entrants into a labour market already stretched thin by newcomers.

So which is it. Not the minimum wage, that’s a wage-poverty story, not a jobs story. Not the federal government, the data runs the opposite direction. Separatism is a real cost, tens of billions in delayed and diverted investment, but it is a drag on the margins, not the core mechanism. The core mechanism is success outrunning itself. Alberta is the most attractive destination in Canada for anyone looking for work, and that attraction is precisely what keeps the unemployment number stubbornly high, because the province cannot build jobs as fast as it draws people who want one.

The uncomfortable part is that the fix for the population math and the fix for the referendum uncertainty pull in opposite directions. You don’t keep attracting workers from every province in the country while simultaneously threatening to leave it.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Danielle Smith wanted talks resumed immediately. Every other premier stood behind Mark Carney’s decision to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States. Smith broke from the group and called for engagement as soon as possible.

I noticed my first move was to guess why. My second move was less helpful: I started cross-referencing her past statements, looking for a pattern that would let me predict what she does next so I could plan a counter-move. I’ve been doing this for months with Alberta’s separatist movement, treating statements and speeches as data points in a series, trying to model where the line goes.

Carissa Véliz’s new book, Prophecy, named the discomfort I’ve been circling around not wanting to admit to myself. She traces prediction from the oracles at Delphi to the algorithms that decide who gets a loan or a job, and her claim is blunt: prediction has never really been about knowing the future. It’s been about power over the people who don’t have the prediction. The oracle didn’t need to be right. She needed to be believed, and belief bought her influence over kings.

I recognized myself in that. My interest in predicting Smith’s next move isn’t curiosity about Alberta’s future. It’s a wish for leverage. If I can guess her pattern, I get to feel ready. I get to feel like I’m not just reacting to politics but anticipating it, one step ahead instead of one step behind. That’s the same appeal Véliz finds in credit scores and election models and AI forecasting tools. Prediction feels like control because it promises you won’t be caught off guard.

But Smith is not a weather system. She’s not a variable in a regression. When I try to build a model of her behavior from past statements, I’m treating a person, and a movement built around grievance and identity, as though it runs on the same kind of pattern that predicts a hurricane’s path. Weather doesn’t have reasons. Smith does. So does everyone showing up at a separatist rally with a flag and a grievance about equalization payments they may not fully understand. Modeling their next statement tells me nothing about why they wanted what they wanted in the first place.

This is where Véliz’s argument about AI lands hardest for me. Large language models are trained to predict the next word, and they do it well enough to feel like understanding. But prediction of pattern is not comprehension of motive. An algorithm can tell you Smith is likely to issue a statement favoring negotiation. It cannot tell you whether that statement comes from genuine belief in Alberta’s economic interest, from a need to keep separatist energy from outflanking her on her right, from a personal theory about American leverage, or from some mixture I haven’t considered. Neither can I, no matter how many past statements I line up.

So the question I keep landing on isn’t what Smith will do next. It’s why she wants what she wants. Why does a premier break ranks with every other first minister in the country over a trade dispute. Why does a movement that stands to lose federal transfer payments keep gaining supporters who say they’d be better off alone. Why does a person choose grievance as an identity, out of everything else they could choose.

I don’t have a clean answer, and Véliz would tell me that’s the point. She argues that a free society doesn’t need more prediction. It needs better preparation, which is a different discipline entirely. Preparation doesn’t require me to know what Smith says next Tuesday. It requires me to understand the conditions that produce statements like hers, well enough that I’m not undone by whichever specific form they take.

That shift changes what I’m doing when I write about Alberta politics. I’m not building a forecasting model anymore. I’m trying to understand a set of people well enough that their next move, whatever it turns out to be, doesn’t catch me looking for the wrong thing. The power I wanted from prediction was the feeling of being ahead. The power worth having is understanding deep enough that being ahead stops mattering as much.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Six years ago I would have argued that a tablet in a five-year-old’s hands was progress. Now I watch students walk into class and reach for a device before they reach for a pencil, and something in me resists calling that progress anymore.

I’m not alone. Across Europe, the pendulum has swung hard the other way.

What Europe is actually doing

The Netherlands banned phones, tablets, and smartwatches in secondary schools starting January 2024, extending the ban to primary schools that same year. After the first full year, close to three-quarters of secondary students reported it was easier to concentrate, and more than half said the social climate in their school had improved. Finland passed a national law restricting phone use in both primary and secondary schools. France banned phones on school premises entirely back in 2018, not just in class but at lunch and between periods. Italy banned phones in kindergartens and middle schools starting in 2024, and the education minister went so far as to push schools back toward paper homework diaries instead of digital ones.

Sweden is the case that stopped me cold. It had been one of the most digitally forward school systems in Europe, and it’s now reversing course. The trigger was reading scores: in the 2022 PISA results, close to a quarter of Swedish ninth graders failed to reach a basic level of reading comprehension. The government’s own language has been blunt about it: they believe books and traditional learning tools serve children better than screens do.

By 2026, more than twenty European countries have some form of formal restriction on mobile devices in schools. UNESCO has recommended, at the global level, that smartphones be allowed in classrooms only when they demonstrably support a specific learning outcome, not by default.

The research behind this isn’t uniform, and I want to be honest about that. A 2024 OECD analysis of PISA data found that students who used digital devices more than an hour a day for leisure during class time showed a real decline in math scores. But the same analysis found that students using devices one to five hours a day for structured, learning-directed purposes actually did better than students who used no devices at all. The European School Education Platform’s own review calls the evidence on outright bans “mixed,” and notes that banning phones at school doesn’t touch the screen time happening at home, though it does seem to improve the classroom environment while students are there. The pattern that keeps surfacing isn’t “screens bad.” It’s “unstructured screens bad, structured screens fine, and most classrooms have been running the unstructured version.”

Alberta already moved on this

Alberta implemented its own province-wide ministerial order in September 2024, restricting personal mobile devices, including phones, tablets, laptops, and smartwatches, during instructional time in all K-12 schools. School authorities had until January 2025 to finalize their own storage and enforcement procedures.

The Alberta Teachers’ Association surveyed its members after the first year. Before the ban, 72 percent of teachers had already judged smartphones extremely or very detrimental to learning. After it, 74 percent said classroom disruptions had genuinely shrunk, two in five reported more face-to-face conversation among students during breaks, and two-thirds reported a real improvement in student mental health and well-being.

I don’t need a survey to tell me that. I’ve watched it happen in my own hallways.

Now, the Daniel Pink claim, and the other side of it

The claim that AI reliance is eroding critical thinking is real and well-documented. But the research behind it isn’t Pink’s, and Pink himself is arguing from the other side of it. It comes from Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School, whose 2025 study found a negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking scores, mediated mainly by cognitive offloading, letting the tool do the thinking so you don’t have to. A small, non-peer-reviewed MIT Media Lab study reached a similar conclusion about “cognitive atrophy” in heavy AI users. A January 2026 Wharton paper by Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave coined the term “cognitive surrender” for workers adopting AI output with almost no scrutiny of their own. That’s the decline case, and it’s a serious one.

Pink is arguing the other side of it, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a feel-good rebuttal. In a piece he published in March 2026, he lists six human abilities he thinks become more valuable, not less, as AI improves: asking better questions, developing taste, iterating relentlessly, synthesizing scattered pieces into something coherent, knowing where to deploy human versus machine effort, and acting with integrity. His implicit argument is that the tool doesn’t erode thinking on its own; it exposes which humans were relying on rote execution rather than judgment in the first place, and it raises the price of judgment, taste, and framing. Skills atrophy when we let them, not automatically because a tool exists that could replace them.

Put the two side by side and the disagreement isn’t really about the data. Gerlich, MIT, and Wharton are measuring what happens to people who use AI passively. Pink is describing what becomes valuable in the people who don’t. Both can be true at once, and probably are: passive use erodes, active use reorients. The open question for a classroom is which habit we’re actually teaching. If you’ve heard Pink cited as evidence that “AI is making us dumber,” that’s a misattribution of the research, but it’s also worth hearing what he’s actually claiming instead. It’s a genuine counterargument, not a softer version of the same worry.

What I’m actually seeing

Set the AI question aside for a moment and go back to devices generally, because that’s where your instinct and mine seem to be pointing. The challenges showing up in classrooms right now cluster into a few honest categories:

Attention that doesn’t recover quickly. Research on classroom distraction has found it can take a student up to twenty minutes to refocus after even a brief non-academic interruption on a device. That’s not a minor tax on a fifty-minute block.

Handwriting and fine motor skill loss in younger grades. fMRI research on preliterate five-year-olds found that a documented “reading circuit” in the brain activated after handwriting practice, but not after typing or tracing the same letters. Handwriting isn’t nostalgia. It’s doing cognitive work that typing doesn’t replicate, especially before a child can read.

Cognitive offloading, the AI-specific version of an old problem. Kids have always been able to skip the hard thinking if given an easy shortcut. AI just makes the shortcut frictionless and always available.

Social and mental health costs that show up off-task. Cyberbullying, comparison, and the general noise of constant connectivity don’t stay contained to lunch hour.

When should we introduce devices

The clearest signal from the developmental research is age-graded, and it lines up with what most of us already suspect. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages screen technology for children under two entirely. From two to five, technology can help if it’s active and adult-guided rather than passive. But the specific skill that seems to require an unplugged foundation is early literacy. Researcher Virginia Berninger’s guidance, echoed across the handwriting literature, is print first, cursive in the middle years once the fine motor and letter-recognition foundation is solid, and touch typing introduced later still, in the upper grades. Kindergarten is not the place to skip that sequence for the sake of engagement.

Past that early window, the research stops being about age and starts being about intent. The OECD’s own device-hour data supports this directly: it’s not how many hours a device is in a student’s hands, it’s whether those hours are structured toward a learning outcome or left open for whatever the student wants to do with it.

What Alberta schools might consider

We’ve already done the hard part with the province-wide cellphone restriction. What’s left is more subtle and more useful:

Extend the “intentional use” principle we already apply to phones to tablets and school-issued devices, especially in the early grades, rather than assuming a 1:1 device program is automatically good practice just because it’s common.

Protect handwriting instruction explicitly in K-3, not as a relic, but because the brain research says it’s doing something typing can’t yet replace at that age.

Build AI literacy the same way we built digital citizenship a decade ago; teach students when to lean on the tool and when the offloading is costing them something real, rather than banning AI use outright and losing the chance to teach that judgment at all.

Keep collecting our own data the way the ATA did after the phone ban. We don’t need to import every conclusion from Stockholm or Amsterdam. We need our own numbers, from our own classrooms, the way we’re already starting to gather them.

Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages

I don’t think that’s a single answerable question, and I’m suspicious of anyone who answers it in one sentence. Structured, teacher-directed, outcome-specific device use has real advantages, the OECD data backs that plainly. Unstructured, leisure-driven, or too-early device use has real costs, and the European experience over the past two years backs that just as plainly.

The honest answer is that we already know the dividing line. It isn’t the device. It’s whether an adult decided, on purpose, what that device was for in that hour. Most of the damage I’ve watched happen in eighteen years of this work came from the hours nobody decided anything about.

Sources

• OECD, Students, Digital Devices and Success (2024), PISA 2022 analysis: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC143863/JRC143863_01.pdf

• CGTN, “Which European countries are banning mobile phones from schools?” (2026): https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2026-05-26/Which-European-countries-are-banning-mobile-phones-from-schools--1Nry1Bzu05G/index.html

• NPR, “Sweden set to ban mobile phones in schools” (2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/06/09/g-s1-126967/sweden-set-to-ban-mobile-phones-in-schools

• European School Education Platform, “Exploring mobile phone use in schools”: https://school-education.ec.europa.eu/en/discover/news/exploring-mobile-phone-use-schools

• Government of Alberta, Ministerial Order on Standards for Personal Mobile Devices and Social Media in Schools (2024): https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/b44bcae6-2e6e-4814-bb25-2e7d7b592b8d/resource/096ddf6b-fc6d-475d-a693-d9fa77aae862/download/educ-standards-use-personal-mobile-devices-social-media-schools-parent-guide-2024-08.pdf

• Alberta Teachers’ Association, “A return to the art of conversation”: https://teachers.ab.ca/news/return-art-conversation

• Gerlich, M., “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking” (2025): https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

• Forbes, “AI Is Eroding Critical Thinking At Work” on Shaw & Nave’s Wharton “cognitive surrender” paper (2026): https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisrosenberg/2026/05/28/ai-is-eroding-critical-thinking-at-work-the-window-is-closing/

• Daniel Pink, “AI Is Getting Smarter. Humans Need These Skills” (March 2026):

The Pink Report

AI Is Getting Smarter. Humans Need These Skills ⚡

▶️ NEW VIDEO: The 6 Skills You Need to Survive AI…

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6 months ago · 267 likes · Daniel Pink

• Kersey, A., et al., “The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4274624/

• PLD Literacy, “The Importance of Teaching Handwriting for Cognitive Development” (Berninger research summary): https://pld-literacy.org/the-importance-of-teaching-handwriting-for-cognitive-development/

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

I was pulled to the front of the class with three other boys for laughing. We were strapped in front of everyone at St. Benedict, the Catholic-run school on Whitefish Lake First Nation #459 (Atikameg) where I grew up. We were told we were only allowed to speak English. Even though the Day School was supposedly closed in 1962, the priest and Grey Nuns still ran the school, taught the students, and imposed their rules as before. I didn’t know any different. It was just what school was.

Then we moved off reserve, and I found out what different felt like. My mother, who was not First Nations and came from New Brunswick, carried her own weight through that move. I was the kid in a provincial school with a heavy native accent, and I got ridiculed for it. I didn’t understand yet what I’d lost. I just knew I didn’t sound like the other kids.

I went on to earn four post-secondary degrees, paid my own way because I could. I went back to work on reserve, not because it was the only teaching job I could find, but because I fell in love with the community and the children. Yes, they had a tough life. None of us played the victim. Not one person I grew up with or worked alongside treated their circumstances as an excuse to stop moving forward.

I tell you this because I keep watching people who share pieces of that story use it for something else entirely.

A specific kind of voice keeps showing up in Alberta’s separatism debate. On March 13, 2026, a speaker at an event in Smoky Lake, Alberta used his own heritage as a credential to argue against the very chiefs who oppose the separation referendum. That speaker is Leighton Grey, a Calgary and Cold Lake lawyer and King’s Counsel who is part of the pro-separation speaking circuit in this province. His own law firm bio describes him as “a status Indian whose great-grandfather was once the Hereditary Chief of the Carry The Kettle or Jack Band,” with a grandmother and great-aunt who survived the Brandon Indian Residential School. The Smoky Lake speech was livestreamed and later posted to YouTube. Watch it yourself rather than take my word for any of it:

From there, the pattern is bigger than any one speaker, and it’s the pattern I want to talk about. People who can point to a Status card, a great-grandparent’s chieftainship, a family member who survived a residential school, use that ancestry as a credential to speak against the very chiefs currently standing against the referendum. They say it in a particular shape: my family didn’t play the victim card, and look at me now, a lawyer, educated, successful, and I can say this because of who I am.

What that framing leaves out is everything that made the difference between their story and the one still being lived on-reserve today.

Ancestry is not in dispute here. What is in dispute is the leap from having ancestry to having lived the legacy. There’s a chasm between claiming a bloodline and living under the Indian Act’s daily restrictions, growing up in a community where the federal government has spent a century underfunding basic health and water infrastructure, and carrying the direct, present-tense weight of what residential schools did to family structure and language. I lived enough of that chasm myself to know it’s not rhetorical. It’s the difference between a story you tell about your heritage and a life you’re still inside of.

Speeches like this one lean on numbers that don’t hold up. A claim that only about one percent of Albertans are First Nations or Aboriginal people, and that only about forty percent of those live on reserve, gets used to argue the chiefs meeting with the King over the referendum represent only a small, disconnected fraction of the province. Check the 2021 census yourself. First Nations people alone make up roughly three and a half percent of Alberta’s population, well over three times that figure, and Indigenous people as a whole, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit combined, make up 6.8 percent. The on-reserve number runs the opposite direction, too. In Alberta specifically, sixty percent of Status Indians live on reserve, not forty, meaning the majority, not a minority, live under direct Indian Act jurisdiction on the land the treaties set aside. And even for those living off reserve, a chief still speaks for them. Band membership and treaty rights travel with a person; they don’t stay behind on the reserve boundary. Distance from the reserve does not dissolve a treaty relationship.

Speakers in this vein also list statistics on addiction, incarceration, homelessness, domestic abuse, and government dependency among First Nations people, framing “First Nations” as something that should be “Last Nations.” The numbers cited are largely real. Indigenous adults are incarcerated in Canada at roughly nine times the rate of non-Indigenous adults, and nearly a quarter of Indigenous people live in poverty compared to about thirteen percent of non-Indigenous people. What gets left out is why. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings tie those exact outcomes to the abuse, family breakdown, and loss of language that residential schools caused. Eighteen of the Commission’s ninety-four Calls to Action target the justice system specifically because of that documented link. Asking why the Indian is “addicted to this dependency,” as this kind of speech does, without ever answering with the history it claims to know so well, is not truth-telling. It’s a setup.

And that’s the part that actually matters, more than any statistic. Treaty rights are not temporal. They are not tangential to some larger political argument about who gets to be aggrieved. Promises were made and signed, generation after generation, and broken more often than kept, but the treaty holds regardless of who is currently living where or how far anyone has moved from the reserve their family was pushed onto. A treaty is not a mood. It doesn’t expire when someone gets a law degree.

People quoting these misused numbers know exactly who is listening. No shortage of Albertans are ready to hear “get rid of the reserves” and “stop giving them my money.” It isn’t their money. First Nations funding in this country comes overwhelmingly from resource revenue, oil, gas, and forestry, negotiated and owed through treaty and land use, not handed down from general tax dollars as a gift. But that correction rarely makes it into the rooms where these speeches get applause.

Call this what it is. This isn’t just bad math or a strong opinion about self-reliance. It’s fuel. Piikani Nation Chief Troy Knowlton said it plainly after sitting face to face with Premier Danielle Smith: that fuelling this separatist movement gave every bigot in Alberta permission to stand on a First Nations person’s doorstep and say they hate First Nations. He pointed to a wave of AI-generated racist content now targeting First Nations leaders, and said the movement has put a target on his own back. That is not a hypothetical downstream risk. That is a sitting chief describing what is already happening to him and to people he represents, in direct response to the same rhetoric this kind of speech supplies with numbers and a friendly, credentialed face.

What troubles me most isn’t that these speakers are wrong about the numbers, though they are. It’s that they use their own hard-won distance from a hard life as license to tell people still living that hard life that their chiefs don’t speak for them. I know what that distance cost to cross. I also know it doesn’t buy you the right to hand someone else’s struggle back to them as evidence they were never really struggling at all. Watch the speech. Check the census yourself. Then decide who’s twisting the legacy here.

None of us played the victim. That was never the same thing as pretending the harm wasn’t real, or that the treaty stopped mattering once we found a way through.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Mr. McRae stood at the front of my grade 8 classroom with a tricorn hat balanced on his head, doing his best impression of a Loyalist arguing with a Patriot neighbor. We wrote skits about the American Revolution and its fallout in Upper Canada. We built props out of whatever we could scrounge from home. I remember the energy of that room more clearly than almost anything else from junior high, and it’s the moment I can point to and say: that’s when social studies first grabbed me.

I see teachers doing versions of that same thing in classrooms today. Enthusiastic, creative, willing to put on the hat and do the voice. And social studies still shows up, year after year, as the subject kids name as their least favourite. Something isn’t adding up.

Part of it is architecture, not enthusiasm. For decades the default has been read the chapter, fill out the worksheet, write the test. Even where a unit gets a skit day or a debate day, the surrounding structure often reverts to that same pattern. Kids get a spike of engagement and then nothing to hold onto it with.

This year I poured everything into Social 30. Detailed notes, assignments, source analysis, essays, the whole nine yards. Diploma results came back and the students did badly. Shockingly, embarrassingly badly. My instinct was to make it about effort, mine or theirs. But that’s not really where the problem lives.

Natalie Wexler talked to a group of seventh grade teachers at a University of Delaware event and asked whether their students seemed to retain social studies content from year to year. The teachers just shook their heads. One of them put it bluntly: the kids don’t even remember on Monday what they learned on Friday. That’s not a motivation problem. That’s a design problem, and it’s bigger than any one classroom.

Then I taught Social 20 and 30 online this summer, and got a second, uglier data point. The AI use wasn’t students getting help polishing a paragraph. It was students handing in assignments they hadn’t written a word of. I could tell immediately, because the writing had no voice. Flat, mechanical, technically correct and completely empty. Then those same students would email me and struggle to construct a real sentence. The gap between the submitted work and the actual student was enormous, and exhausting to sit with all summer.

Here’s why I think this matters more than a single subject’s popularity contest. Social studies is where students are supposed to build the habits of mind they’ll need once they’re out from under any teacher’s supervision: reading a source skeptically, weighing evidence, understanding why people in the past believed what they believed, forming a judgment and being able to defend it. Scroll through Facebook for five minutes and you’ll see exactly what it looks like when a population hasn’t practiced those habits. We don’t have a shortage of opinions. We have a shortage of people who know how to test one.

I first heard about The Four Question Method from an article by Natalie Wexler, so I recently bought the book. Jonathan Bassett and Gary Shiffman, the educators behind the Four Question Method, argue that social studies needs the same kind of reckoning that early literacy went through with the science of reading. Their starting point is basic cognitive science: working memory can hold about four things at once, for less than a minute, before it maxes out. Long-term memory has no such limit. If a fact or a story is actually banked in long-term memory, a student can retrieve it without burning working memory, which frees up capacity to actually think. If it isn’t banked, every attempt at analysis collapses under its own weight. You cannot think about what you don’t know. Their other core claim is that students are novices, not junior historians, and treating them like working historians who just need a stack of primary sources handed to them is a fallacy that overloads kids who don’t yet have the context to make sense of what they’re reading.

The model built on those two principles moves through four questions in order. What happened, which asks students to learn and retell a story. What were they thinking, which has students interpret one primary source at a time, slowly, using the same steps every time, to get inside the head of a real person in that story. Why then and there, which asks students to step back and notice patterns across history, comparing cases once they actually know more than one case well. And finally, what do we think about that, which asks for judgment, but only once the knowledge underneath it can support the weight of an opinion.

That order matters. Mr. McRae’s skits were the right instinct but they were sitting on top of whatever knowledge we happened to already have. The Four Question Method builds the knowledge on purpose, in sequence, before it asks kids to do anything with it. Engagement without that foundation is a great single day. Engagement built on top of secured knowledge is a subject kids can actually carry with them past Friday.

A few things I think this points toward for anyone trying to make social studies stick:

Sequence content so kids bank a real, connected story before they’re asked to analyze it. Save the “what do you think” questions for after the knowledge is there to support an answer, not before.

Build retrieval into every class, not just the unit test. Short, frequent, low-stakes recall, oral if possible, so kids are practicing pulling information out of memory rather than recognizing it on a multiple choice page.

Interpret one primary source at a time, with the same steps every time, instead of burying students in a stack of documents and hoping context emerges on its own.

Make the memorization part playful. Games, Kahoots, timed drills, friendly competition. Kids can enjoy banking facts if the banking itself has some energy to it, the way McRae’s classroom did.

Design the writing tasks so they can’t be quietly outsourced. In-class drafting, oral defence of a written argument, visible process work. If a student can’t explain their own paragraph out loud, that tells you something an AI-polished submission never will.

Spiral the content across the year or semester. Bring earlier units back on purpose so the knowledge gets restacked instead of shelved after the unit test.

I keep coming back to that classroom with the tricorn hat. McRae gave me the spark. What I didn’t get, and what I don’t think most of us got, was a structure built to make that spark last past the unit. That’s the piece I’ll be fixing as I teach Social 30 this year.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

I got into an argument online last week that I want to admit I lost, in the sense that neither of us moved an inch. I’d written about libertarianism’s failures, and a reader pushed back hard, insisting Thatcher and Reagan were neoliberals, not libertarians, and that calling them libertarian was a category error. He wasn’t entirely wrong on the technical point. He was, however, defending something closer to a personal identity than a definition, and at one point he said it outright: “our entire philosophy.” That’s when I understood we weren’t debating terms anymore.

But the exchange pointed at something worth digging into. I hadn’t set out to write about libertarianism as an abstraction. I’d been watching the rhetoric coming out of Alberta’s separatist movement, and the term the people inside it use for themselves is libertarian, not neoliberal, not conservative. They say it plainly, in their own words. What struck me is that the term almost never gets defined for the people reading or hearing it. Most Albertans encounter “libertarian” and “neoliberal” constantly right now, in comment sections, in premier’s statements, in separatist manifestos, without anyone stopping to say what either word actually commits a person to. That gap is what I want to close.

Neoliberalism is not a bigger government. It’s a differently aimed one. The clearest way to spot it isn’t by asking how much government someone supports, it’s by asking which parts of government they want kept and which parts they want gone. Neoliberalism keeps and often strengthens the state functions that build and protect markets: central banks, property law, trade enforcement, policing, military spending, corporate subsidy. It guts the functions that redistribute outcomes to people who need help: welfare, public health care, public education funding, labour protections, progressive taxation. That’s the actual signature. Not less government. Government reallocated, away from the collective and toward capital.

Libertarianism, in its strict form, is a different animal. It’s built on the non-aggression principle, the idea that individual freedom is nearly absolute and can only be limited by a duty not to harm others. Taken seriously, it’s anti-state almost everywhere, not just in welfare. Reagan and Thatcher never governed that way. They expanded policing, grew military budgets, and protected corporate power through the state rather than by removing the state from the picture. What they borrowed from libertarianism was the language, freedom, individual liberty, get government off your back, because that language sells. The policy underneath was neoliberal the whole time.

Here’s where it gets interesting for us in Alberta, and where I think the real confusion lives. Neoliberalism rarely travels alone. It needs something else riding along to make austerity and cuts feel less like abandonment and more like virtue. Elsewhere in the world that passenger has often been authoritarian nationalism, a strong hand promising order and national greatness while the economic floor gets pulled out from under ordinary people. In Alberta, the passenger looks different. It’s grievance politics dressed as provincial sovereignty.

Danielle Smith didn’t invent this pairing, but she runs it as well as anyone currently in office, and she’s a useful case precisely because she doesn’t fit neatly into either box. By her own account she’s a libertarian, someone who returns to Ayn Rand every few years for guidance. That’s philosophy. What she actually governs with is the neoliberal playbook, health care and education treated as costs to be trimmed rather than commitments to be funded, public sector workers asked to accept less, markets protected while public provision shrinks. The belief system underneath is libertarian. The policy delivered is neoliberal. Most people watching don’t separate the two, and they don’t need to for the confusion to matter. What they see is a leader talking individual freedom while running an economically neoliberal government, wrapped in a third layer that’s neither: provincial grievance politics. The Sovereignty Act is the clearest expression of it, freedom from the collective reframed at the provincial scale, us against a larger them, instead of individual against the collective. It’s the same underlying move my first piece described, just repackaged for an audience that responds to provincial identity more than personal liberty rhetoric.

The trouble is that equalization, in particular, gets weaponized in ways most people can’t easily untangle, because the mechanics are genuinely confusing and almost nobody explains them plainly. Alberta pays into federal coffers more than it receives back largely because Alberta has historically had higher average incomes and a smaller population drawing on federal transfers, not because the province is being punished. That’s a fact people can check. But grievance doesn’t need to survive a fact check to do its political work. It needs to feel true long enough to win an argument, or an election.

Someone will read this and think I can’t make up my mind. Is it populism, is it libertarianism, is it neoliberalism, and don’t forget there’s a strain of modern liberalism in the mix too, even a little socialism showing up in the parts of the state nobody wants to touch, health care chief among them. I understand the instinct to want one clean label. It’s tidier, easier to argue against, easier to fit on a sign. But real political systems are rarely built from a single pure ideology, and pretending Alberta’s politics reduce to one word is its own kind of dishonesty. What I’m describing isn’t indecision about what’s happening here. It’s an attempt to name all the parts actually operating at once, because that’s what it takes to see the whole machine instead of arguing with a caricature of it.

This is what makes Alberta’s political landscape genuinely hard to read right now. We have a governing philosophy that borrows credibility from libertarianism’s talk of individual freedom, delivers neoliberalism’s economics, and sells both through a grievance politics that claims to speak for the collective while asking almost nothing of the people running it. Three different logics, stacked, each one useful for deflecting the other when it’s convenient. Call the cuts principled, call the anger provincial pride, and never let anyone hold the actual philosophy still long enough to examine it. That’s not confusion by accident. A politics this hard to pin down is easier to defend than one that has to justify itself plainly, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Most of what’s on offer here isn’t built around what Albertans owe each other. It’s built around what a narrower set of interests get to keep.

The man I argued with online will keep insisting the categories are pure and separate, because for him they have to be. Most people aren’t defending an identity. They’re just trying to read the news and understand why the same promises keep failing the same way. My hope with this piece is that the next time someone hears “neoliberal” or “libertarian” tossed around, in a headline, at a kitchen table, in a legislature, they’ll have a way to tell what they’re actually looking at, and who it’s actually built to serve.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

I watched a kid write an essay once. Watched the whole thing, start to finish. She chewed her pen. She deleted a paragraph and wrote it again, worse, then better. She came to my office and asked if “in conclusion” was cheating, and I told her no, just tired, and she laughed and went back and fixed it herself. I conferenced with her twice. I have the drafts. I have the timestamps. I have my own memory, which still works, mostly.

Then I ran it through an AI detector, and it looked at her heart on a page and said: 98% machine.

Ninety eight percent. As if a girl who bled ink for a week is somehow two percent human and the rest is server farm.

I want to laugh about this, and some days I do, because the alternative is despair, and despair doesn’t grade papers any better than a bad algorithm does.

Here’s the trouble, plainly: the tools built to catch the fake are guessing, dressed up to look certain. A percentage that precise looks measured. It isn’t. Nothing was measured. Something was estimated and then handed a number so it would sound like science instead of a hunch.

I just finished teaching two online courses, Social Studies 20 and 30, and I saw the other half of that same failure. Not students wrongly accused, but the real thing, undisguised. AI wasn’t tweaking sentences in those assignments. It was writing them outright, start to finish, and it was exhausting to read and respond to week after week. No voice. Flat, impersonal, almost mechanical, the kind of writing that answers the question without ever seeming to have thought about it. I didn’t need a detector for any of it. I needed eyes and a red pen. So I built a policy: where I suspected AI had written the work and the student couldn’t show me otherwise, I marked it at less than half value. I gave every one of them the chance to bring proof, a draft, a screenshot, anything showing the thinking was theirs. Not one student did. That’s the tell a percentage will never catch, and it’s also the limit of a percentage’s usefulness. The real cases didn’t need measuring. They needed someone paying attention.

And the tool tends to flag the students who write the cleanest. The ones who learned grammar. The ones who use a semicolon on purpose. The ones who write in full, structured sentences because someone taught them that structure isn’t the enemy of voice, it’s the frame voice hangs on. Write well enough and you trip the wire. Write messier, more human in its unevenness, and you slide through untouched. So the tool ends up quietly rewarding the rougher draft and punishing the polished one, which is exactly backward from what we’re supposed to be teaching.

I did not sign up to coach students toward writing worse on purpose, just to stay under suspicion.

And now Substack, the platform I hand my own words to every week, the place I came to for exactly the opposite of metrics and panic, has partnered with Pangram, a detection company. On a writing platform. I keep turning that over and I can’t find the part where it makes sense for writers.

Let’s be honest, everyone is using AI nowadays. I can’t run a search on Google that doesn’t come back with an AI insight first. Log into your Telus account and the chat that greets you is AI. It’s stitched into the plumbing of ordinary life now, whether anyone asked for it or not. I use AI too, and let me qualify that. I’ve said so, I’ll keep saying so, because I’m not interested in performing a purity I don’t have. I have ADHD and a job that eats hours like a wood chipper, and sometimes I want the scaffolding built fast so I can climb up and do the actual writing, the part that’s mine, the part with my fingerprints on it.

So every letter I send to parents, every message to the community, every article I post, gets run through AI first, not to write it, but to check the tone, to catch the sentence that reads calm in my head and combative on the page. Last month it caught a line in a letter to parents about a schedule change, a sentence I’d read as neutral that landed, on a second read, like an accusation aimed at the people I was writing to. I cut it before it went out. That’s not a machine writing my letter. That’s a second pair of eyes that never gets tired and never takes it personally. A carpenter who uses a nail gun is still a carpenter. Nobody hands the house back and says this doesn’t count, I heard a machine helped.

Here’s the part I can’t get around, writing this. An essay about detection paranoia is, itself, a test of that same reflex. If admitting all of this makes you trust the essay in front of you a little less, that’s the exact instinct I’m describing, working on you in real time. I’d rather name it than let it work on you quietly.

But I can write. I have always been able to write, long before any of this existed, and I love it, the actual sitting down and wrestling a sentence until it behaves, and that love is what’s under threat here. Not from the technology. From surveillance dressed up as quality control. From a number that claims to know the difference between a voice and a void, and doesn’t.

What I’m actually afraid of isn’t robots writing. It’s humans no longer trusting other humans to have written. A teacher looking at a beautiful sentence and feeling suspicion instead of joy. That’s the real damage. Not plagiarism. Distrust, manufactured and sold back to us as vigilance.

I want my students to become good writers. Great ones, even, the kind who make you stop on the sidewalk and read a line twice. I can’t build that on a foundation of paranoia. You don’t grow trust by handing a percentage generator the keys to the classroom.

So here is where I’ve landed, and it isn’t complicated: watch the writing happen. Sit beside the kid. Read the draft that was worse yesterday and better today. Ask a question you don’t already know the answer to, and see if they can answer it in their own words, out loud, without a screen between you. That’s the only detector that’s ever worked. It runs on attention, not algorithms, and it’s accurate every time, as long as you actually show up.

Online, I can’t sit beside anyone. Social Studies 20 and 30 gave me no hallway, no desk to lean over, no face to watch while a kid works out a hard sentence. So I built the next-best thing: the burden shifted to the student, proof as the price of credit. It’s not as good as presence. Nothing is. But it beats a percentage, because it still asks a human being to account for their own work, instead of asking a machine to guess at it.

The machines can keep guessing. I’ll keep watching kids write, badly and then better, one real sentence at a time.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Bill Fowler, one of my reader’s, wrote to me last week with a line I haven’t stopped turning over: “Libertarianism only suits the one person. It’s never about us.”

Bill’s earned the right to say it. He’s watched this province and this country cycle through decades of the same promise, that if government would just get out of the way, everything would sort itself out. He’s old enough to remember when that promise first arrived dressed as liberation.

I think about my own path constantly. I’m a principal in rural Alberta because of a chain of people and circumstances I didn’t build alone. Mentors who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. A community in the Northwest Territories that trusted a young upstart to work with their youth. Elders on a First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan who taught me what education owes a community, not just a student. Luck, more than I’d like to admit. Perseverance, yes, but perseverance inside a web of people who caught me when I needed catching. Nobody gets to where they are alone. The libertarian story asks us to forget that, or worse, to be embarrassed by it.

In addition to going back further than Bill’s memory, I’ve read enough of the history to see the shape of it clearly. Thatcher and Reagan sold libertarianism as the cure for a bloated, meddling state. Lower taxes, fewer regulations, get government off your back. The language was freedom. The substance was neoliberalism, a redistribution of power away from the collective and toward those who already held capital. Nobody campaigned on trusting government less because government was untrustworthy in principle. They campaigned on limiting it, specifically limiting its ability to restrain markets, tax wealth, and protect the people markets tend to leave behind. Less government wasn’t the goal. Less accountability for the already powerful was.

We’re watching the same script now with sharper edges. In the US, Musk, who built his fortune on federal contracts and government-backed loans, spent a fortune helping dismantle the very agencies built to catch people when markets fail them. That’s not a contradiction if you understand what libertarianism actually protects. It is never against government. It’s against the parts of government that ask anything of the wealthy in return.

We don't have to look south for the clearest example either. Alberta's own premier has said openly that she considers herself a libertarian, and that she returns to Atlas Shrugged every few years as a kind of guiding text. Danielle Smith's record reads like a checklist pulled straight from Ayn Rand. Public sector workers told to accept austerity and pain. Health care and education treated as line items to be trimmed rather than commitments to be honoured. Privatization casting the individual entrepreneur as the hero, the collective and social programming as a drag on his ambition. This isn't a fringe mindset held by a scattering of frustrated readers. It's the operating philosophy of the government running this province.

At the root of all of it is a simple substitution. Capitalism is a system built around the individual, the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the self-made man. Libertarianism is capitalism’s political theology, the belief that this individual owes nothing back to the system that made his success possible. No debt to the roads, the schools, the courts, the workers, the community that absorbed the risk he didn’t have to. Bill is right. It was never about us. It was always about the one, dressed up in language expansive enough that the rest of us mistook it for our own liberation.

I’ve spent my career in communities where this ideology simply doesn’t hold up against lived experience. In the North, I watched what happens when a government retreats from its obligations to remote communities and calls it respect for local autonomy. In Alberta, I hear the same rhetoric now wrapped in provincial grievance, equalization anger, and talk of going it alone. The pitch hasn’t changed in forty years. Keep more of what’s yours. Owe less to people you’ll never meet. What has changed is how thin the cover story has worn.

A shared vision of the future can’t be built on a philosophy that treats the collective as an inconvenience. Bill used the word “us,” and I think that’s the whole argument in one syllable. Every school I’ve led, every community I’ve served, was built by people who understood they were accountable to each other, not just to themselves. That’s not nostalgia. It’s the only model that’s ever actually worked for the people libertarianism leaves behind.

The ideology isn’t rising because it’s been vindicated. Nothing about the last forty years proves it works. It’s rising because we’ve gotten tired of being asked for anything, tired of taxes, tired of other people’s problems, tired of the sense that we owe strangers something. Libertarianism offers an exit from that fatigue. Stop worrying about the collective. Keep what’s yours. Call it principle instead of exhaustion.

That’s the appeal, and it’s also the flaw baked into the idea from the start. A philosophy built to ask nothing of anyone will always fail the people who need something asked. It failed them under Thatcher and Reagan, when the safety net got called dead weight and wages stagnated while wealth at the top compounded. It’s failing the US and Alberta now, as the same programs get gutted again by leaders who never needed them and never will. This isn’t a case of good ideas poorly executed. Every version of this ideology, run faithfully, produces the same result: less for the many, more for the few who were already ahead, and most importantly, freedom from each other. The machine is working exactly as designed.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

I picked up Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe to read this past week not knowing it was an immigration book. I bought it a few years ago for the title, the reputation, the promise of a smart writer taking apart a continent’s assumptions. By the time I publish this, I will have finished it, but the Alberta referendum question on immigration is still sitting in front of us. If you haven’t read it, the arguments in the book and the arguments in our own province turn out to be nearly identical.

The core economic case is always the same one. A country’s population is aging, the workforce is shrinking, and someone has to fill the jobs and pay into the systems that support retirees. Immigration is the fastest lever available. That’s true in the UK, in Germany, and it’s true in Alberta. When people say Canada “needs” more immigrants, this is almost always what they mean, whether they say it out loud or not.

None of this makes the people arriving here bad people. Most are responding to conditions in their home country that we would also flee if we lived under them. Many send money home to family in the Philippines or India, working jobs here so someone there can eat, study, or get medical care. That’s not a cynical calculation on their part. It’s often the most responsible thing a person can do for the people they love.

The comparison worth sitting with is Israel. Israel also takes in large numbers of immigrants, but almost all of them arrive with some claim to Jewish heritage, and with it, a shared thread of religious and cultural history. Canada doesn’t have that filter, by design. We bring in new languages, new religions, new assumptions about family, gender, and community, all at once. That’s not a flaw in our system. It’s the tradeoff of an immigration policy built on economic need rather than ethnic continuity. But it does mean the challenges we face are structurally different from Israel’s, and comparing our outcomes directly to theirs misses that.

The education argument doesn’t hold up well under its own weight. The claim that today’s immigrants arrive with less education or fewer skills than “we” did ignores how most Canadian families actually got here. Go back two or three generations and you’ll find laborers, farmhands, and domestic workers with little formal schooling, arriving with a trunk and a trade and not much else. That didn’t stop their children and grandchildren from becoming teachers, doctors, and tradespeople. There’s no reason to believe the pattern has suddenly stopped working.

The assimilation question is the one that actually deserves care, because it’s the one people are genuinely worried about, not the one they always say out loud. Yes, there are documented cases of individuals or small communities holding onto religious views that reject basic equality, particularly around women and sexuality. These cases are real and shouldn’t be waved away. But they are a small minority, not a representative sample, and they’re not unique to any one group of newcomers. Go back far enough in Canadian history and you’ll find plenty of our own forefathers carrying chauvinistic, exclusionary, and rigid views of their own, views that took a generation or two of contact with a different culture to soften. Cultural change is slow and intergenerational, not instant, and we should apply that same patience to newcomers that we’re willing to grant, in hindsight, to our own ancestors.

This is also why loaded words don’t help, in either direction. Douglas Murray makes the point that calling a government’s immigration policy fascist, or calling its critics racist, empties the word out over time. Once a term gets attached to every disagreement, it stops describing anything specific and just signals which side you’re on. The same discipline that says “name the specific practice, not the whole culture” also says “name the specific policy failure, not the whole government or the whole electorate.” Precision is what keeps a hard conversation honest.

None of that means we should be naive about the friction points. Large-scale immigration without a plan for integration creates real strain, on housing, on schools, on the informal social trust that lets a community function. The referendum conversation in Alberta is, underneath the noise, mostly a conversation about capacity and pace, not about the character of the people coming here.

A few things would help, and none of them require treating newcomers as a threat.

First, tie immigration targets to actual regional capacity, housing starts, school enrollment room, healthcare staffing, rather than treating the national number as something that applies evenly everywhere. Alberta’s pressures aren’t Toronto’s pressures.

Second, invest seriously in settlement and language support in the first two to three years, rather than assuming integration will happen on its own. Communities that get this support integrate faster and with less friction than communities left to sort it out alone.

Third, be honest and specific when addressing the assimilation cases that do occur, rather than letting them become a stand-in for an entire group. Naming a specific practice or specific incident as unacceptable is different from suggesting an entire culture or religion is a problem. The first builds trust. The second builds resentment, on both sides.

Fourth, keep the economic argument in view alongside the moral one. We’re not taking in immigrants purely out of generosity, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Being honest about the economic self-interest behind our policy actually makes the case easier to defend, because it stops sounding like charity that could be withdrawn and starts sounding like a mutual arrangement that both sides have a stake in maintaining.

Alberta’s referendum question isn’t going to settle this. But how we talk about it between now and the vote will shape whether the conversation stays about policy and capacity, or slides into something uglier. That choice is still ours to make.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Four hours and forty four minutes is a long time to sit with two people talking about the end of the world as they see it. I listened to the interview between Shawn Ryan and Candace Owens in one sitting, on a drive that did not require four and a half hours, so I sat in the driveway for the last forty minutes to finish it. That alone tells you something about the format. It is built to hold you. I should add that at the time of this writing, it has had 5.9 million views on Youtube.

The tone was easy. Two people who like each other, unhurried, no network clock ticking down a segment. Owens sounded reasonable in the way people sound reasonable when they are certain. Ryan asked the questions a curious friend would ask, not a journalist’s questions, and that changes what gets said and what gets left unchallenged. I did not always agree with what I heard. Some of it I found sound, some of it common sense dressed up as revelation, and running underneath nearly all of it was a current of conspiracy and a deep distrust of government and institutions.

The part that stayed with me the most was the framing of Israel. Owens has been telling audiences of millions that the Israeli government was behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and in the same breath that Israel is steering American and even Canadian foreign policy toward its own war with Iran. She has said, in effect, that American servicemen are not fighting America’s war. She is not alone in this. Tucker Carlson has spent the last year making a similar case, and figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed it from inside the Republican caucus itself. What is notable is that these are not fringe voices anymore. They are some of the most listened to political commentators in North America, all of whom backed Trump hard in 2024, and all of whom now describe themselves as disillusioned by him, specifically over Israel and Iran. Owens has said on camera that she is embarrassed she told people to vote for him. Carlson has said versions of the same thing. None of this makes them liberal. They remain hard conservative, deeply skeptical of centralized government, and instinctively libertarian on most domestic questions. What has shifted is where they place their trust, and it is no longer with the Republican establishment or with Israel as an ally beyond question.

I want to be careful here, because Kirk’s death is not a settled matter to be casual about. He was shot at Utah Valley University in September of last year, a man is standing trial for it, and the legal process is still working through the evidence. Owens has built a public case, outside that courtroom, involving alternative weapons, tampering, and foreign involvement, and she has done it with total conviction and no hedging. That certainty is the product, as much as any argument she makes.

Here is why I keep circling back to this. It was an Albertan who told me to listen to these podcasters. This person’s media diet is almost entirely this world, long-form interviews, hours at a time, delivered with warmth and confidence and an unrelenting suspicion of government. And this same person has told me, more than once and without irony, that Alberta needs to separate from Canada.

That is not a coincidence I can wave away. Alberta is heading toward an actual referendum question on October 19 of this year, and the polling through the spring told a mixed story. Support for full independence sat around 18 to 19 percent in the most recent numbers, well down from the mid to high 20s earlier in the year, but a competing poll had it climbing to 27 percent, the highest in five years of tracking. Whatever the precise number, this is not a fringe position anymore either. It is a live question on a real ballot, and the people most drawn to it describe their motivation less in terms of old grievances and more in terms of a belief that Alberta’s future is simply better outside Canada.

I think about what feeds that belief. If your daily diet of political information is nearly five hour conversations that treat distrust of government as the default posture, that frame Israel as a hidden hand in world events, that describe institutions as compromised almost by definition, it is not a large step to apply that same lens to Ottawa. Once you have decided that the CIA, the FBI, Israeli intelligence, and the mainstream press are all working some angle they will not admit to, why would the federal government of Canada be exempt from suspicion. The style of thinking generalizes even when the specific claims do not.

I am not writing this to tell anyone what to believe about Israel, Iran, or who killed Charlie Kirk. I am writing it because I spend my working life around young people who are absorbing political reality from exactly this kind of content, long, personable, confident, and largely unchallenged by anyone in the room. Alberta’s future, separatist or not, is going to be shaped by a generation that gets its politics from podcasts or Youtube before it gets them from anywhere else. The format rewards certainty over accuracy and charisma over correction. That is the part I think worth naming pointedly, whatever you make of the arguments themselves.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

A reporter named Markham Hilsop asked me last week if Alberta could pull back from where Christian nationalism is taking it. I gave him an answer I didn’t love giving. Every society that has drifted toward a destructive ideology has stayed on that path until the pain became personal. Not warnings. Not data. Pain. People need to feel the cost in their own household before they reconsider what they were told would save them.

Call it a pattern rather than fatalism, one that keeps repeating because we keep refusing to learn it in advance.

Modern liberal democracy, with all its flaws, built things that quietly kept people alive. Unemployment insurance. Universal health care. Public systems for addiction and mental illness that treated a crisis as a health problem instead of a moral failure. None of it was perfect and none of it was cheap. But it was cheaper than the alternative, because the alternative doesn’t make the need disappear. It just moves the cost from a budget line to a sidewalk, a jail cell, an emergency room, a grieving family.

Look at the United States eighteen months into the current administration, and this time look at the numbers instead of the slogans. The Tax Foundation calculates the 2025 and 2026 tariffs together as roughly a $1,500 tax increase per American household this year, the largest tax hike as a share of GDP since 1993. Goldman Sachs estimated that about 55 percent of tariff costs were passed straight through to consumers rather than absorbed by exporters. A Harvard Business School pricing study found imported goods rising roughly twice as fast as domestic ones, adding about seven tenths of a percentage point to the consumer price index by last fall. Manufacturing, the sector tariffs were supposed to rebuild, has been shedding jobs for most of the past year, with estimates of the total loss ranging from the tens of thousands into six figures depending on which government dataset and time window you use. The range itself is the point. Nobody is measuring manufacturing job growth.

You can see the cracks forming in the coalition that built this. The founder of Leaving MAGA, Rich Logis has spoken about how right-wing media, Fox News chief among them, stopped doing journalism years ago and started doing grievance theatre. Not reporting the world as it is, but manufacturing anger because anger keeps people watching and voting a certain way. Shawn Ryan, who built a massive audience partly on pro-Trump sentiment, has said publicly that he no longer supports the agenda, and he points to the same source. I’m citing him narrowly, on that one point about the media diet that shaped his politics. His break with Trump has other threads, including foreign policy grievances tied to Israel, that belong in a different article than this one.

The record backs him up. Media Bias/Fact Check rates Fox News a questionable source given to extreme bias and the promotion of propaganda and conspiracy content, and a University of Texas analysis found Fox dispatching false or misleading health and election stories at roughly twice the rate of NBC and ABC. Reuters Institute survey data shows 43 percent of Americans say they distrust Fox News outright, tied with CNN for the highest distrust rating of any major outlet.

I know what comes next in the fringe-right talking points here at home, because I hear it constantly. CBC is dismissed as a liberal mouthpiece pushing a social agenda, and the fix on offer is to defund it and let people get their news from Fox instead. The trust data runs the opposite direction. That same Reuters Institute survey ranks CBC fourth in trust among major English-language Canadian outlets, with 68 percent of respondents trusting its coverage. Media Bias/Fact Check does note a left-of-centre editorial lean and occasional loaded language at CBC, and it has made real mistakes worth criticizing, an unproven on-air claim about Russian involvement in the 2022 trucker convoy protest among them. But rating an outlet as left-leaning with high factual standards is a different finding than rating one as a questionable source prone to propaganda. Trading the first for the second flatters an existing grievance rather than correcting a bias problem.

That is the machine Alberta is plugging into.

We have a real and growing audience here for Fox-style media, for American culture war imports, for a version of Christian nationalism that borrows the language of faith and discards almost everything Christianity actually asks of a person. Care for the poor. Welcome the stranger. Heal the sick without asking first whether they deserve it. What gets marketed here as Christian values is often closer to a political brand that uses scripture as packaging.

And it shows up in policy, not just rhetoric, though the picture is more specific than a blanket claim about social spending. Alberta increased its addiction and recovery budget this year, adding treatment beds and recovery communities, and that investment is real and worth acknowledging. At the same time, the 2025 budget cut AISH funding by $49 million, which the government attributes to caseload changes and a new federal disability benefit offsetting provincial costs, though disability advocates count it as one piece of a broader pattern of tightening. The disability income program replacing AISH next year, ADAP, pays new recipients $200 a month less than the current AISH rate, and cuts the amount a person can earn before their benefit is clawed back from $1,072 a month to $700, a figure the government raised from an initial $350 after public pressure. Budget 2026 also caps some income support recipients at six months of benefits, a change the government projects will save $44 million this year rising to $177 million by 2028-29. The government calls this getting people back to work. Carolyn Krahn, executive director of the Workers’ Resource Centre, has publicly cautioned against a one-size-fits-all approach to who counts as expected to work, saying she isn’t convinced the cap will actually reduce the number of people needing support, since it doesn’t address the health conditions or housing instability that put many of them there in the first place. Push someone off income support who cannot work and the cost simply moves downstream, to emergency rooms, shelters, and policing, where it shows up bigger and harder to trace back to the policy that caused it.

So what actually stops Alberta from sliding further into this.

I want to be honest about why this is hard, because the honesty matters more than a tidy list of fixes. Distrust travels as one broadcastable sentence. Don’t believe them, they’re lying to you, works on almost anyone regardless of their specific grievance, and it costs the person spreading it nothing to send it to a million people at once. Trust doesn’t travel that way. Trust gets rebuilt one relationship at a time, because it depends on a specific track record with a specific person, and there is no version of it that scales like a viral clip does. Outrage content is also cheap to produce and profitable to run, while the slow work of restoring someone’s trust in a source, a neighbour, an institution, has no revenue model behind it at all. And joining a conspiracy costs almost nothing, an instant sense of belonging and an explanation for real anxiety, while leaving costs the very things that made it attractive, the community, the identity, the feeling of finally understanding what everyone else supposedly missed. Getting pulled in exploits fast systems. Getting pulled out requires slow ones. That mismatch is why a Facebook page can recruit faster than a family can talk someone back out.

Knowing that changes what solutions are worth funding here. Local journalism that still does the boring work of checking facts before publishing, a paper covering the county council meeting or the school board budget, rebuilds the habit of trusting a source that got something right about your own town last week, in a way no national outlet accused of running the liberal agenda ever will. Churches and faith communities saying plainly that nationalism wrapped in scripture is not the faith they practice, because silence from the pulpit reads as agreement, and because that message travels through exactly the relational network the separatist and alt-right pull depends on. Neighbours willing to have the uncomfortable conversation with the family member who has gone all in on this, one conversation at a time, knowing it will not out-broadcast what recruited that person in the first place, only outlast it. And a willingness from the rest of us to address the grievance underneath the conspiracy, rural neglect, economic anxiety, the sense of being talked down to from Edmonton and Ottawa, separately from the conspiratorial story wrapped around it, because that grievance is real even when the explanation attached to it isn’t.

None of this wins fast, and some of it may not win at all. The recruiting side has industrial scale on its side. The relational side never will. But it wins in decades if it wins, and giving up on it because it is slow just leaves the field to whatever is fastest.

I would rather Alberta learn this from watching the United States than from living it. History says we probably won’t. I would like to be wrong about that.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

A teacher friend of mine can tell you almost nothing about what she learned in grade 5. She had a teacher that year who was, in her words, mean. Not once in a while mean. A daily condition. She passed the grade. She has the report card somewhere to prove it. But ask her what she learned that year and she goes quiet. It isn’t there.

Ask her about grade 2 and the year unspools in detail. The teacher, the classroom, the projects, the specific way certain concepts were explained to her at seven years old. She remembers being cared for. She remembers almost everything she learned.

Same brain. Same district, probably the same building. One year of content is gone. One year is intact two and a half decades later. The difference wasn’t her intelligence or her effort. It was whether the adult in the room made her feel safe enough to think.

This week I talked with Adelee Penner about a book I had just finished reading, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made.” Adelee had read it years before me and had been sitting with its implications for education a lot longer than I had. Neither of us walked away from that conversation satisfied. Between the two of us, over a half a century in this profession, and we agreed we haven’t done nearly enough to educate our own teachers about what emotion actually does to learning. That conversation is the reason I went looking for the research that follows.

For a long time, education treated this as a nice-to-have. Warmth was a bonus on top of instruction, not part of it. The neuroscience says otherwise, and it says it bluntly. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who has spent her career studying the brain’s relationship to learning, put it this way: it is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thought, or make meaningful decisions without emotion. Not difficult. Impossible. The brain evolved to conserve its considerable energy costs for things that matter to the organism, and “mattering” is an emotional judgment before it is a cognitive one. We only think deeply about what we care about.

This overturned an older assumption in neuroscience, the one that treated emotion as static on a circuit that reason had to fight through. Antonio Damasio’s work with patients who had damage to the brain’s emotion-processing regions showed the opposite. Their logic stayed intact. Their ability to function in the world collapsed. Rational decision-making, it turns out, requires an emotional rudder to steer it. When you strip the emotion out, you don’t get pure reason; you’re left with paralysis.

Now run that framework backward through my friend’s two teachers and the outcome isn’t surprising anymore. It’s predictable. Fear-based learning gets encoded around threat and escape. It’s shallow by design, because the brain isn’t trying to build something durable, it’s trying to survive the hour. Curiosity-based learning, the kind a caring teacher makes possible, gets encoded as something worth keeping. One year taught her to get through class. The other taught her something about the world. Only one of those survives contact with time.

I think about this differently because of where my career has taken me. I’ve worked in Northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, and I served as Director of Education at Prince Albert Grand Council. I have sat with the legacy of residential schools long enough to know that what I’m describing isn’t an abstraction.

For 166 years, Indigenous children in this country were removed from their families and placed in institutions explicitly designed, in the words of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and assimilate a people out of existence. Children were told their language was evil and their culture was backward. Every condition Immordino-Yang identifies as necessary for deep learning, safety, being valued by the adult in the room, the freedom to be curious rather than defensive, was not simply missing from residential schools. It was inverted on purpose.

If we filter the neuroscience through that, the results are not a mystery. A nervous system locked permanently into threat detection doesn’t get to choose curiosity. It gets fear of failure and an instinct to avoid anything that feels too much like school, patterns documented again and again in the survivors themselves. What got transmitted in those buildings as learning, when anything did, was shallow, compliance-driven, and built to be forgotten as fast as possible, because forgetting was the safer option. Although, the memories of the abuse were not to be forgotten.

It didn’t stop with the generation that walked through those doors. Children of survivors carry elevated adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores without ever setting foot in an institution, because trauma doesn’t require direct exposure to pass itself forward. A parent whose own capacity for warmth was stripped out of them at age six has less of it left to offer their own child twenty years later. The caring that Immordino-Yang’s research identifies as the precondition for deep learning was rationed out over generations before some of these children ever opened a textbook.

None of that requires an institution as extreme as a residential school to operate. A child going home to violence or instability carries the same threat-primed nervous system into a classroom that may be perfectly kind. The room doesn’t have to be hostile. The child’s wiring already is. What looks like an attention problem, or a motivation problem, or a discipline problem is very often a nervous system that never got the memo that this room is safe. Educators unfamiliar with trauma tend to read the behaviour and miss the mechanism.

I’d be lying if I said this framework stayed comfortably in the past or in someone else’s home life. Last fall our teachers went through a strike. It was emotionally draining. Many of us felt degraded and disrespected, and we said so, plainly, to each other. I don’t think that experience stayed contained to staff rooms and bargaining updates.

Teachers’ emotions are not private information they keep to themselves once the bell rings. Research on emotional contagion in classrooms is consistent on this point: what a teacher feels, students perceive, and it becomes linked to their own motivation and emotional state, whether anyone names it aloud or not. Burnout and exhaustion travel the same route, degrading the consistency, warmth, and organization that Immordino-Yang’s model identifies as the conditions for deep encoding. Achievement drops. Student motivation shifts from wanting to learn toward simply complying, which is the exact fear-based mode that produces the forgettable version of school.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an indictment of teachers who were exhausted and hurting. It’s the same mechanism running through the other end of the relationship. My friend’s grade 5 teacher chose to be unkind. Our staff last fall didn’t choose exhaustion, it was done to them, and their capacity to offer students the emotional safety this whole framework depends on was depleted at the source. A tired, demoralized adult cannot fully hand a child the sense of safety that deep learning requires, not because they’ve stopped caring, but because the resource that caring draws on was drained before the first bell of the day.

If there’s a single thread through all of this, from one seven-year-old’s kind teacher to a residential school dormitory to a staff room after a bruising strike, it’s that emotion was never separate from learning. It was the mechanism the whole time. We built school systems as though content delivery and emotional experience were two different jobs, one for the curriculum and one for whoever had spare time for it. The brain never agreed to that division. It only ever learned deeply through one door, and that door was always caring.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Pierre Poilievre had his moment. Twenty-five points ahead of the Liberals before the 2025 election. A trucker convoy behind him, a party unified, a country tired of Trudeau. Then Mark Carney walked in, wearing a suit that looked more conservative than half the front bench, and Poilievre started losing the only asset that ever mattered to him: momentum.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a number of podcasts lately, but I must turn to the Curse of Politics podcast. Four voices, one from each corner of the spectrum, releasing weekly since long before Carney was a name anyone outside a central bank recognized. Kory Teneycke sits in as the conservative voice, the man who ran Doug Ford’s three winning campaigns. He is not an outsider lobbing grenades from the sidelines. He is inside the tent, and he has spent over a year telling Poilievre the same thing every week: you cannot win by being against everything.

Poilievre didn’t take the advice. He took a shot at the people giving it.

At the Calgary Stampede this month, Poilievre congratulated Kerry-Lynne Findlay on winning the BC Conservative leadership “against Liberal lobbyists from out east,” as CBC News reported. Findlay won. She wasn’t the target. The remark was aimed at Caroline Elliott, the runner-up, whose campaign manager happened to be Teneycke. Elliott didn’t let it go. She said she’d backed Poilievre from start to finish, and accused him of celebrating her political demise as though she’d defected to the Liberals, a detail Chantal Hébert raised on Good Talk. Elliot’s point, unstated but obvious: a federal leader’s job is to unite the conservative movement, not settle scores with the runner-up in a provincial race he had no business commenting on.

Teneycke didn’t let it go either. On the Curse of Politics, he said somebody needed to do a wellness check on Poilievre, because picking fights with conservatives across the country makes no sense for a man who is supposed to be leading them.

This is the pattern. Not a one-off spat, not a bad week. Ford defended Teneycke publicly over a year ago when Teneycke called the 2025 campaign a disaster in the making, telling reporters, as the Globe and Mail recorded, that sometimes the truth hurts. It still applies. The people telling Poilievre he has a problem aren’t Liberals. They aren’t strategists auditioning for Carney’s team. They are Conservatives who worked campaigns, won elections, and are watching him burn goodwill inside his own party the same way he used to burn it against Trudeau.

That’s the real story of Poilievre’s decline, and it has almost nothing to do with Carney. Carney governing from the centre-right took away Poilievre’s easiest arguments, the ones about inflation and overreach that used to write themselves. But the deeper problem is that Poilievre never built a second gear. He knows how to be against something. He has never shown Canadians, or his own party, he can be the next Prime Minister. Listing grievances is not a platform. Naming enemies is not a plan.

A leader who spends his energy pointing out what is wrong with everyone else, Liberals, lobbyists, provincial leadership candidates, eventually runs out of people to blame who aren’t standing next to him. Poilievre is there now. He picked a fight with the runner-up in a provincial leadership race he had no reason to comment on, and in doing so, he picked a fight with the strategist who has been diagnosing his campaign’s failures in public for over a year. Teneycke didn’t start that fight looking for a fight. He started it because he watched a winnable election get lost, and he has been saying since why it happened.

Poilievre’s supporters will call this disloyalty. I’d call it the last warning a party gives a leader before it stops giving warnings. Doug Ford, one of the most successful conservative campaigners in the country, backed Teneycke’s diagnosis while Poilievre was still the frontrunner, and has since told reporters that Poilievre didn’t lift a finger for him in the Ontario election and told his own MPs to stay out of it. Caroline Elliott, who just lost a leadership race, still had enough standing left to tell the federal leader to knock it off. When the people inside your coalition are more willing to name the problem than you are, the problem isn’t Carney. It’s you.

The floor crossings make the same point from a different angle. Four Conservative MPs have joined the Liberals since November, and one of them, Chris d’Entremont, didn’t dress it up as a policy disagreement. CBC News reported he said he left because of Poilievre’s leadership style. That is a former caucus member, not a podcast commentator or a provincial premier, naming the exact problem Teneycke and Elliott were pointing at. And yet Poilievre walked into January’s mandatory leadership review in Calgary, the one his own party’s constitution forced on him after the election loss, and cleared it with 87 percent support among delegates on hand, according to CBC News. Worth being honest about what that number is. It’s 87 percent of 2,588 delegates, a small, structurally loyal slice of a membership that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, drawn from riding associations and gathered on Poilievre’s home turf in Calgary. That’s not a rigged result, it’s how every party leadership review works, but it’s also not a plebiscite of the base. It measures organizational loyalty, the people most plugged into the party rewarding an incumbent. The floor-crossings measure something else entirely: sitting MPs with direct knowledge of caucus and campaign mechanics making a judgment about competence. Both can be true at once. The grassroots haven’t turned. However, MPs like Chris Warkentin, who posted that Canadians are “rejecting Carney’s bait and switch,” are still out defending him publicly. That’s the real shape of this story. It isn’t a party unanimously plotting his exit. It’s a leader bleeding caucus members and taking friendly fire from people who’ve run winning campaigns, while the base still isn’t ready to admit what some of its own MPs are already saying with their feet.

Chantal Hébert put a number on it. On Good Talk, she said she isn’t sure Poilievre survives the year, and that she hasn’t been sure for months. She also laid out the mechanism that actually removes a Conservative leader who won’t go quietly: not more floor crossings to the Liberals, but caucus members choosing to sit as independents, the same route that forced a leadership vote on Stockwell Day years ago. She waved off the excuse that there’s no one ready to replace him, pointing out that a movement which has produced sitting premiers and a full Harper cabinet clearly has people capable of leading it better than the man doing it now. And when her co-host floated that a full membership vote might back Poilievre by something like 95 percent, she pushed back immediately, calling that number a guess with no real backing and repeating that delegates at one convention were never a stand-in for the whole movement.

There’s a reason this costs Poilievre more than it earns him, and it isn’t just my opinion. A Conversation review of the political science on negative campaigning keeps landing on the same uncomfortable finding: attacking constantly makes a leader look sharper but less trustworthy, a trade that reads well in a debate clip and poorly over years. People who feel like they’re being worked on rather than spoken to tend to push back against the source, not the target, a reaction researchers call psychological reactance. The same research links sustained negativity to voter exhaustion rather than persuasion, hardening the people already on your side while doing nothing for anyone else. A 2023 Pew survey cited there found nearly two in three American adults feel drained just thinking about politics. I doubt the Canadian number is much better, and Poilievre’s style is built entirely on giving people more of the thing that’s draining them.

That matters more than usual right now because of where the exhaustion is already coming from. Trump is running economic wars, military posturing, and PR campaigns against half the world at once, and Canadians wake up to some version of it daily whether we want to or not. I don’t need to hear the opposition leader adding another layer of dread on top of that. I’m not asking for false comfort, the kind that pretends the trade war or the cost of living isn’t real. I’m asking for the version of hope that actually lowers stress: a leader who names a problem once, then spends his energy on what he’d do about it, instead of spending every appearance re-litigating who’s to blame. Carney, whatever else is true about him, mostly sounds like a person describing a plan. Poilievre mostly sounds like a person describing an enemy. Given what’s already coming out of Washington, Canadians don’t need more of the second thing from inside our own borders.

Poilievre still has time to change course. However, time is the one thing his critics keep saying he’s running out of.

Vince Hill writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

My Saturday piece is usually an education topic. Curriculum, assessment, something from inside a school. This week I’m making an exception. What follows isn’t about a classroom, but it belongs in one. Most Canadians never learned the actual terms of the treaties their country was built on, what was promised, what was written down, and what quietly got left out. That’s an education gap as real as any I write about on a normal week, so I’m treating it as one.

Chief Allan Adam stood in Fort McMurray this month and said something that should make us all pause for a moment. His members still receive $5 a year under Treaty 8, signed in 1899. Not $5 a month. Not $5 adjusted for the cost of living. Five dollars, once a year, unchanged since Queen Victoria was on the throne. His nation is suing Ottawa, not for back pay, but to have the amount modernized so it means something again.

This isn’t a one-off grievance. Depending on the treaty, annuity payments across Canada sit at either $4 or $5, and none of them have ever moved. Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba is pursuing class-action status on behalf of 36 Treaty 5 nations over the same unchanged $5, now 148 years frozen. The pattern is national, not local, and it’s worth asking how it got this way, and whether “it got this way” was ever really an accident.

What a treaty is

Most Canadians grow up thinking of a treaty as a contract. Sign it, fulfil the listed terms, both sides are square. Former Chief Ernest Sundown once described it to me differently: a treaty is a covenant. A contract ends when its terms are met. A covenant doesn’t. It’s a relationship entered into for as long as the relationship exists, renewed by conduct on both sides, not closed off by a single payment schedule fixed at signing. That distinction sits underneath everything else in this piece. If Ottawa understood these agreements as covenants, in the sense that First Nations signatories did, a $5 figure frozen for over a century wouldn’t be a technical breach of contract law. It would be an ongoing failure to hold up one side of a living relationship.

What the treaty actually said

The numbered treaties use language like “cede, release, surrender and yield up.” That phrasing only makes sense if the Crown understood the land already belonged to the people signing it. You can’t surrender what was never yours. The written text of Treaty 8 acknowledges title. That much is not in dispute.

What is in dispute, and has been for over a century, is whether the written text captured what was actually agreed to. When commissioners first presented Treaty 8 to the Lesser Slave Lake nations in 1899, the negotiations nearly collapsed. The treaty as read left out things the signatories considered essential to survival as hunters, trappers, and fishers, and they refused to sign it. Agreement only came after commissioners made additional promises out loud: that traditional ways of life would not be interfered with, that the old and destitute would be cared for, that medical aid would be provided. None of that made it into the document Ottawa later held itself to.

Bishop Gabriel Breynat, who interpreted at those negotiations, swore an affidavit decades later stating plainly that the written text “was not explicit enough to give satisfaction to the Indians,” and that it was the spoken promises, not the paper, that secured consent. Internal correspondence from the period shows officials were in a hurry to close Treaty 8 before northern nations could be “influenced” by the Treaty 6 signatories to the south, who by then already had grievances about promises that hadn’t held. Ottawa knew its own record with earlier treaties was already breaking down, and moved to sign the next one before word could spread.

This is one party controlling the pen, aware the other side’s leverage is limited, quietly managing what gets written down. Equals don’t negotiate that way.

The inflation excuse doesn’t hold

Anyone tempted to wave this off as a product of its time should look at what economists were doing in exactly this era. In 1875, the same year the Crown froze the Robinson Treaty annuity at $4 for good, William Stanley Jevons was publishing arguments in favour of inflation-indexed bonds. The idea wasn’t fringe. Index numbers for tracking price change had been in use since the Napoleonic Wars, and the London Economist had been publishing a running price index since 1869. Indexing a payment to the cost of living wasn’t some 21st-century innovation retrofitted onto old promises. Colonial Massachusetts indexed soldier pay to a basket of goods in 1780, nearly a century before Treaty 8 was even signed.

The people negotiating and ratifying these treaties had access to the same financial thinking that, decades later, would let Ottawa build inflation protection into other programs without a second thought. The Canada Child Benefit is indexed to the Consumer Price Index every July, by law, automatically. Nobody has to sue for that. It was simply built into the design. The treaty annuity wasn’t. Both governments had the same tools available. Ottawa simply chose which payment was worth protecting.

The timing this month makes the contrast hard to miss. Prime Minister Mark Carney posted on LinkedIn that the Canada Child Benefit rises again on Monday, up to $8,157 a year per child under six, framing it as money going where it matters most. He’s not wrong. But that increase is the routine, automatic outcome of indexation Ottawa built into the CCB back in 2018. It required no announcement of hardship, no court case, no chief standing in front of cameras asking to be taken seriously. It’s the same week Allan Adam is in the news explaining why $5 a year, frozen since 1899, is an insult. One payment updates itself every July without anyone having to ask. The other hasn’t moved in 127 years and only might, now, because someone finally sued.

A pattern the courts have already confirmed

The Robinson Treaties give us the clearest legal proof of deliberate conduct. Those treaties contained an augmentation clause: if the ceded territory produced enough wealth, the Crown was to increase the annuity accordingly. Resource revenue from that land ran into the billions. The annuity stayed at $4 anyway, from 1875 until a Supreme Court ruling forced the issue in 2024. The Court called the Crown’s 149 years of inaction dishonourable and ordered it to negotiate real compensation. Robinson-Huron beneficiaries settled for $10 billion in back compensation. Robinson-Superior beneficiaries are still negotiating theirs, with a claim north of $126 billion once resource revenue and compound interest are factored in.

Treaty 8 and Treaty 5 don’t have an augmentation clause, so the legal path for Adam’s case is different. But the underlying behaviour is identical: a payment fixed in writing, a party with every reason to know its real value would erode, and a hundred-plus years of silence unless someone sued.

I’m not going to claim I’ve found a memo where an official wrote down that letting the annuity rot was meant to hasten the disappearance of a people. I looked, and I haven’t seen one. What I have seen is that this era’s Department of Indian Affairs was openly assimilationist in its own words, that starvation was used as leverage to force nations onto reserves in the same decades these treaties were being signed, and that the government’s fiscal exposure under these treaties was calculated per person. A shrinking population meant a shrinking bill, with or without inflation. Whether the annuity freeze was a deliberate lever in that machine or simply one more place where nobody bothered to protect Indigenous interests, the effect was the same either way.

What should happen now

Index the annuities. Apply the same fiscal discipline Ottawa already uses for the CCB and the GST credit. If a payment to a Canadian family adjusts every July without anyone having to ask, a payment owed under a nation-to-nation treaty should not require a lawsuit and a hundred and twenty-seven years of waiting. The Restoule decision already established that the Crown has a duty to act honourably and diligently on these obligations. That duty didn’t appear only for the treaties with an augmentation clause written in. It’s the same Crown, the same century of neglect, and the same fix available right now.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Further reading

• CBC News, “Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation sues Canada over treaty annuity payments stuck at $5” (July 16, 2026): https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/athabasca-chipewyan-treaty-annuity-lawsuit-9.7272261

• Global News, “Alberta First Nation sues Ottawa over $5 treaty annuity, argues amount stuck in 1899” (July 15, 2026): https://globalnews.ca/news/11967576/athabasca-chipewyan-first-nation-treaty-8-payments/

• CBC News, “Manitoba First Nation sues feds, alleges unchanged $5 annuity payments violate treaty” (December 16, 2023): https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7061085

• Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Treaty Research Report: Treaty Eight (1899), by Dennis F.K. Madill: https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/DAM/DAM-CIRNAC-RCAANC/DAM-TAG/STAGING/texte-text/tre8_1100100028810_eng.pdf

• Supreme Court of Canada, Ontario (Attorney General) v. Restoule, 2024 SCC 27: https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/20493/index.do

I was watching Danielle Smith on Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen, and she explained her immigration referendum questions the way she explains everything: calmly, in complete sentences, with numbers ready. No slurs. No sneering. Just a premier walking through categories of residency status like she’s reading off a spreadsheet. Permanent residents get full access to programs, same as citizens, nothing’s changed there. Temporary residents are the issue. Asylum seekers who don’t get approved, international students, temporary foreign workers. She groups them together and says they’re putting an extra burden on social programs, paying in $150 million in tax revenue against what her office pegs at a billion dollars in costs.

I want to be honest about what that sounds like on first listen. It sounds like accounting. It sounds like the kind of thing a reasonable person says when they’re worried about a budget. She reaches for Australia, for the UK, for the idea that guest workers everywhere are expected to cover their own healthcare, that other countries make newcomers wait five or ten years before they’re eligible for benefits. She says she’d never go be a guest worker in someone else’s country and expect their taxpayers to fund her. It’s reciprocity. It’s fairness. It’s the kind of framing built to survive a fact-check, because there’s no factual claim in it you can pin down and call false.

What’s noteworthy for each of us to muse about is she never says an ethnicity. She never says a country of origin. She talks about status categories: permanent resident, temporary resident, asylum seeker, guest worker. Status categories are real, and drawing lines around eligibility for public programs is a normal thing for governments to debate. That’s precisely why this works as a vehicle. The language is clean enough that she can stand in front of a camera and defend it as policy, and technically she’s right that none of it is a racial claim.

But nobody hears speeches in a vacuum. When a premier stands up and says newcomers are draining the province’s social programs, most of her audience isn’t picturing a British software engineer here on a two-year work permit. They’re picturing whoever they already associate with immigration in this country right now, and everyone knows who that is. She hasn’t said it. She doesn’t have to. The category “temporary resident” becomes a stand-in, and the stand-in gets filled by whatever the listener already believes. Smith gave a fiscal argument. Some fraction of the people who heard it walked away with a racial one, and she has said herself, on the record, that she understands this is a live risk. Asked directly whether blaming Alberta’s problems on immigration was accurate, she called that framing inaccurate. She’s also said the impression that immigrants are the cause of the province’s strain is quite problematic for people already facing hostility. She sees the wire she’s walking. She’s walking it anyway.

One of my readers, Michelle Shaw, pushed me further on this topic last week. Her point was that you shouldn’t measure Smith’s relationship to violence by whether she calls for it directly. You measure it by what she stays silent on. Smith doesn’t speak out against anti-2SLGBTQ hate in this province, and her government has passed legislation that Shaw argues endorses it rather than restrains it. Smith has also made clear that First Nations resistance to her government’s resource projects will be met with legal force. In both cases, online and real-world hate incidents aimed at those groups have risen afterward. Shaw’s term for this is stochastic terrorism: a government doesn’t need to order the harm, it just needs to keep signalling who the acceptable targets are and let the crowd supply the rest, while the government keeps its hands clean enough to say it never told anyone to do that. But the line Shaw said that really stuck with me: it’s the political version of the schoolyard bully insisting you stop hitting his fist with your face.

Another reader, who goes by Bill, pushed back on something I’d said almost in passing last week as well, that there’s little direct evidence of violence in any of this. Bill’s point is that I’m using too narrow a definition of the word. I picture tear gas and riot lines when I hear violence, and by that measure the UCP looks clean. But Bill asks me to think about violence the way society already thinks about domestic abuse, where the harm is often emotional and structural rather than a bruise you can photograph. People dying in emergency rooms while they wait aren’t dying because of a specific piece of legislation. They’re dying because of governmental inaction on problems the government has known about for years. AISH recipients losing support while being publicly recast as frauds is the same pattern Ralph Klein ran decades ago, when he floated busing people on welfare out to British Columbia. Bill’s sharpest example is aimed straight at Smith’s referendum wording itself: a government that won’t define who “immigrants” actually means, and lets the ambiguity do the work of suspicion, is practicing a form of mental and emotional abuse on the people that ambiguity gets aimed at, newcomers denigrated online with growing frequency, and their children caught in the middle of a fight they didn’t start. Bill’s phrase for the proposal to charge newly arrived families a fee for their kids to attend public school while immigration paperwork is still processing was that it amounts to inflicted anguish on parents and children who have no part in the politics being played over their heads.

I think Bill and Shaw are describing the same structure from two different vantage points. Shaw is watching what the government refuses to condemn. Bill is watching what the government’s inaction and phrasing do to people who never show up in a headline. Both land on the same conclusion I keep circling back to: the cruelty doesn’t announce itself. It gets dressed in status categories and budget lines and program names, and it moves through the province as social permission rather than as a directive, so that when someone gets hurt, there’s no order to point to and no premier who ever told anyone to do it.

That’s the difference between what Smith says and what she causes. A careful listener hears status categories and a genuine fiscal debate. A less careful one, or an already-resentful one, hears permission. Not permission to be violent outright. Permission for the resentment to feel justified, dressed up in numbers, backed by a premier who sounds reasonable doing it, and backed further by a government that stays quiet exactly when its silence tells you who’s expendable.

So here’s where I land. Danielle Smith is not standing at a podium calling anyone a racial slur, and nobody serious should pretend otherwise. What she’s doing is quieter and, I’d argue, more durable. She’s building a vocabulary that lets people feel the resentment without ever having to name what they’re resentful of, she’s staying silent in the exact places where her silence does the most damage, and she’s doing all of it while acknowledging, in her own words, that this is precisely the harm critics are naming. That’s not a slip. That’s a premier who understands exactly what her language and her silence do, and has decided the referendum is worth it anyway.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

It’s 2:20 a.m. in the Alberta legislature. The UCP caucus has just voted, for the fourth time in two months, to invoke the notwithstanding clause, the constitutional override that shields a law from Charter challenge. Desks pound. Someone shouts “Hear, hear!” The Opposition benches shake their heads and say nothing. The premier isn’t in the room. She’s already gone home.

That scene stayed with me while I was reading How Democracies Die. Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote the book with Trump in mind, but the mechanism they describe isn’t American. It’s generic. Elected leaders erode democracy not by a coup, but by using the legal tools already sitting on the table, one at a time, each one defensible on its own, until the accumulation is the story. I don’t think Alberta is where they say Hungary or Venezuela ended up. But I think the tools are on the table here too, and I think it’s worth naming them plainly instead of waiting to see how the story ends.

The four warning signs

Levitsky and Ziblatt give four indicators of an authoritarian-leaning politician: rejection of the democratic rules of the game, denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, and a readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media. None of these requires a single dramatic act. All four show up as patterns, and patterns are exactly what a weekly news cycle is bad at tracking. So let’s track one.

Rejection of the rules of the game. Danielle Smith’s first bill as premier was the Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, legislation that, in its original form, would have let cabinet rewrite provincial law by order-in-council, without a legislature vote, any time MLAs judged that Ottawa had overstepped. Legal scholars across the political spectrum called it an end-run around responsible government. It was walked back under pressure, but the instinct behind it didn’t go away. Three years later, her government used time allocation to pass the Back to School Act, stripping teachers of their right to strike, in under twelve hours, while Smith herself was already on a plane to Saudi Arabia. Then came Bill 9: three more Charter overrides in a single sitting, on top of the one already used to end the teachers’ strike. Four invocations of Section 33 in two months, applied to a provision that had been used sparingly across the previous four decades of Alberta history. In January 2026, the province’s three chief justices found it necessary to issue a public statement defending judicial independence, after the premier spoke of wanting to “direct” the courts.

Denial of opponents’ legitimacy. This one is more rhetorical than legislative, and harder to pin to a single bill, but it’s consistent. Smith has framed federal jurisdiction, and by extension anyone in Alberta who works with it, as an occupying force rather than a legitimate order of government. During the sovereignty act debate, she suggested that a vote against her agenda amounted to Rachel Notley phoning her friend Justin Trudeau to override Alberta’s laws. Political opponents aren’t people to argue with in that frame. They’re proxies for an enemy.

Toleration of violence. This is the indicator I can least support with hard evidence, and I want to say that directly rather than stretch the comparison to fit. There’s no record of Smith encouraging or excusing political violence the way Levitsky and Ziblatt document with Trump. What exists is looser: a 2022 comment about wanting to issue pardons to people who’d broken pandemic health orders, retracted once she learned Alberta’s premier doesn’t have that power. That’s a governor-envy moment, not an incitement. I’m not going to manufacture a parallel that isn’t there.

Curtailing civil liberties. This is where the pattern is strongest. The same notwithstanding-clause bill that ended the teachers’ strike was followed by three more overrides restricting how transgender youth are named in schools, whether trans girls can compete in amateur sports, and whether minors can access gender-affirming care, overrides broad enough to exempt the laws from the Alberta Human Rights Act and the Alberta Bill of Rights, not just the federal Charter. The Canadian Medical Association and the Alberta Medical Association both challenged the health restriction before the override made that challenge moot. A sitting judge had already granted an injunction, finding a serious question about whether the ban would cause lasting psychological harm to transgender youth, and the government’s response was to remove the question from her courtroom entirely.

What the defenders say, and why I still think the pattern matters

I want to be fair to the other side of this, because Smith’s government has an answer, and it isn’t crazy on its face. Section 33 is written into the Constitution. It was put there deliberately, by the same framers who wrote the Charter, precisely so that legislatures could have the last word over courts in specific cases. Smith’s House Leader has said plainly that the courts remain a check on government power. Smith herself argues that a legislature elected by Albertans has the standing to override judicial rulings it disagrees with, because that’s what parliamentary supremacy means. None of the four notwithstanding invocations is, technically, unconstitutional. That’s the whole point of the clause.

Here’s why I don’t find that reassuring. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s central claim isn’t that authoritarian drift happens through illegal acts. It’s that it happens through legal acts, deployed in a way that breaks the unwritten norms (what they call mutual toleration and institutional forbearance) that make a constitution function as more than a rulebook. The notwithstanding clause existing is not the problem. The notwithstanding clause being invoked four times in two months, on a strike, on trans health care, on trans sport, on trans identity in schools, by a government that also drafted a bill to let cabinet rewrite law without the legislature and openly wants to “direct” judges, is a different animal from the clause being used once in forty years for a genuinely hard case. Forbearance is the norm of not using a power just because you technically can. That norm is the thing eroding here, and no single bill will ever be the smoking gun for that, because erosion of a norm doesn’t work that way. It works by repetition until repetition is the new normal.

The referendum irony

There’s a wrinkle worth sitting with. In December 2025, Smith became the first Alberta premier in ninety years to face an approved citizen recall petition. In May 2026, she announced a tenth referendum question for this October, asking whether Alberta should pursue a path toward separation from Canada. A government willing to override the Charter, the provincial Human Rights Act, and its own Bill of Rights in the same two months is now putting the province’s constitutional future to a direct vote of the people. I don’t think that’s hypocrisy exactly. Direct democracy and executive centralization aren’t opposites, Levitsky and Ziblatt would tell you plenty of illiberal leaders use referendums as legitimizing tools rather than checks. But it’s a reminder that the fight here isn’t between “the people” and “the institutions.” It’s between institutional forbearance and a government that has decided forbearance is optional.

Where I land

I’m not writing this to tell Albertans we live under an authoritarian government. We don’t. Alberta has courts that still rule against the premier, a press that still reports it, an opposition that still votes no at 2:20 in the morning even knowing it will lose. Those are the guardrails Levitsky and Ziblatt say matter most, and they’re still standing.

What I am saying is that the four warning signs in that book aren’t abstractions imported from Washington. Three of the four have observable, documented instances in Alberta over the past four years, and the fourth (legitimacy of opponents) is close behind. The book’s argument was never that democracies die in a single vote. It’s that they die from politicians testing how far the guardrails bend, learning the answer is further than expected, and testing again. Reading that argument next to Alberta’s own legislative record this past year, I don’t think the comparison is a stretch. I think it’s the most useful lens available for understanding what’s actually happening here, and I’d rather name it early than write the retrospective later.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Waneek Horn-Miller was fourteen years old on the Mercier Bridge in 1990, holding her four-year-old sister behind her, when a Canadian soldier drove a bayonet into her chest. She survived. The photograph of her, bleeding, still shielding her sister, became one of the defining images of the Oka Crisis.

The crisis started over a golf course. The town of Oka planned to expand a nine-hole course onto land at Kanesatake that included a Mohawk burial ground. Objections were filed for years and ignored. In March 1990, Mohawk community members set up a blockade to stop the expansion. By July, Quebec police stormed the barricade. An officer died in the exchange of gunfire. The Canadian Army was deployed. Mohawk communities at Kahnawake, in solidarity, blockaded the Mercier Bridge, cutting off a major commuter route into Montreal. Furious commuters gathered at the barricades and burned Mohawk effigies while police stood by and watched. The standoff lasted seventy-eight days. Horn-Miller was stabbed near its end, evacuating children across that bridge.

Most people reading this have never heard her name, or the length of the siege, or that it ended with the army occupying Mohawk territory into the fall.

A reader named kapowless brought this up in response to a piece I wrote about Alberta separatism. He described watching the standoff as a child. Effigies burning. Police standing by. A girl nearly dying on a bridge shielding her sister. He raised a direct question about the piece: why does an essay calling for patience and good-faith engagement ask that patience of people currently being targeted, while asking less scrutiny of the movement doing the targeting?

He was right to ask. I’d written about separatism as a policy disagreement, federal overreach, equalization, the CPP, jurisdiction. All real. But I’d framed the conversation as if every participant in it was arguing from the same footing, making the same kind of claim, facing the same kind of risk for making it. That’s not how it works, and I should have said so.

Separatism isn’t one thing. Some Albertans arguing for a referendum are doing so strictly on fiscal and jurisdictional grounds and want nothing to do with the racial and homophobic rhetoric that also runs through parts of the movement. Painting all of them with the worst material coming out of their coalition is the same flattening error this piece is about to name in others. The claim here isn’t that every separatist is responsible for every threat made in the movement’s name. It’s that commentary, mine included, routinely extends the fiscal wing of the movement a level of scrutiny it withholds from the rhetoric running alongside it, and that both exist inside the same public conversation whether any individual separatist endorses the second or not.

Here’s the pattern once you look for it. When a group raises a fiscal or jurisdictional grievance, we call it a legitimate concern and treat the burden of proof as belonging to whoever wants to dismiss it. When a different group raises a safety concern, that they are the target of dehumanizing language, that violence has been directed at them by name, we’re far quicker to call that emotional, or fringe, or a distraction from the real issue. Same structural move in both cases: someone is naming a cost being imposed on them. Only one version gets treated as an argument. The other gets treated as a complaint.

Having worked inside both a reserve-based education system and a provincial one, I’ve watched this asymmetry operate from both sides of that line.

A school board will sit through a parent’s objection to a fee increase for an hour, minutes, a follow-up email, a policy review. The same board, faced with a parent’s account of their child being targeted for their race or their family, will often move to de-escalate the parent before it moves to address the target. The first is treated as a stakeholder input. The second is treated as a temperature that needs managing.

You can watch the same split in how separatist rhetoric gets covered by commentators who consider themselves fair-minded. Complaints about Ottawa’s fiscal formula get taken at face value and analyzed on the merits. Language about “de-migration,” or framing around who counts as a real Albertan, gets waved off as fringe noise unrepresentative of the movement, even when it’s coming from people with real standing inside it. Both are claims being made by the same coalition, in the same spaces, often by the same people. Only one gets to set the terms of the debate.

This isn’t a ranking of who suffers more. It’s a claim about how institutions sort grievances into categories worth engaging and categories worth managing, and that sorting isn’t neutral. A separatist will say the same about Ottawa. Whether that claim holds up is a separate question from whether it gets heard. This piece isn’t adjudicating Alberta’s fiscal case. It’s naming who gets the hearing and who gets managed.

None of this means the fiscal and jurisdictional arguments are illegitimate. Some of them aren’t. It means treating the whole movement as a single, reasonable interlocutor requires ignoring the parts of it that aren’t, and that the people asked to ignore those parts hardest are usually the ones those parts are aimed at.

The October 19 referendum makes the point concretely. The UCP bundled the secession question with a set of immigration reform questions, treating both as legitimate matters for a ballot. At the same press conferences and court filings responding to that referendum, Treaty 8 Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi and Treaty 6 Grand Chief Joey Pete raised jurisdictional claims rooted in treaties that predate Alberta’s existence. Mikisew Cree leaders raised unsafe drinking water and healthcare access on reserve as reasons the province should address its own obligations before pursuing a secession vote. A court agreed the province owed First Nations consultation before proceeding. The public reaction to that ruling included calls to disregard the ruling and Treaty rights altogether. One set of grievances got a ballot question. The other got a court fight and comment-section dismissal.

None of this is an argument for pity. Nobody at Kanesatake or Kahnawake in 1990 was asking to be felt sorry for. They held a line over a burial ground and a golf course because it was right, not because it was sympathetic, and they held it through seventy-eight days of army occupation. Should they have had to fight over a golf course? No. But they held their heads up and did the right thing, and that’s the standard. Not who suffered more. Who was correct, and whether the rest of the country was willing to say so before the crisis forced the admission.

Understanding a grievance is not the same as excusing what gets built on top of it. You can take federal overreach seriously as a policy question and still refuse to extend the same patience to rhetoric that targets people for who they are. Those are two different asks, and collapsing them, even with good intentions, ends up asking the people with the least room to be patient to do the most waiting.

That’s the correction I owe the piece I wrote before this one. Not a retraction of the policy argument. A refusal to keep treating civility as if it costs everyone the same.

I hope this helps.

Last week’s article:

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

Ross Greene’s Lost at School sits on my desk again, dog-eared in places it wasn’t dog-eared the first time through. I’m reading it slower this time, partly for pleasure and partly because it keeps dragging me back to a school I no longer work at, where a handful of us once built something that worked, and then watched it disappear the way sandcastles disappear. Not all at once. One tide at a time.

We adopted Collaborative and Proactive Solutions at that school because the alternative wasn’t working. Most of our hardest students were carrying weight from home that no consequence chart was ever going to lighten, though I want to be careful here and not generalize. Not every student who struggled behaviorally was struggling because of what waited for them after the last bell. But enough were that the pattern was impossible to miss, and CPS gave us a way to meet kids where the actual problem lived instead of where the paperwork said it should live. We trained in it. We used it. In my judgment, and in what I watched happen in classrooms and hallways, it produced results.

Then people left. Not all at once, but enough of us, close enough together, that the practice lost its critical mass. I’ve since learned through the grapevine that when someone floated bringing it back, staff dismissed the idea outright. They’d rather hand out consequences than sit down and solve problems with a kid collaboratively. That’s a shame, and it’s also not surprising, because it’s the same story I’ve watched repeat itself at nearly every school I’ve worked in, at nearly every level of the system. New leadership arrives, brings energy and ideas, and within a few years the last leadership’s ideas are gone, whether or not they were working.

There’s research behind why this keeps happening, and it isn’t comforting. Michael Fullan, who has spent a career studying how school change succeeds and fails, observed plainly that school improvement initiatives fail more often than they succeed, and has documented well-designed programs fading once the people who championed them moved on. Principal turnover itself has been studied as a driver of that fade. Gates and colleagues, in their work on principal mobility, found that the churn in school leadership carries real costs for the initiatives those leaders leave behind. None of this is a mystery to anyone who has spent a career in schools. We’ve all watched a good thing get shelved the same month the person who believed in it packed their office.

What CPS specifically had going for it wasn’t sentiment. It had data. Greene and Winkler’s 2019 review of the research found that CPS produces behavioural improvements at least equivalent to standard interventions like Parent Management Training, and that it may carry extra benefits in how children build skills and how they relate to the adults around them. A later randomized trial out of the Kidman Centre in Sydney compared CPS directly against Parent Management Training in a community setting and found the two approaches produced equivalent outcomes, with the majority of participating youth landing in the non-clinical range after treatment and gains holding at six-month follow-up. This isn’t a philosophy that happened to feel right to a few of us in a staff meeting. It’s a model that has been tested, replicated, and found to work. We didn’t lose a nice idea when we lost it. We lost something with evidence behind it, because the people who understood why it worked walked out the door before the practice could root itself into the culture.

That’s the real casualty in all of this, and it’s bigger than one program. Culture is what survives when the person who introduced the good idea is gone. Fullan and Pinchot, writing about school cultures under strain, found that schools with strong, deeply embedded cultures kept functioning through disruption, including turnover, while schools built around one strong personality collapsed the moment that personality left the building. A program is fragile. A culture is not, but only if you’ve actually built one, and building one takes longer than most administrators get to stay.

I ran into this same pattern from a different angle a couple of weeks ago, sitting with two teachers and talking about differentiation. Differentiation is having the same expectations for every student, and using different approaches to help each of them reach it. Both teachers looked at me like I’d said something new. They’d both understood differentiation to mean building three or four separate versions of every lesson, one for each perceived level of student, which is exhausting to plan and impossible to sustain, and it isn’t what differentiation means at all.

It turns out I wasn’t inventing a stricter definition to make my own life easier. Carol Tomlinson, whose work effectively built the field of differentiated instruction, has spent years pushing back against exactly this misreading. She’s been explicit that differentiation is not individualized instruction, the old and abandoned model of writing a distinct lesson plan for every student in the room, a model that burned teachers out decades ago for good reason. Tomlinson’s own words on it are direct: fairness isn’t giving every student the same thing, it’s giving every student what they need to reach the same destination. Same outcome, same expectation, different road to get there. That’s the whole idea, and somewhere along the way, in some schools, the idea got lost in translation and never got corrected.

This is what happens to a school over time without anyone intending it. New teachers arrive, absorb half of what the last generation understood, fill the rest in with guesswork, and pass that guesswork along as though it were the original teaching. Multiply that by ten years and a few staff turnovers, and you have a building full of people using the same word to describe two entirely different practices, one sustainable and one not. Nobody lied. Nobody was careless. The culture just stretched, the way fabric stretches, until it no longer holds the shape it was cut to hold.

I want to be clear that I'm not opposed to change. I've built and rebuilt programs across two provinces and a territory, and change has been a constant companion in that work. What I'm after is something narrower and harder: a culture strong enough that new staff are shaped by it rather than the other way around. A healthy culture bends new people toward its center of gravity. A weak one gets rewritten by whoever shows up next, and the students are the ones who absorb the whiplash, year after year, initiative after initiative, never quite sure which version of the school they're going to get.

I’ll add one exception to that, because it matters. A toxic culture doesn’t fix itself just because a new administrator walks in with good intentions. In my experience, a genuinely unhealthy staff culture only shifts when leadership deliberately and repeatedly hires for character, for people who are open to being uncomfortable and willing to try something new. Keep the existing toxic culture in place and you’ll get surface compliance while the new administrator is watching, and a full reversion the moment they leave. That’s not cynicism. That’s just what I’ve seen, more than once.

I watched a version of this play out with a junior high Knowledge and Employability program that existed almost entirely because a group of students were hard to manage, not because they met the actual criteria for K&E placement. Alberta Education has been pushing the opposite direction for years now, toward inclusive education, keeping students who struggle in the regular classroom with the differentiated supports they need, on the logic that being surrounded by peers who are engaged in real learning pulls struggling students up rather than down. There’s substantial research behind that logic. A review compiled for the NeMTSS project found that across dozens of studies on inclusive education, the large majority showed either no negative effect or a clearly positive one for students without disabilities learning alongside peers who had them, and separate research on peer acceptance found friendship rates ran higher in inclusive classrooms than in traditional ones. The reverse holds too. Research on self-contained placements has found that concentrating students with significant behavioral needs together can result in exactly what you’d predict: those students end up modeling the very behaviors you were trying to reduce, for each other, because the room simply doesn’t contain enough of the alternative to model instead.

Put a room full of students who all struggle with the same behaviors together, take away the peer modeling that comes from being surrounded by kids who are already doing the thing you’re trying to teach, and what you get isn’t a controlled environment. It’s chaos with a schedule attached. These programs get created because those students are difficult to manage in a mixed classroom, which is true, but the fix isn’t isolation. The fix is closer to what CPS actually offers: a structured way to solve the underlying problem collaboratively, with buy-in from the student, inside the community of learners rather than outside it.

I left that school before that particular fight was settled. Staff pushed until the new administration reinstated the program. I understand the pressure that produces that outcome. Managing a classroom of struggling, dysregulated kids is genuinely hard, and a segregated room can feel, in the short term, like relief. But it’s relief bought against the long-term interest of the very students it claims to serve, and it’s the clearest example I’ve seen of how culture, not policy, decides what actually happens inside a building. Alberta Education can write inclusive education into every framework document it publishes. None of it survives contact with a staff room that has decided, quietly and without a vote, that it would rather not.

That’s the thread running through all of this, from CPS to differentiation to a jr high program that never should have existed in the first place. Programs are what get imported. Culture is what gets kept. If we want the good ideas to survive past the administrator who brought them in, we have to stop treating them as programs to be adopted and start treating them as culture to be built, slowly, deliberately, with the kind of staff who will carry the thing forward even after the person who introduced it has moved on to the next building down the road.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

A reader wrote to tell me I was running a routine, in maybe, not the most polite Canadian manner. Acknowledge the feelings, dismiss the substance, that’s the move, he said. Then he laid out the case: Alberta has sent hundreds of billions net to Ottawa with nothing back in equalization, the Constitution gives the province the resources, and successive federal governments have slowed, blocked, or priced out the pipelines that would get that product to tidewater. None of that is cultivated resentment, he said. That’s the record.

He’s right about the underlying numbers, even if the framing needs a correction I’ll get to. He also said he was a moderate, by his own description, voting no on separation, sitting in the fix-it-don’t-break-it camp. And he still thinks the response he expects from people like me is the real obstacle to persuasion.

I never wrote back fast enough to ask him the question that actually matters: who, specifically, responded to him with “your pain is real, your reasons aren’t”? Because I didn’t say that. I said he was running a page from the Poilievre playbook. All he heard was a verdict on his feelings and skipped past the part where I agreed with most of his facts.

The rhetorical trick nobody names

Here’s what’s happening structurally, regardless of which side of the equalization debate you land on. There’s a move where any engagement with the substance of a grievance gets pre-emptively recast as an attack on the person holding it. Question the policy conclusion and you’re accused of dismissing the pain. Cite a counter-fact and you’re accused of managing emotions. The grievance becomes armoured against scrutiny by fusing the argument to the identity making it, so that disagreement reads as condescension no matter how it’s phrased.

This isn’t unique to Alberta and it isn’t unique to the right. It’s the standard architecture of populist rhetoric everywhere: build the case so that contesting it requires contesting the people, and then any contest at all becomes proof of contempt. Pierre Poilievre has built a career on this exact mechanism. Land a real grievance, attach it permanently to an aggrieved identity, and any response that isn’t full agreement gets filed as elite condescension. You don’t have to be wrong about the facts to be doing this. You just have to make disagreement cost the other person their decency.

The actual fiscal case, taken seriously

So let’s take the facts seriously, because they deserve it, including the part that usually gets flattened in the retelling. It isn’t Alberta, the province, writing a cheque to Ottawa. It’s individuals living in this region paying the same income tax every other Canadian pays under the same federal formula, no more, no less. The “net contribution” comes from the fact that this is a high-income region, oil and gas money runs through individual paycheques and corporate profits at a scale most provinces don’t see, and a progressive federal tax system pulls disproportionately from disproportionate income. That’s not Alberta being singled out. That’s the same rule applied evenly producing an uneven result because the underlying economy is uneven.

The number is still real. Equalization still sends nothing back regardless of need, and the federal approval gauntlet for pipeline infrastructure has still been slower and more expensive than comparable projects in other federations. Those are findings, and you can hold them without needing the inflated version where the province itself is being singled out for punishment rather than benefiting, disproportionately, from the same tax code everyone else lives under.

Where the populist version and the pragmatic version split isn’t on the facts. It’s on what the facts are evidence of. The populist read treats the fiscal imbalance as proof of an adversarial, almost colonial relationship, Ottawa as antagonist, separation or threat of separation as the only language that gets heard. The pragmatic read treats the same imbalance as a negotiation problem inside a federation that has solved worse asymmetries before, through fiscal arrangements, equalization formula reform, and infrastructure permitting that has, in fact, moved under enough political pressure.

Neither read requires you to be naive about the numbers. But only one of them requires you to believe the system is fundamentally rigged against you, and that belief is doing a lot of work it didn’t earn from the numbers alone.

Why grassroots doesn’t mean correct

There’s a deeper assumption running under all of this, and it’s worth dragging into the light: the idea that because a grievance is widely felt and locally rooted, the angriest version of it is automatically the most legitimate one. Grassroots gets treated as a synonym for honest, and anything that sounds measured or hedged gets read as managed, scripted, compromised, or disingenuous.

That’s backwards. The depth of a grievance and the soundness of a proposed fix are two different questions, and conflating them is exactly how a real fiscal imbalance turns into a referendum question nobody asked for. You can believe Alberta has been structurally shorted by Confederation, because it has been on several measures, and still think separation is a worse trade than staying and fighting the formula. That’s not a contradiction. That’s most of the province, by the numbers.

A lesson Danielle Smith should take, and isn’t

This is where I think Danielle Smith got the diagnosis right but the prescription wrong. She didn’t invent the grievance, the equalization formula and the pipeline record. But she chose to run the populist version of the argument, referendum included, rather than the pragmatist one, and that choice carries a cost she keeps waving off.

Look at where the populist version has already been tried, at scale, by people who were just as sure they were channeling legitimate grievance against a distant, unresponsive centre. Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016 on a wave of exactly that instinct, sovereignty over technocracy, the grassroots over the establishment. A decade on, the UK is about to install its seventh prime minister in ten years, six of them since the 2020 Brexit vote. A country doesn’t burn through leaders at that rate because its institutions are stable and the public trusts the process. It burns through them because a referendum that promised control instead produced a decade of instability nobody knew how to spend, and every successor since has inherited a public that no longer believes anyone can deliver.

Smith doesn’t have to take Alberta anywhere near a vote on separation to fix the equalization formula or push pipeline approval reform. Those are negotiation problems, solved by sustained pressure, coalition-building with other resource provinces, and a federal government that knows the file won’t go away. A referendum doesn’t add leverage to that fight. It adds the same risk Britain is still paying down: a province arguing about its own legitimacy instead of building the case it already has.

And the instinct doesn’t stop at the referendum question. It’s written into the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act itself, which borrows a word that means something specific, the legal authority to govern without external constraint, and discards the definition while keeping the costume.

Alberta is not sovereign. Not even close. We use the Canadian dollar, printed and managed by a central bank we don’t control. We rely on the Canadian Charter for our rights, Canadian courts for our final appeals, Canadian passports for our border crossings. Equalization math, trade negotiations, currency stability, none of it bends to Edmonton. The Act’s name performs sovereignty while the province practices dependency. That’s not a contradiction critics invented. It’s printed in the title.

The separation fantasy, played straight

Run the thought experiment honestly instead of as a slogan. Full separation means Alberta builds its own pension system from a standing start, after pulling its share out of the CPP, an extraction that would take years of legal and actuarial fighting just to settle the number. It means standing up a provincial health system from nothing, with no national risk pool to spread the cost of an aging population. It means replacing the RCMP, which currently polices most of rural Alberta under contract, with a force built, trained, and funded entirely from scratch.

It means defending an international border and an export economy without the alliances, trade agreements, and military infrastructure that come from being part of a G7 nation. Saskatchewan’s friendship is not a defense pact. BC’s amicability is not a customs union. And it means betting the whole arrangement on oil and gas remaining the world’s most wanted commodity indefinitely, in a province that has watched commodity cycles wreck its own budget every decade since the 1980s.

Nobody pushing this Act wants that future. They want the rhetorical high of sovereignty with none of its arithmetic, the same trade the Brexit vote offered a British electorate that is still, seven prime ministers later, waiting on delivery.

What’s actually being asked for

Strip the branding and the Act is a request for more provincial leverage inside Confederation: more control over federal policies that touch Alberta resources, less deference to Ottawa on jurisdictional edges. That’s a legitimate ask. Provinces negotiate the terms of the federation constantly, and Alberta has real grievances about how federal energy and environmental policy lands here, the same grievances my reader laid out, correctly, in his email.

But that ask doesn’t need the word sovereignty. It needs the word leverage, or autonomy, or jurisdiction. Sovereignty is reserved for nations. Using it for a province’s negotiating position isn’t bold framing, it’s imprecise framing, and imprecise framing is how political movements lose the thread of what they’re actually trying to accomplish. It’s also how a legitimate fiscal grievance gets armoured into the kind of rhetoric that treats any disagreement as betrayal, the exact trick this whole argument started with.

The better slogan

If the sentiment behind the Act is real, here’s the honest version of it: a united Alberta within a sovereign Canada. Alberta organized, leveraged, and clear about what it wants from the federation it has no actual intention of leaving. That framing doesn’t sell as well on a bumper sticker. It also doesn’t ask Albertans to pretend, and it doesn’t ask Danielle Smith to bet this province’s next decade on a wager Britain is still losing.

The man who wrote to me wasn’t wrong about the fiscal arithmetic. He was wrong that disagreeing with his framing meant dismissing his facts. Those are different sentences, and the gap between them is exactly where this whole argument, and this whole Act, lives or dies.

Happy Sovereign Canada Day!

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.

There is a particular kind of hunger that doesn’t announce itself cleanly. It doesn’t show up as sadness, exactly, or loneliness, or even need. It shows up as movement. As productivity. As the inability to sit still without feeling vaguely guilty, or the reflex to fill silence with helpfulness, or the way you find yourself quietly tallying what you’ve contributed at the end of a day, measuring your right to exist in a room by what you did while you were in it.

The Hunger Underneath the Busyness

I know that hunger. I lived inside it for years.

The logic underneath it is simple enough, even if it takes a long time to name: if no one told you that you were good, you learned to be useful instead. Affirmation, when it never comes freely, becomes a transaction. You do more. You show up earlier and stay later. You volunteer before you’re asked. You sand yourself down, fill in every gap, make yourself indispensable. And somewhere underneath all of it runs the quiet, unexamined hope that someone will finally notice and say the thing you needed to hear.

They usually don’t. Not in the way you need. And even when they do, it doesn’t land the way you imagined it would, because the hunger isn’t really about the words. It’s about what the absence of those words did to how you see yourself.

When the Busyness Stops Working

At some point, the busyness stops working. Not all at once. It’s more like a slow dimming, a growing awareness that the next accomplishment isn’t going to settle whatever this is. You start to notice that you’ve been running a long time and haven’t arrived anywhere that feels like rest. That’s not a crisis. That’s information.

For me, the shift wasn’t dramatic. It was more like a reorientation. A gradual turning from what I do toward who I am. Not a rejection of work or effort, but a question about what those things are in service of. Character, I’ve come to think, is the real project. Not the resume. Not the output. The person underneath all of it.

That pivot changes what you’re looking for in others, too.

When you’ve been chronically unaffirmed, one of two things tends to happen: you either spend your life seeking affirmation from everyone around you, or you eventually get tired of that and start learning to give what you never received. The second path is harder. It requires that you develop a language you were never taught.

A Vocabulary for Goodness

That’s where the Virtues Project came in for me.

The Virtues Project began with a simple premise: that there is goodness in people, and that goodness has a name. Virtues like courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance, humility, and kindness aren’t abstractions. They’re real capacities that show up in real moments, and they can be seen, and named, and spoken back to the person who is living them.

What the Virtues Project gave me wasn’t a self-help framework. It gave me a language. A vocabulary for noticing what is genuinely right about a person and saying it with precision.

The Difference Between a Pat and a Mirror

Speaking the language of the virtues became a critical part of using this vocabulary. It distinguishes between saying “good job” and “you stayed with that task even when it got hard, that’s real perseverance, and I honour that in you.” The first is a pat. The second is a mirror.

“Good job” closes the moment. It signals that you noticed something happened and that you approved of it, and then it moves on. It doesn’t require the speaker to have actually paid attention. It doesn’t require them to have seen you specifically, in this specific moment, doing this specific thing. It’s a social reflex, and most of us recognize it as one. We say thank you and we move on, and nothing inside us shifts.

But when someone says “you didn’t have to include that person, and you did anyway, that’s real kindness, and I affirm that in you,” something different happens. The words land because they’re accurate. They’re not describing your output. They’re describing your character as it showed up in a real moment. The person speaking had to have been watching. They had to have thought about what they saw. They chose a word, kindness, that named something true about who you are, not just what you did. That’s not a reflex. That’s attention, and most of us are starved for it.

Consider a colleague who stays late to help a new staff member figure out a lesson that isn’t working. You could say nothing. Most of us do, because the moment passes and the day moves on. You could say “that was nice of you.” Or you could say “you gave up your own time to make sure she didn’t feel alone in this, that’s generosity, and it makes this a better place to work.” The third option requires thirty seconds and a willingness to be specific. People who feel genuinely seen at work show up differently. Not performatively. Differently, in the way that matters.

This is what the Virtues Project understood that most affirmation frameworks miss: the goal isn’t positivity. The goal is accuracy. When you name a virtue in someone, you’re not inflating them. You’re reflecting something that was already there. You’re saying: I saw this in you, I know what it’s called, and I want you to know that I noticed. That act of precise witnessing is what most of us were hungry for all along. Not applause. Not approval. Just someone who looked closely enough to see us, and told us what they found. Truth be told, there’s virtue in everyone, sometimes we just have to dig a little to find it and affirm it.

Learning to speak that language to others has done something unexpected. It has slowly, quietly, changed how I speak to myself.

Giving Without Needing Return

I want to be clear that this isn’t about becoming someone who disperses compliments like candy, or who performs warmth as a social strategy. That would just be people-pleasing with better vocabulary. This is something different.

It’s about genuinely looking for what is good in the people around you. Deciding, as a matter of character, to be someone who sees others clearly and names what they see. Not to be liked for it. Not to get something back. Simply because noticing goodness and speaking it aloud is itself a virtue, and because the world is measurably better when people feel accurately seen.

That distinction, doing it without needing return, is the hard part. It runs against the old wiring. The old wiring says: if I give something, I should receive something. The work of becoming is learning to unhook from that logic entirely.

I’m not fully there. I don’t think anyone is. But the direction matters.

You Can Give What You Didn’t Receive

If you grew up in a home or a community where affirmation was withheld, where love was demonstrated through provision or expectation rather than words, where you learned that approval was conditional and had to be earned fresh each day, then you know the particular shape of this deficit. You also know how long it can take to even recognize it for what it is.

The first step isn’t learning to affirm others. The first step is recognizing that you deserved to be affirmed, and weren’t, and that this shaped you in ways worth understanding. Not to live in that story permanently, but to stop being unconsciously run by it.

After that, the work is slow and specific. It’s learning to see virtues in people. It’s practicing the language. It’s deciding, in small moments, to speak to the goodness in someone rather than letting it go unacknowledged because you weren’t sure if it was your place, or because no one ever did it for you.

You can give what you didn’t receive. That’s not a cliché. It’s actually one of the more quietly radical things a person can do.

What This Has to Do With Schools

When I originally found the Virtues Project, I was looking for answers for the school I was leading. Little did I know, it would have the profound effect it did on my personal life. After allowing it to resonate in my life first, I was able to effectively implement it into the school, where we saw tremendous transformation.

I have worked with young people for over 35 years. And I want to say plainly what I see: we are losing them to a story they are telling about themselves, and it is not a good story.

The research on adolescent mental health has been pointing in the same direction for years now. Since the early 2010s, rates of anxiety, depression, and low self-worth among young people have climbed steadily, and the rise of social media is woven through almost every serious account of why. The mechanism isn’t complicated. Platforms built on comparison and performance metrics, likes, followers, views, train young people to evaluate their worth by external response. They post and they wait. They curate and they measure. And the verdict, delivered algorithmically and constantly, is almost never enough.

What this produces in a school hallway is a particular kind of student. Competent, often, in ways that are measurable. Fragile, frequently, in ways that aren’t. Many of them move through their days without a stable interior sense of their own goodness. They don’t see their worth because the tools they use to assess worth were never designed to reveal it.

The Adults Have to Go First

This is where schools have both an opportunity and a responsibility that we don’t always take seriously enough. But the language of virtue has to move through the adults before it reaches the students.

If teachers and support staff are not practicing virtue language with each other, if the staff room runs on complaint and irony and the quiet, chronic under-acknowledgment of good work, then it will not land authentically with students. Children are precise detectors of performed warmth. They know the difference between a teacher who has been told to say affirming things and a teacher who actually sees them. The difference is visible. It is felt before it is understood.

So the work starts in the staff room, and in parent communication, and in how school leaders speak to their teams. It starts with adults who are themselves learning to notice goodness and name it directly, without agenda, without transaction. That practice, built into the culture of a school, eventually reaches students in a form they can actually receive.

Naming What Students Cannot Yet See in Themselves

Consider a student who fails a test, retakes it, and passes. “Good job on the retake” is not wrong, exactly, but it’s thin. It skims the surface. “You didn’t quit when you didn’t get it the first time, that’s perseverance, and that matters more than the grade” reaches underneath the result and names the character move that produced it. That student now has a word for something they did. They have evidence, offered by an adult who was paying attention, that they possess a quality worth having. That doesn’t evaporate when the next hard thing comes.

A student who has been called out for their kindness, specifically, by an adult who was paying attention, who heard the words “what you did for that kid took real compassion” instead of just “good work,” carries that differently. It goes somewhere. It has a chance of becoming part of how they understand themselves.

The language of virtue, the precise, character-directed affirmation that the Virtues Project teaches, is not soft. It is not a feel-good supplement to the real work of education. It is foundational to the conditions in which learning actually happens. A student who believes they are seen, who has had their integrity or their courage or their care named by an adult who meant it, is a different student than one who hasn’t. Not because a kind word fixes everything, but because being genuinely seen builds something. It lays down a layer of interior stability that social media simply cannot provide.

That is what we are competing against when we talk about social media and self-esteem. Not just screen time and dopamine loops, though those matter. We are competing against a narrative that tells young people their value is conditional, quantifiable, and perpetually up for review. The counter-narrative isn’t a poster on a wall or a wellness week in October. It’s a daily, specific, adult-led practice of looking at young people and naming what is genuinely good about who they are.

We have that language available to us. The question is whether we use it.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.