The Free Alberta Strategy Petition

The Free Alberta Strategy

Alberta’s treatment within Canada has become intolerable. Successive Federal Governments in Ottawa have relentlessly attacked our Province’s economic interests, stifled our prosperity, and pillaged the resources and wealth of Alberta’s citizens to purchase electoral support in other parts of the country.

Though Albertans have tolerated the expropriation of our wealth for decades, the Federal Government has now advanced its anti-Alberta agenda a bridge too far, posing an existential threat to our Province’s economic viability and the core freedoms of our people. 

Ottawa has fundamentally breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta. The Alberta Government, therefore, has a right and duty to repudiate this arrangement on behalf of its people, to renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation.

We call upon the Government of Alberta to implement the following package of legislative and other reforms, which we summarize as follows:

1. Passing into law the Alberta Sovereignty Act, granting the Alberta Legislature absolute discretion to refuse any provincial enforcement of federal legislation or judicial decisions that, in its view, interfere with provincial areas of jurisdiction or constitute an attack on the interests of Albertans. This would include Alberta prohibiting any provincial enforcement of the federal Carbon Tax, the No New Pipelines Act, and attempts by federal agencies to regulate our Province’s energy sector in any manner.
   
   This would necessitate establishing an Alberta Provincial Police Force to replace the RCMP, and passing into law the Alberta Independent Banking Act designed to expand significantly the number of provincially regulated financial institutions for the purpose of providing Alberta businesses and citizens with protection from enforcement of federal legislation or judicial decisions designated as unenforceable by the Alberta Legislature.
   
   
2. Effectively ending federal equalization transfers from Alberta through passing into law the Equalization Termination and Tax Collection Act. In addition to establishing an Alberta Revenue Agency to collect all provincial taxes, this Act would also grant the Provincial Government authority to recover the total amount of equalization confiscated by the Federal Government from Alberta each year, by withholding from the CRA, an equal amount of federal tax source deductions that are collected by all provincial agencies, municipalities and, at their option, private corporations banking with provincially regulated financial institutions.
   
   
3. Opting out of all federal programs that interfere with provincial areas of jurisdiction, including health, education, resource development, environmental regulation and property rights. This would include replacing the Canada Pension Plan (“CPP”) and Employment Insurance (“EI”) with an Alberta Pension Plan and Alberta Unemployment Insurance designed to deliver to Alberta pensioners and those who become unemployed higher benefits using lower premiums from Alberta workers.
   
   
4. Declaring that the Provincial Government will replace the Federal Government as acting authority to negotiate Alberta’s international trade and market access relationships; and further, granting the Provincial Legislature authority to make all future judicial appointments in Alberta through passing into law, the Alberta Judicial Independence Act.

These proposed reforms constitute the key elements of a strategic plan for Alberta to assert its sovereignty, offload the burden of Ottawa’s tyrannical economic policies against the Province, and secure self-determination for the people of Alberta within a reformed confederation, or if necessary, as an independent nation.

We call this proposal, the ‘Free Alberta Strategy’.