Alberta politics and the cost of power

Alberta politics: Oil, money and broken promises

ALBERTA LIKES TO call itself strong and free. But that freedom often belongs to the rich. The province’s power comes from oil, and oil has always meant control. Big companies shape the land, the laws, and even how people think about their future.

For decades, politicians said oil money would help everyone. Schools, hospitals, jobs — they promised it all. But look around. The profits flow to corporations, not communities. Workers face layoffs, small towns dry up, and public services fade. What Alberta calls “success” is a system built to serve wealth, not people.

A Green Story That Isn’t Green

Today, the same politicians talk about clean energy. They speak of “transition,” “balance,” and “responsibility.” But their actions tell another story. New pipelines open. Old subsidies stay. “Carbon capture” becomes a new excuse for oil expansion.

This is what greenwashing looks like. It’s a way to make exploitation sound progressive. Alberta’s government claims to protect jobs, but it protects profits first. Even the rhetoric of innovation feels hollow — the same market logic that fuels oil profits now fuels digital industries like Vave Casino Canada, where technology is dressed as progress but driven by extraction all the same.

A real transition would mean public ownership of energy, new local industries, and strong labor rights. But those changes would threaten the elite, so they don’t happen.

The land continues to burn, the rivers dry, and yet the ads still say “sustainable.”

Workers, Land, And Resistance

Transformation in Alberta does not descend from power; it germinates beneath it, within the contradictions of everyday endurance. The real struggle unfolds not in legislative chambers but in the persistent gestures of labor — in classrooms, in hospitals, across territories scarred by extraction. Here, teachers, nurses, and Indigenous land defenders occupy the same terrain of resistance, linked not by ideology alone but by necessity.

Each strike, blockade, or collective refusal dismantles a fragment of the colonial-capitalist order that built Alberta’s wealth upon dispossession. The land resists, and so do those who refuse to let it be consumed entirely by the logic of profit. Their defiance is not merely opposition; it is reappropriation — the slow recovery of meaning from the machinery of production.

To say that land and labor must belong to those who sustain them is not sentimentality. It is the radical articulation of justice. Ownership, under this lens, becomes stewardship — not domination. A democratic Alberta, if it is to exist at all, must emerge from this inversion: people before pipelines, solidarity before speculation, autonomy before accumulation.

Yet domination persists because it disguises itself as reason. Corporations purchase narratives as easily as they purchase land. The state speaks the language of pragmatism while enacting coercion. “Growth” becomes a sacred word, repeated until it sounds like truth. Fear of instability, of job loss, of imagined decline — these are the tools of control. Every campaign donation, every “balanced” media report, tightens the loop of dependency. The system calls it realism; the people living through it call it exhaustion.

The Real Freedom Alberta Needs

Freedom, as Alberta defines it, remains chained to capital — a hollow echo mistaken for autonomy. True freedom cannot coexist with hierarchy. It requires equality, not as charity but as structure. It begins when no one’s survival depends on another’s profit.

The mythology of “trickle-down” prosperity has long served as a sedative. It numbs resistance, convincing workers that patience will yield fairness, that inequality is a temporary inconvenience. But history has already proven the opposite: wealth accumulates, never circulates. It trickles upward, solidifying power until even imagination feels regulated.

To reclaim freedom, Alberta must dismantle the conditions that make dependency appear inevitable. Workers, teachers, and nurses already embody that potential. They sustain the province when markets falter, when oil collapses, when profit vanishes into tax havens. Their labor holds the structure together, yet they are told to wait, to tighten belts, to be grateful.

A new politics must emerge from their voices — collective, stubborn, and unyielding. One that refuses the fantasy of merit and exposes the system’s internal decay. A politics that understands prosperity not as possession but as relation.

Alberta worth imagining would not promise comfort; it would demand participation. It would replace hierarchy with cooperation, production with reciprocity. Its freedom would not be the right to compete but the capacity to care.

And if such a transformation sounds utopian, that is only because realism has been defined by those who benefit from its limits.