The UCP’s Inheritance: 2001 & 2024
The 2001 Firewall Letter
Published as an open letter to Premier Ralph Klein in the National Post (Jan. 24, 2001), it was signed by Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, Ted Morton, Rainer Knopff, Andrew Crooks, and Ken Boessenkool.
It’s framed as a response to the federal Liberals treating Alberta as a “soft target” after the 2000 election, and its core proposal — the “Alberta Agenda” — argues the province should use constitutional powers it already has but hasn’t exercised:
- withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan for an Alberta Pension Plan (“If Quebec can do it, why not Alberta?”);
- collect Alberta’s own personal income tax instead of letting Ottawa do it;
- let the RCMP contract lapse in 2012 and stand up an Alberta Provincial Police Force, one that would “not be misused as a laboratory for experiments in social engineering”;
- and resume full provincial control of health policy, fighting Ottawa in court over Canada Health Act penalties if it comes to that.
It closes with the line the letter is named for: “It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”
The 2021 Free Alberta Strategy
This “strategy” subtitled “A Strong, Free & Sovereign Alberta Within Canada,” was published by Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper, and Derek on Sept. 28, 2021. It’s a direct legislative update of the Firewall Letter’s agenda.
The centerpiece is the proposed 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 language became, almost verbatim, the actual Sovereignty Act passed in December 2022.
The rest of the package:
- an Alberta Provincial Police Force,
- an Alberta Independent Banking Act,
- an Equalization Termination and Tax Collection Act (paired with a new Alberta Revenue Agency empowered to withhold federal remittances to claw back “equalization confiscated by the Federal Government”),
- and an Alberta Pension Plan and Unemployment Insurance to replace CPP and EI.
The economic case rests on the claim that Albertans “have transferred well in excess of $600 billion more to the federal government over the last 60 years… than they have received… in programs and benefits.” For a useful outline of this issue that disputes the UCP separatist claims see this analysis.
Despite the firewall lineage, the document technically stops short of calling for outright separation upfront — it calls on Alberta to “renegotiate its terms of membership in Confederation and, if Canada’s federal and provincial leaders refuse to negotiate, to form an independent nation” — but it does lay out an actual independence mechanism as a fallback: if reform efforts fail, “a provincial referendum on independence and the Alberta Constitution would be held, requiring a 60% or higher vote of approval.”
What the UCP Destroys and Why…
Selling Our Alberta: What the UCP Destroys and Why” argues that Alberta’s government under Premier Danielle Smith isn’t lurching from crisis to crisis — it’s following a consistent pattern: public land, water, power, and pensions get handed to private companies and foreign investors, while protections for the people with the least power to fight back (disabled Albertans, people with addictions, trans kids, teachers, Indigenous Nations) get cut.
Drawing on political theorists Antonio Gramsci and Giorgio Agamben, the essay traces how this happens through real legal tools — emergency declarations, a referendum bundling separation with anti-immigrant questions, and Section 33 of the Charter, invoked twice in weeks to end a teachers’ strike and override court protections for trans youth.
It also traces a direct, personal throughline: Smith was mentored for decades by the University of Calgary’s “Calgary School,” the same Hayek- and Strauss-influenced group behind the 2001 Firewall Letter and the 2021 Free Alberta Strategy that became the Sovereignty Act — meaning this isn’t an outside theory applied to Alberta, but a description of where the government’s ideas actually came from.
The essay is paired with a fully sourced timeline documenting every claim, plus a companion page tracking Alberta’s AI data centre buildout and the protests against it.
