Three hundred episodes. I wanted to mark it with something that looks forward rather than back, so I called Fergus Hodgson.
Fergus runs Econ Americas out of Colorado. He is a week away from moving to Calgary for a month to put the finishing touches on Capitalism & Morality — September 11 and 12 at the Croatian Cultural Centre — and he says something early on that reframes the whole conversation.
He didn’t arrive at this from theory. Jason Lavigne took him on a speaking tour around Alberta at the start of the year, and by the end of it he’d stopped thinking of the place as his mother’s hometown. “This is my tribe. These are my people.”
He is not building an event about independence. He is building an event about the people who would have to hold it together afterward.
Nation and state
The distinction he draws is old and most of us have stopped using it. A nation is a people — shared values, shared character, a way of living. A state is a government. Ideally the two line up. His argument is that in Canada they never have. Quebec is a nation stuck inside somebody else’s state. So, he says, is Alberta.
Which leads to the line I keep coming back to: he has little interest in a province breaking off and then resurrecting Ottawa on the prairies. “What’s the point?” If a free Alberta is going to mean anything, the people have to be free first, and the government follows from that rather than the other way round.
So the event is only partly political. Yes, there’s a secession panel — Darcy Gerow leads it, last slot of the day, which Fergus cheerfully calls the spiciest. But there’s also Lorraine Moller, a four-time Olympian, on the psychological resilience that makes athletes succeed. There’s Steve Cooksey, who bills himself as the Diabetes Warrior, on what he calls unplugging from the medical cartel. Fergus doesn’t want a room full of people waiting for an election to save them.
Who’s coming
The names alone are worth the ticket. Tamara Lich is guest of honour at the Friday VIP dinner. James Ostrowski — a dozen books, a new one out this week — gives the lunchtime keynote, Why Gun Rights Come First, and Fergus makes the point that Alberta is already one of the most armed places in the world, so nobody is importing an ideology here. Michael Wagner, who has written about Alberta independence for years. Corey Morgan. Bruce Pardy. Drew Barnes and Rick Strankman on a panel about winning at retail politics. Phil Hart, the Idaho state senator, on the freedom caucus model — and Fergus’s pitch that the UCP needs one of its own, a bloc of MLAs who won’t be intimidated.
Mailyn Salabarría comes up from Cheyenne. She grew up in Cuba and got out, and she’s speaking on what Fergus calls microstates and she calls free cities — the argument that Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore point the way, and that decentralizing to Edmonton isn’t decentralizing far enough.
There’s a panel on thriving as a thought criminal: Frances Widdowson moderating, with Amy Eileen Hamm, Lorraine Moller and Nadine Wellwood. Frances and I don’t agree on everything. I’ll be honoured to be in the room with her anyway.
And it isn’t all ideas. Brett Oland, CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union — the event’s gold sponsor — is on a panel about the economic opportunity in an Alberta that stands up on its own. Fergus is blunt that he wants entrepreneurs and investors in that room, not just philosophers.
And on the Saturday evening, Helen Grus comes out from Ottawa in person for a screening of Silencing Detective Grus, with a Q&A after.
I’m on the media panel — How To Beat Regime Media.
The parts that will get him called names
Fergus doesn’t hedge, and I’m not going to pretend he does. He talks about a “natural aristocracy” leaving Canada for the United States — roughly a million Canadian-born people down there against roughly a quarter million American-born up here, by his figures — and he ties Alberta’s prosperity to a demographic shift he plainly doesn’t welcome. He says the same thing about Colorado, that the cowboy spirit he remembers a generation ago has been covered over.
He knows what he’ll be called for saying it. His answer, more or less, is that he’s past caring, and that he doesn’t blame people who are more careful.
He’s also on record that he had nothing to do with the Alberta white paper. He’s been living in the States, and the people running it didn’t want any appearance of American influence. He doesn’t blame them for that either.
The practical bit
Roughly 25 speakers, most talks capped at ten minutes with questions after — Fergus is running it like a fire hose on purpose, with an exhibit hall and a bar so you can step out when you need to. Buffet lunch, light breakfast items, drink ticket included. Business casual; he wants the room to look like what it’s trying to build.
VIP dinner is Friday September 11 at 6:00 pm. The main event is Saturday September 12 — check-in opens at 8:00 am, program starts at 8:30.
Tickets are at capitalismandmorality.com. Regular is $200 right now, $225 after August 13, $250 after September 1. VIP $500 includes the Friday dinner with the speakers.
Use UTN10 for 10% off.
I’ll be there selling merch. Come say hello.
Sponsor — NuggetStacker. Protect your family’s wealth with gold and silver; a subscription lets you set it and forget it. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $600. Questions: 1-866-644-2121. Use the link at unscrewthenews.com for a discount.
Also coming up — the Allison Inquiry, Ottawa, September 8–11. Four days of testimony from injured Canadians in a parliamentary committee room. Write your MP and ask them to be in the room.
Stay sane. Keep your head on a swivel.
— Bruce
