How to Monetize the Free Alberta Strategy

[Editor’s note: It’s been a wild time in Alberta. The notorious Free Alberta Strategy was launched last September and its impacts continue apace. Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian, always eager to help aspiring writers, offers some collegial advice to the strategy’s authors.]

Dear Rob Anderson, Barry Cooper and Derek From —

Thanks for letting me see your pitch for your Free Alberta Strategy. I gather it’s been around for a few months but was not attracting much attention until recently. I think I know why, and how to fix the problem.

Clearly you’re thinking big: a multivolume series of novels, and maybe a streaming series, about the liberation of a suffering province. I see it as Ayn Rand fighting for Alberta in the Hunger Games.

It’s an ambitious idea for a science-fiction political thriller, and since two of you are lawyers and the third a political science professor, your expertise could lend a lot of plausible detail. But having pitched a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels, I have to tell you your idea needs work.

First of all, show, don’t tell. This is basic storytelling, guys. You give us words like “intolerable,” "relentlessly attacked,” “stifled our prosperity” and “pillaged the resources and wealth of Alberta’s citizens.”

So show us the attacks. Show us the pillaging. Show us the stifling. Let’s see the RCMP running off the cattle and burning the ranch houses, repossessing the pickup trucks and semi-trailers. Then your readers will say, “Wow, that’s intolerable!”— and they’ll want to know how you’re going to get Alberta out of this mess.

For that, you need a solution — a hero who symbolizes the province, someone readers can identify with and root for. I know Danielle Smith is a big fan of the Free Alberta Strategy, but frankly, right-wing heroines (think Marjorie Taylor Greene) are a hard sell these days.

Ayn Rand’s fingerprints are all over your idea, so maybe a John Galt of the oil patch, a mysterious visionary individualist whose ideas and projects keep getting shot down by overpaid and underworked Ottawa bureaucrats.

Just as he’s about to pack up and head for a sensible petrostate like Saudi Arabia or Russia, a handful of near-bankrupt ranchers and truck drivers beg him for help. Our John Galt gathers a band of his old roughneck buddies — think the Magnificent Seven — to break Ottawa’s grip.

Before you know it, John and the old gang have put together a knockout PowerPoint with all the key points of the Free Alberta Strategy — Alberta police, Alberta courts, Alberta banks and pension plans and unemployment insurance, all based on the Alberta Sovereignty Act.

The act tells Ottawa Albertans will ignore any federal laws they don’t like. If Ottawa fights back, too bad — sovereign Alberta will become the Republic of Western Canada. (The act, by the way, is genius — every Utopia is based on a key document. And it’s even better that we don’t really know what’s in it.)

But nation-building is not the walk in the park your pitch describes. You’ve got to stress John and his buddies, put obstacles in their way so they can reveal their character and ability and natural goodness. Here are some ideas about what could stress them:

Indigenous people rise in revolt. Their absence from your pitch is a big problem. Better for John and his buddies to win them over with promises to restore all their original lands. (Just kidding — I know that would be the whole province.)

Nobody buys in. No one wants to be an Alberta provincial cop, or judge, or tax assessor. Bankers hate the Free Alberta idea because other banks won’t deal with them. Workers worry they’ll lose what they’ve paid into the Canada Pension Plan. Teachers and health-care workers move out of the province. Businesses realize Canada and the U.S. will put up big tariffs on Alberta oil, gas, beef and grain. How do John and his buddies overcome that resistance and win Albertans’ hearts and minds? You’ll come up with something, I know.

Everybody hates Alberta. B.C. digs up the TMX pipeline and sends Edmonton the bill. Albertans need visas to get into Canada, not to mention the U.S. The pro sports teams are kicked out of their leagues. Great opportunity for some creative plot switches here as John and his gang blame B.C. socialist hippies and international foundations funded by George Soros.

Canada masses troops on Alberta’s borders, like Putin with Ukraine. Alberta Premier John Galt dons a khaki T-shirt and goes on social media to raise money for weapons (he can’t really tax his people, because they don’t like taxes and besides, they’re broke). Maybe get guns and soldiers from American states like Wyoming and Idaho? Your call. But gunfire always solves a lot of plot problems. As Lenin is supposed to have said, “What’s the point of a revolution if you can’t shoot anyone?”

The price of fossil fuels falls to 10 bucks a barrel. Your pitch depends on preserving Alberta’s freedom to be a petrostate. But as I’ve learned, you never bring an editor just one pitch. How about John Galt and company invent controlled nuclear fusion, offering the world clean Alberta energy at last? You’re in science-fiction country, after all, so fusion is as plausible as imagining that we can go on burning oil and gas forever. Or we bring Danielle Smith in as a feisty scientist with a formula for pumping carbon dioxide into tailings ponds and converting them into ranch dressing.

Finally: guys, get an agent. You’re preaching to a very small congregation here, and you have competition like the Independence Party of Alberta. You need to reach a way bigger audience if you want to monetize the Free Alberta Strategy. An agent can show you how to hype it so millions of others will buy in, and help you develop spinoffs like the Free Saskatchewan Strategy, the Free Nova Scotia Strategy… you get the idea.

I’m just brainstorming here, trying to figure out how to help you monetize the Free Alberta Strategy. It’s such a big idea, but you need to dramatize it. As a dramatic, shoot-em-up wish-fulfilment epic, it could be a viable franchise.

As it is, though, it’s just a fantasy.