Alberta Is Choosing a Story America Already Told

A reporter named Markham Hilsop asked me last week if Alberta could pull back from where Christian nationalism is taking it. I gave him an answer I didn’t love giving. Every society that has drifted toward a destructive ideology has stayed on that path until the pain became personal. Not warnings. Not data. Pain. People need to feel the cost in their own household before they reconsider what they were told would save them.

Call it a pattern rather than fatalism, one that keeps repeating because we keep refusing to learn it in advance.

Modern liberal democracy, with all its flaws, built things that quietly kept people alive. Unemployment insurance. Universal health care. Public systems for addiction and mental illness that treated a crisis as a health problem instead of a moral failure. None of it was perfect and none of it was cheap. But it was cheaper than the alternative, because the alternative doesn’t make the need disappear. It just moves the cost from a budget line to a sidewalk, a jail cell, an emergency room, a grieving family.

Look at the United States eighteen months into the current administration, and this time look at the numbers instead of the slogans. The Tax Foundation calculates the 2025 and 2026 tariffs together as roughly a $1,500 tax increase per American household this year, the largest tax hike as a share of GDP since 1993. Goldman Sachs estimated that about 55 percent of tariff costs were passed straight through to consumers rather than absorbed by exporters. A Harvard Business School pricing study found imported goods rising roughly twice as fast as domestic ones, adding about seven tenths of a percentage point to the consumer price index by last fall. Manufacturing, the sector tariffs were supposed to rebuild, has been shedding jobs for most of the past year, with estimates of the total loss ranging from the tens of thousands into six figures depending on which government dataset and time window you use. The range itself is the point. Nobody is measuring manufacturing job growth.

You can see the cracks forming in the coalition that built this. The founder of Leaving MAGA, Rich Logis has spoken about how right-wing media, Fox News chief among them, stopped doing journalism years ago and started doing grievance theatre. Not reporting the world as it is, but manufacturing anger because anger keeps people watching and voting a certain way. Shawn Ryan, who built a massive audience partly on pro-Trump sentiment, has said publicly that he no longer supports the agenda, and he points to the same source. I’m citing him narrowly, on that one point about the media diet that shaped his politics. His break with Trump has other threads, including foreign policy grievances tied to Israel, that belong in a different article than this one.

The record backs him up. Media Bias/Fact Check rates Fox News a questionable source given to extreme bias and the promotion of propaganda and conspiracy content, and a University of Texas analysis found Fox dispatching false or misleading health and election stories at roughly twice the rate of NBC and ABC. Reuters Institute survey data shows 43 percent of Americans say they distrust Fox News outright, tied with CNN for the highest distrust rating of any major outlet.

I know what comes next in the fringe-right talking points here at home, because I hear it constantly. CBC is dismissed as a liberal mouthpiece pushing a social agenda, and the fix on offer is to defund it and let people get their news from Fox instead. The trust data runs the opposite direction. That same Reuters Institute survey ranks CBC fourth in trust among major English-language Canadian outlets, with 68 percent of respondents trusting its coverage. Media Bias/Fact Check does note a left-of-centre editorial lean and occasional loaded language at CBC, and it has made real mistakes worth criticizing, an unproven on-air claim about Russian involvement in the 2022 trucker convoy protest among them. But rating an outlet as left-leaning with high factual standards is a different finding than rating one as a questionable source prone to propaganda. Trading the first for the second flatters an existing grievance rather than correcting a bias problem.

That is the machine Alberta is plugging into.

We have a real and growing audience here for Fox-style media, for American culture war imports, for a version of Christian nationalism that borrows the language of faith and discards almost everything Christianity actually asks of a person. Care for the poor. Welcome the stranger. Heal the sick without asking first whether they deserve it. What gets marketed here as Christian values is often closer to a political brand that uses scripture as packaging.

And it shows up in policy, not just rhetoric, though the picture is more specific than a blanket claim about social spending. Alberta increased its addiction and recovery budget this year, adding treatment beds and recovery communities, and that investment is real and worth acknowledging. At the same time, the 2025 budget cut AISH funding by $49 million, which the government attributes to caseload changes and a new federal disability benefit offsetting provincial costs, though disability advocates count it as one piece of a broader pattern of tightening. The disability income program replacing AISH next year, ADAP, pays new recipients $200 a month less than the current AISH rate, and cuts the amount a person can earn before their benefit is clawed back from $1,072 a month to $700, a figure the government raised from an initial $350 after public pressure. Budget 2026 also caps some income support recipients at six months of benefits, a change the government projects will save $44 million this year rising to $177 million by 2028-29. The government calls this getting people back to work. Carolyn Krahn, executive director of the Workers’ Resource Centre, has publicly cautioned against a one-size-fits-all approach to who counts as expected to work, saying she isn’t convinced the cap will actually reduce the number of people needing support, since it doesn’t address the health conditions or housing instability that put many of them there in the first place. Push someone off income support who cannot work and the cost simply moves downstream, to emergency rooms, shelters, and policing, where it shows up bigger and harder to trace back to the policy that caused it.

So what actually stops Alberta from sliding further into this.

I want to be honest about why this is hard, because the honesty matters more than a tidy list of fixes. Distrust travels as one broadcastable sentence. Don’t believe them, they’re lying to you, works on almost anyone regardless of their specific grievance, and it costs the person spreading it nothing to send it to a million people at once. Trust doesn’t travel that way. Trust gets rebuilt one relationship at a time, because it depends on a specific track record with a specific person, and there is no version of it that scales like a viral clip does. Outrage content is also cheap to produce and profitable to run, while the slow work of restoring someone’s trust in a source, a neighbour, an institution, has no revenue model behind it at all. And joining a conspiracy costs almost nothing, an instant sense of belonging and an explanation for real anxiety, while leaving costs the very things that made it attractive, the community, the identity, the feeling of finally understanding what everyone else supposedly missed. Getting pulled in exploits fast systems. Getting pulled out requires slow ones. That mismatch is why a Facebook page can recruit faster than a family can talk someone back out.

Knowing that changes what solutions are worth funding here. Local journalism that still does the boring work of checking facts before publishing, a paper covering the county council meeting or the school board budget, rebuilds the habit of trusting a source that got something right about your own town last week, in a way no national outlet accused of running the liberal agenda ever will. Churches and faith communities saying plainly that nationalism wrapped in scripture is not the faith they practice, because silence from the pulpit reads as agreement, and because that message travels through exactly the relational network the separatist and alt-right pull depends on. Neighbours willing to have the uncomfortable conversation with the family member who has gone all in on this, one conversation at a time, knowing it will not out-broadcast what recruited that person in the first place, only outlast it. And a willingness from the rest of us to address the grievance underneath the conspiracy, rural neglect, economic anxiety, the sense of being talked down to from Edmonton and Ottawa, separately from the conspiratorial story wrapped around it, because that grievance is real even when the explanation attached to it isn’t.

None of this wins fast, and some of it may not win at all. The recruiting side has industrial scale on its side. The relational side never will. But it wins in decades if it wins, and giving up on it because it is slow just leaves the field to whatever is fastest.

I would rather Alberta learn this from watching the United States than from living it. History says we probably won’t. I would like to be wrong about that.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.