The Words Everyone Uses and Almost Nobody Can Define

I got into an argument online last week that I want to admit I lost, in the sense that neither of us moved an inch. I’d written about libertarianism’s failures, and a reader pushed back hard, insisting Thatcher and Reagan were neoliberals, not libertarians, and that calling them libertarian was a category error. He wasn’t entirely wrong on the technical point. He was, however, defending something closer to a personal identity than a definition, and at one point he said it outright: “our entire philosophy.” That’s when I understood we weren’t debating terms anymore.

But the exchange pointed at something worth digging into. I hadn’t set out to write about libertarianism as an abstraction. I’d been watching the rhetoric coming out of Alberta’s separatist movement, and the term the people inside it use for themselves is libertarian, not neoliberal, not conservative. They say it plainly, in their own words. What struck me is that the term almost never gets defined for the people reading or hearing it. Most Albertans encounter “libertarian” and “neoliberal” constantly right now, in comment sections, in premier’s statements, in separatist manifestos, without anyone stopping to say what either word actually commits a person to. That gap is what I want to close.

Neoliberalism is not a bigger government. It’s a differently aimed one. The clearest way to spot it isn’t by asking how much government someone supports, it’s by asking which parts of government they want kept and which parts they want gone. Neoliberalism keeps and often strengthens the state functions that build and protect markets: central banks, property law, trade enforcement, policing, military spending, corporate subsidy. It guts the functions that redistribute outcomes to people who need help: welfare, public health care, public education funding, labour protections, progressive taxation. That’s the actual signature. Not less government. Government reallocated, away from the collective and toward capital.

Libertarianism, in its strict form, is a different animal. It’s built on the non-aggression principle, the idea that individual freedom is nearly absolute and can only be limited by a duty not to harm others. Taken seriously, it’s anti-state almost everywhere, not just in welfare. Reagan and Thatcher never governed that way. They expanded policing, grew military budgets, and protected corporate power through the state rather than by removing the state from the picture. What they borrowed from libertarianism was the language, freedom, individual liberty, get government off your back, because that language sells. The policy underneath was neoliberal the whole time.

Here’s where it gets interesting for us in Alberta, and where I think the real confusion lives. Neoliberalism rarely travels alone. It needs something else riding along to make austerity and cuts feel less like abandonment and more like virtue. Elsewhere in the world that passenger has often been authoritarian nationalism, a strong hand promising order and national greatness while the economic floor gets pulled out from under ordinary people. In Alberta, the passenger looks different. It’s grievance politics dressed as provincial sovereignty.

Danielle Smith didn’t invent this pairing, but she runs it as well as anyone currently in office, and she’s a useful case precisely because she doesn’t fit neatly into either box. By her own account she’s a libertarian, someone who returns to Ayn Rand every few years for guidance. That’s philosophy. What she actually governs with is the neoliberal playbook, health care and education treated as costs to be trimmed rather than commitments to be funded, public sector workers asked to accept less, markets protected while public provision shrinks. The belief system underneath is libertarian. The policy delivered is neoliberal. Most people watching don’t separate the two, and they don’t need to for the confusion to matter. What they see is a leader talking individual freedom while running an economically neoliberal government, wrapped in a third layer that’s neither: provincial grievance politics. The Sovereignty Act is the clearest expression of it, freedom from the collective reframed at the provincial scale, us against a larger them, instead of individual against the collective. It’s the same underlying move my first piece described, just repackaged for an audience that responds to provincial identity more than personal liberty rhetoric.

The trouble is that equalization, in particular, gets weaponized in ways most people can’t easily untangle, because the mechanics are genuinely confusing and almost nobody explains them plainly. Alberta pays into federal coffers more than it receives back largely because Alberta has historically had higher average incomes and a smaller population drawing on federal transfers, not because the province is being punished. That’s a fact people can check. But grievance doesn’t need to survive a fact check to do its political work. It needs to feel true long enough to win an argument, or an election.

Someone will read this and think I can’t make up my mind. Is it populism, is it libertarianism, is it neoliberalism, and don’t forget there’s a strain of modern liberalism in the mix too, even a little socialism showing up in the parts of the state nobody wants to touch, health care chief among them. I understand the instinct to want one clean label. It’s tidier, easier to argue against, easier to fit on a sign. But real political systems are rarely built from a single pure ideology, and pretending Alberta’s politics reduce to one word is its own kind of dishonesty. What I’m describing isn’t indecision about what’s happening here. It’s an attempt to name all the parts actually operating at once, because that’s what it takes to see the whole machine instead of arguing with a caricature of it.

This is what makes Alberta’s political landscape genuinely hard to read right now. We have a governing philosophy that borrows credibility from libertarianism’s talk of individual freedom, delivers neoliberalism’s economics, and sells both through a grievance politics that claims to speak for the collective while asking almost nothing of the people running it. Three different logics, stacked, each one useful for deflecting the other when it’s convenient. Call the cuts principled, call the anger provincial pride, and never let anyone hold the actual philosophy still long enough to examine it. That’s not confusion by accident. A politics this hard to pin down is easier to defend than one that has to justify itself plainly, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Most of what’s on offer here isn’t built around what Albertans owe each other. It’s built around what a narrower set of interests get to keep.

The man I argued with online will keep insisting the categories are pure and separate, because for him they have to be. Most people aren’t defending an identity. They’re just trying to read the news and understand why the same promises keep failing the same way. My hope with this piece is that the next time someone hears “neoliberal” or “libertarian” tossed around, in a headline, at a kitchen table, in a legislature, they’ll have a way to tell what they’re actually looking at, and who it’s actually built to serve.

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