According to a study by The Guardian, the world’s top 100 oil and gas companies collected more than $30-million every hour in “unearned” profit during the first month of the Iran war, and stand to make “$230-billion by the end of the year if the price of oil continues to average $100.” That’s a pretty big “if”—but it does put an eye-watering number on the potential windfall for companies in 2026 compared to anticipated profits before the war started. And it’s why people began talking about a “windfall tax” on the companies.

“As the owners of the resource, Albertans should get the lion’s share of those profits,” wrote Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the first week of the war. “And the way to do that is to introduce a windfall profits tax on top of the royalties that oil companies pay in exchange for the right to exploit publicly owned assets.”

This wasn’t a sudden revelation but rather part of McGowan’s long-standing argument that Alberta must increase oil and gas royalty rates. And he’s not alone. A long list of prominent economists have been saying the same thing for years—and they doubled down as the Iran war dragged on into April. “Taxing windfall profits won’t worsen inflation; it will recapture unearned gains from corporations and resource owners and can be used to protect vulnerable populations,” declared a group of economists led by Nobel-prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

It all sounds straightforward. Indeed, about 25 countries had already introduced a windfall tax well before Donald Trump’s misadventure in Iran. And Alberta does have a sliding scale for oil sands royalty rates, where they increase relative to the price of oil. But this isn’t enough for critics such as McGowan.

Oil companies are suddenly awash in windfall profits—while we’re paying near-record prices for gas.

Oil companies are pushing back, arguing windfall taxes discourage investment. They quote University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, who in 2022 said in an interview that “having a government just enact an ad hoc tax out of nowhere based on just whatever they think the rate should be—that’s problematic because it creates uncertainty.”

We also bump up against the “symmetry argument,” in which oil companies, facing a windfall tax from governments during boom times, could then demand some sort of “calamity compensation” from governments when oil prices collapse—as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To save ourselves from jumping on the never-ending merry-go-round of arguments for and against a windfall profits tax, let’s just ask one short question: Would a windfall tax ever fly in Alberta The even shorter answer: No.

That’s not just because Alberta is governed by the fossil-fuel champion Danielle Smith. A windfall tax is part of a political suicide trifecta, along with raising royalty rates and introducing a provincial sales tax. The provincial NDP has also shied away from the trifecta. After campaigning in 2015 on implementing “competitive, realistic royalty rates as prices rise,” NDP leader Rachel Notley then performed a whiplash-inducing policy shift upon becoming premier. She went through the motions of a royalty review, then concluded the rates under previous Progressive Conservative governments were suddenly okay.

At the time, an irate McGowan complained that the NDP government was committing a “profound political mistake.” McGowan vowed to continue the battle for higher royalties, a fight that now extends to a windfall tax.

The public appetite for higher royalties comes and goes in direct relation to the world price of oil. When it’s over US$100 a barrel, Albertans practically march on the legislature, demanding a bigger share of energy revenues. When the price drops, so does the appetite. We felt the hunger pangs return last spring, watching our wallets drain as our tanks filled. In that context a tax on skyrocketing oil profits looked pretty good.

But even if there were a windfall profits tax, how would you, as an inflation-pummelled Albertan, benefit Alberta governments in the past have tended to spend windfall revenue to avoid making hard political decisions. The nadir of that unofficial policy came in 2006, with “Ralph Bucks.” Premier Klein, trying to boost his flagging popularity, gave a $400 “prosperity” cheque to pretty much everyone in the province. A lot of Albertans were happy. Like McGowan today, they saw it as a just counterbalance to high oil prices.

But there was no long-term plan, no saving for a rainy day; just a cheap political stunt. You could still argue a windfall tax is a good idea—but you can’t deny that Alberta has a poor track record of dealing with windfall revenues in the past.

Graham Thomson is an Edmonton-based political commentator who has covered Alberta politics since the early Don Getty era.

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Gloria Taylor was a devout Christian and a lover of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. A mother and grandmother, she was working at a residential care facility for people with developmental disabilities in the Okanagan when she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS.

Taylor too wanted to die on her own terms. So, along with the Carter family, she lent her name to a case brought by the BC Civil Liberties Association, a constitutional challenge of the law against MAID. They won at BC’s Supreme Court and at its Court of Appeal. Taylor died before the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada. But in 2015, in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), that court found criminalizing MAID unjustifiably infringed section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The law, said the Court, was of no force and effect if it prohibited a physician-assisted death for a competent adult who clearly consented to the procedure and had a grievous and irremediable medical condition, including an illness, disease or disability that causes enduring and intolerable suffering.

In response Justin Trudeau’s government passed a law allowing MAID in cases where a person’s death was reasonably foreseeable. But that law was immediately challenged in the courts, because it didn’t deal with people dying by inches, with intolerable, irremediable suffering. Finally, in 2021, Ottawa passed Bill C-7, which extended access to MAID to all people encompassed by the Carter ruling.

The Senate debate on C-7 was deep, profound and moving, as we worked through the thorny legal and ethical issues. Medical assistance in dying was one of the most thoroughly and thoughtfully debated public policy decisions in history—and one widely supported by Canadians and Albertans.

So what to make of Danielle Smith’s decision to ban MAID for people precisely like Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor?

Alberta’s Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, purports to protect vulnerable Albertans. In fact, it flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling and of federal law. It denies Albertans with intolerable, irremediable medical suffering their Charter right to MAID. People who want to die with dignity, people who want one final chance to exercise agency after so much agency has been taken from them.

The new law also infringes mightily on the rights of those whose deaths are imminent.

Bill 18 forbids doctors to refer suffering patients to another province for a MAID assessment. It forbids health facilities from displaying information on MAID in a poster or pamphlet. It forbids Alberta doctors and nurses from even discussing MAID with a patient, unless the patient initiates the conversation.

All of this may be wide open to legal challenge. But of course, all Smith’s government need do is invoke the notwithstanding clause to get around that pesky Charter.

Most Albertans support MAID for people with irremediable medical suffering.

Criminal law remains a federal domain. Alberta can’t jail physicians if they violate these new laws. Healthcare, though, is provincial jurisdiction. So Bill 18 threatens people who practise MAID, or even provide information about it, with discipline by their professional colleges—and could ultimately cost them their licences. Indeed, it undermines the autonomy of the College of Physicians and Surgeons by making such sanctions mandatory.

It’s a legal loophole. A moral outrage. And a perplexing political strategy.

An Environics poll from this January found 79 per cent of Albertans agree with the Carter decision and support MAID for people with irremediable medical suffering. We are also much more likely to opt for MAID in cases of irremediable suffering than are most other Canadians. In 2024 Quebec had the highest rate of residents who opted for MAID for conditions that weren’t immediately terminal. Alberta was a close second. That’s perfectly consistent with a culture that puts a high premium on personal liberty, independence and self-determination.

Smith has tried to distract us, by claiming to be protecting children and people without mental capacity from euthanasia, and stopping people from making advance directives for MAID. But those things aren’t currently allowed by federal law. Indeed, much of Bill 18 bans things that aren’t actually happening.

Forget the UCP fearmongering. Alberta is doing an end run around the Constitution, depriving the most vulnerable of their Charter rights and denying health professionals the ability to do their jobs responsibly. Like it or not, Alberta is still a part of Canada. This legislation, though, makes Albertans second-class Canadians. It robs us all of the freedom to make fundamental choices about how we live—and how we die.

Paula Simons is an independent Alberta senator and member of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.

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The upshot is that the fat cat invites the starving cat to the palace where she lives. On the day before, there had been a great feast at the palace. Sadly, the huge amount of food left on the floor has now attracted a host of scavenging felines. The result is the sultan requests that archers be brought in to do away with the scavengers. The end.

What this has to do with the controversy involving premier Danielle Smith’s visit to Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2025 is no doubt unclear. I’ll get to that.

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi minister of energy, evidently met the premier of Alberta in November 2023, when Calgary hosted the World Energy Congress. The prince and the premier toured a few pavilions together and had a sufficient meeting of minds that the former invited the latter to visit him in Saudi Arabia.

Premier Smith accepted, and the visit occurred. While in the Middle East the premier met an impressive roster of dignitaries, including the Saudi artificial intelligence boss and officials from OPEC.

Months later, back in the Alberta Legislature, Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi asked Smith about some missing receipts. Where she’d been and the list of receipts didn’t jibe. Her explanation was that the oilfields and other spots she’d visited weren’t accessible by commercial aircraft. She’d flown on private jets. This might have seemed a trivial matter, but since the government voyageurs had managed to rack up $64,000 in expenses in Saudi Arabia, for which Albertans were on the hook, Nenshi wasn’t ready to drop the topic.

No one from the UCP side was (or is) offering to have the cat assayed, so we’re still dealing in hypotheticals.

And then there was the cat. A sharp-eyed individual had noticed that in a McDougall Centre office there was a new golden statue of a cat. It appeared in the background of a photo that included the premier. A question was put to the premier: “What’s with the golden cat?” And the answer was: “Oh that. Just a little something from Prince Abdulaziz…?”

The cat was a hefty looking specimen standing on all fours. Inevitably people speculated what it was made of. The initial eyeball assay was that it was made of gold. In the old Arab tale of the two cats, then, this would have been the sultan’s cat rather than the scavenger.

Albertans started doing some math. The cat was hefty, not something you could shove in your purse. Chunky, not light. At the current price of gold (around $7,000/ounce), the cat was one heck of a gift! As news of the statue spread, the possible value bounced around. Some said the cat might be worth millions. More-conservative types said, “Nah. $300,000 tops.” Also unclear was whether the premier or the province owned the cat. It should have been the province, but it wasn’t clear.

When the Opposition leader brought up the trip and the receipts in the Legislature, inevitably the subject came around to the cat.

Initially the government attempted to brush it off. Members portrayed Nenshi’s concerns as a rube-like fuss launched by someone who doesn’t get out much. But wait a minute. Nenshi was the mayor of Calgary for 11 years. And he was awarded the title of the World’s Best Mayor in 2018, for which he got a pretty handsome statue of his own (albeit stainless steel). Anyway, the man has been around, and he wasn’t letting the golden cat escape from public attention quite yet.

The next thing the UCP government had to say about the cat was that it wasn’t gold at all. No, it was a copper cat with a touch of gold paint. Worth maybe a few hundred dollars. One pundit pegged its real value at $80. No one from the government side was (or is) offering to have the cat assayed, so we’re still dealing in hypotheticals.

And I must say I have a hypothetical or two. When the cat went from being solid gold to being (maybe) copper with a paint job, it changed my view of the Saudi royal family’s generosity. And of the esteem in which on our premier is held.

Oh, heck. What should we give that politician from Canada

I don’t know. What about that old copper kitty the maid found at the bazaar

Is no one concerned about the implications of this…?

But, then, it might be a damn long time before any Albertans are asked to visit Saudi Arabia again. Like the sultan in the Arab folk tale, the leaders of that country aren’t exactly known for their sentimentality. And next time the Saudis might suggest that our premier rent a car. Drive in the desert for a few days and see how high and mighty she feels.

Fred Stenson has published 20 books. A new novel, Carpenter Creek, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in fall 2026.

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In 2004 I broke the story that a paper Ralph Klein had tabled in the legislature, an essay on the Chilean Revolution that he’d written for a class at Athabasca University, was a collection of quotes lifted from other sources without citations. (Our lawyers advised me not to use the term plagiarism. Other news outlets were less punctilious.) How did I score this scoop I’d simply typed various phrases from Klein’s paper into Google—which was still something of a novelty—and found the sources he’d borrowed from so liberally.

Five years later I broke a story about the Stelmach govern-ment’s multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign, which featured a photo of two blond children, in cable-knit sweaters, frolicking on a beach. Except the kids weren’t Albertan. Nor was the beach. It was a stock photo of English children in Northumberland, playing near a castle that, according to legend, had been home to a knight of the Round Table. The Journal story, headlined “Sir Lancelot wants his beach back,” included a ludicrous claim from the government that there had been no intent to deceive. “The children are a symbol of the future,” I was told. “They symbolize that Albertans are a worldly people.”

From the vantage of 2026 it may be hard to understand why these two stories were front-page scandals. With ChatGPT and other large language models running amok in high school and university classrooms, Klein’s cut-and-paste sloppiness seems almost quaint. At least the premier went to the effort of finding sources and copying them himself. Today artificial intelligence has automated plagiarism and made a mockery of our long-held taboos about passing off other people’s work as our own. Intellectual property Original thought What do they matter, when with a few keyboard strokes a program can stitch together a plausible paper—or column Never mind that the AI is stealing or, worse, making stuff up, adding citations and quotations it has simply manufactured.

And oh, how I long for a time when stock photos were the worst of our problems. In 2026 AI doesn’t just plunder bits and pieces from original work to concoct believable fakes, stealing the livelihoods of artists and photographers and graphic designers. AI has made it simple to strip everyday photos of women and girls, turning them into instant fake porn.

Artificial intelligence can manipulate photos and videos so we no longer know what’s true.

Indeed, AI can manipulate photos and videos so that we no longer know what’s true or false and when to believe the evidence of our eyes. When Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Black civil rights activist from Minneapolis, was arrested this past January for protesting, the White House shared an AI-altered photo of her arrest. The doctored version darkened her skin, removed her lipstick, made her look heavier, and turned her proud stoic expression into a flood of messy tears. Amidst all the horrors in Minnesota that month, that incident didn’t get much attention. But the racism, the misogyny and the petty malice chilled me in a different way than the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—the White House was willing to trample the truth with an ease that would have made Goebbels pea-green with envy and Orwell sob into his beer.

I’m no Luddite. I’ve toured the cutting-edge AI labs at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Alberta researchers are world leaders, doing exciting work in machine reinforcement learning and developing AI to do everything from improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancerous tumours to running power plants more efficiently. Nor am I worried about sentient AI becoming self-aware and leading a robot rebellion. What worries me isn’t smart computers—it’s stupid humans, using the crudest energy-sucking generative AI tools to make themselves dumber, debase creativity and undermine the very concept of truth itself. (And I haven’t even touched on the horror stories of people who fall in love with their chatbots, or turn to them for dangerously bad advice, without seeming to understand they’re caught in a narcissistic feedback loop, speaking to their own reflection.)

When I see governments and businesses pushing people to use AI to answer every email, goose every online search or even draft official documents, I can only hope this fever dream will pass, that it will become fashionable again to write and create and think for ourselves. Until then, I’ll be boycotting anything that blurs the line between reality and faked fantasy. Maybe I am a latter-day Luddite. After all, they weren’t afraid of machines. They were afraid of what the Industrial Revolution would do to their communities and societies. Before our own post-industrial AI revolution overwhelms us, let’s decide which human values we’re willing to sacrifice—and which we’re not.

Paula Simons is an Alberta senator and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.

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I feel the headache coming on, and I haven’t even mentioned “notwithstanding” yet. To legislate in this way, denying or suspending some aspect of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is called “invoking the notwithstanding clause.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself. The “withstanding” part seems simple; just a modified way of saying “standing with.” We get that, right I stand with you on the matter of children not being allowed to throw stones at one another on the playground. I find “notwithstanding” much more difficult to get my ahead around. If it’s easy-peasy for you, well, carry on. No sense wasting your time.

In its more normal use, notwithstanding isn’t hard to fathom. E.g., “Notwithstanding the rainstorm, the teams continued to play baseball.” Trust me, the Charter’s notwithstanding clause is not so simple. It’s more like: “We stand with you on the safeguarding of our sacred rights and freedoms—until we don’t.”

To get one’s head around the concept of “notwithstanding” isn’t easy. As a word, it seems to work against itself.

As I searched for a helpful definition of the political use of the word notwithstanding, I was delighted to find a reference to Wayne’s World. Some of you won’t get this reference, so pardon me as I explain. In the 1990s, comedians Dana Carvey and Mike Myers came up with a sketch for the comedy show Saturday Night Live. Dana played Garth, and Mike played Wayne, two teenage stoners who create a TV show called Wayne’s World that they broadcast from Wayne’s parents’ basement. It was a huge hit and went on for years, became a movie etc. If it’s something new to you, use Wayne’s World as a search term on the internet, and you’ll be watching a sketch in about a minute. One of Garth and Wayne’s signature moves was to say something that sounded out of character for them; i.e., serious or respectful. Then they’d pause and both would say, “Not!”

And that’s exactly how Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause part of section 33 works: “We agree to abide by the rights and protections of Canadian citizens as set out in the Charter—Not!”

When a word is troubling me, I look up its origins. The etymology of “notwithstanding” is an eye-opener. It doesn’t come from the modern world, as I thought for sure it would. I was looking for a definition like “a bureaucratic term invented to fuzzy up a simple concept.” But it’s actually a very old word (Olde and Middle English): widstandan. The ancient meaning was “to stand against or resist.”

A lovely thing in one of the etymologies I consulted was that the “wid” part of “widstandan” contains a very old connotation of the word “with”: that is, “with” as negative! Who knew So, when you say to someone “I’m with you on that,” and they stomp off, you might just be dealing with a historical etymologist.

So, in other words, the folks who invented the notwithstanding clause really did mean that it should convey the idea that we’d stand with one another on these grave matters of our rights and freedoms as Canadians—until such time as someone might wish to use the negative connotation of “with” and not be with you at all.

In the present instance of Alberta’s using the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—or, at least the first time Alberta used it, as this government has since invoked the clause three more times—the UCP government is saying (and this is not a direct quote):

“We do acknowledge that Alberta teachers have a Charter right to organize, which includes the right to form and join unions (under freedom of association). But we thought the teacher strike had gone on rather too long, so we used s. 33 of the Charter to force teachers back to work.” The notwithstanding clause had never been used in Canada to end a strike before.

When some new use of the notwithstanding clause is found, it generally goes to the courts for further argument and analysis. So someday, somewhere far down the road, we can probably expect a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that (no matter what the decision is) will be of little use to the Alberta teachers who went on strike last fall and were ordered back to work. But it might help teachers’ unions and other unions in the future.

Will Garth and Wayne of Wayne’s World be invoked in the eventual Supreme Court decision Likely—not.

Fred Stenson has published 20 books. A new novel, Carpenter Creek, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in fall 2026.

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First off, premier Smith could call an election anytime she wants—today, tomorrow, next spring. She needn’t follow the election-every-four-years convention. Under our system of government all she would need to do is ask Alberta’s lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature and direct the chief electoral officer to issue the writs of election.

Wait, you ask—what about our fixed-election-date law?

Alberta’s fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of political theatre designed to evoke American-style politics. It disappears like a puff of smoke when confronted by the “reserve powers” of the province’s lieutenant governor. Here’s what Alberta’s Election Act says about a fixed election date: “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Lieutenant Governor, including the power to dissolve the Legislature.”

The fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of theatre designed to evoke American-style politics.

Think back to the 2015 provincial election. At the time, Alberta had a fixed election “period” where an election, by provincial law, was to be held sometime between March 1 and May 31, 2016. But premier Jim Prentice wanted to go one year early (arguably to avoid campaigning during a looming recession), so he simply asked the lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature.

So, why would Danielle Smith call an early election?

Answering that question means moving from the world of misleading “fixed” election date laws to the more familiar world of cutthroat politics.

Thomas Lukaszuk, the former Progressive Conservative deputy premier who spent the fall championing the “Forever Canadian” initiative (trying to force a referendum that would ask Albertans “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”) told me he thinks Smith will go early because the NDP is dropping in public opinion polls: “If they (the UCP) are smart,” he says, “they’ll call a very early election and win a large majority.”

Peter Guthrie voluntarily quit his cabinet portfolio in February, was kicked out of the UCP caucus in April for criticizing Smith, and is now trying to cobble together a party to challenge the UCP. He thinks Smith will call an election early next year to get ahead of problems including a ballooning budget deficit and a troubled healthcare system. He expects Smith to introduce a “good news” budget in February and “call an election in March right afterwards.”

But nobody has explained how Smith would justify going early to the public. That’s a crucial consideration. Voters tend to view early elections as a manipulative move by a desperate government trying to avoid trouble on the horizon.

Besides Jim Prentice’s snap election in 2015, Don Getty called a one-year-early election in 1989 and Ralph Klein called one five months early in 2004. None of them gave a good argument for going early. Even though Getty’s government won the election, the premier lost his own seat in Edmonton. He could only return to the legislature after winning a rural by-election. Klein’s government likewise won the election but lost 11 seats, and its popular vote dropped by 15 percentage points compared to the 2001 election.

I’m not saying that calling an early election is the sole reason all these premiers lost ground, or a seat, or their entire government. But I would argue going early was an indication they were under pressure and wanted to strike while the iron was hot, or at least still warm.

Going early, though, sometimes pays off. Ontario premier Doug Ford, deemed by one poll to be the most unpopular premier in Canada in December of 2024, called a snap election in February 2025, almost a year and a half ahead of his province’s own “fixed” election date of June 2, 2026. He won his third consecutive majority government.

Ford shrewdly made Donald Trump the ballot-box issue: “We need a mandate from the people to fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs, the attack he’s [bringing] against our families, our businesses, our communities.”

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi suspects premier Smith just might similarly call a snap election in early 2026: “I’m not sure the premier herself knows, or her office knows. I think they’re changing their mind day-to-day, based on what they see in the wind. So we’re ready.”

As I write this, Smith continues to hold a strong grip on power, and her polling numbers are steady. I think Smith will stick to the “fixed” election date of October 18, 2027. But then again, there’s not much stickiness to a date that can so easily be unfixed.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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And while passengers wait in those lines, they can’t help but look over at the lucky Verified Travellers, whisking their way through the short, speedy Verified Travellers line, where people can leave their computers in their cases, their toothpaste in their toiletry bag and their boots on their feet.

As they stand watching, they may be wondering—how do I get to be a Verified Traveller?

Four classes of Canadians, in fact, get to use the “good line.” First, current members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Second, RCMP members as well as most members of provincial and local police forces. Third, pilots, flight attendants and other aircrew members in uniform, as well as any airport employees who carry special Restricted Area Identification Cards.

If you’re not in one of these categories, the only way to use the fast line is with a NEXUS card. NEXUS is a joint US/Canadian program that lets Canadians cross more easily into the US. It’s ideal for people who do a lot of cross-border business or who work in both countries. Applicants go through security background checks and in-person interviews by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)—and US Homeland Security.

During the first Trump term, when COVID hit, the whole system ground to a halt, creating multi-year waits to get a card. Then the US tightened its rules. Canadians used to be able to go to any major international airport, such as those in Calgary and Edmonton, to be interviewed by US border officials. Now Canadians can only book an interview by crossing a US land border or by buying an airline ticket to an American destination. Getting an appointment isn’t easy. When I spoke to the CBSA a few months ago, they said more than 100,000 Canadians were waiting for an interview.

That’s not the only problem. For many Canadians, the idea of submitting to vetting by Trump’s Homeland Security apparatus, of providing the Trump regime with their fingerprints and their retinal scans, is more than a little disquieting. Then, this past summer, the CBSA confirmed that Homeland Security will only accept NEXUS cards with genders clearly marked F or M. For trans, gender-fluid or gender non-binary Canadians, that means a NEXUS card may simply be out of reach.

The CBSA says applications for NEXUS cards started dropping noticeably last November, right after Trump’s second election. It’s hard to see that trend reversing anytime soon.

The idea of providing the Trump regime with our fingerprints and retinal scans is disquieting.

That’s a problem for Canadian airports. Without enough Verified Travellers in the queue, they can’t afford the staff to keep Verified Traveller lanes open. Already, Ottawa’s airport only opens its Verified line during limited peak hours. The Canadian Airports Council warns that if we don’t have enough Verified Travellers, security wait times will increase for everyone.

Why do we still rely on a country that has threatened our sovereignty to investigate our citizens and collect and retain their private and biometric information It’s not just gender queer Canadians at risk. What if the Trump government just doesn’t like your politics, your social media posts or your skin tone Why have we surrendered to another country the authority to determine which Canadians can be trusted?

Maybe you don’t think you need a NEXUS card. Canadians have dramatically reduced US travel since Trump’s annexation threats. But if you want to fly from Edmonton to Moncton, and leave your boots on, you must show a NEXUS card. If you want to fly from Calgary to Ottawa, without unpacking your laptop, you need a NEXUS card. The only way for Canadian frequent fliers to travel conveniently within their own borders is with Donald Trump’s blessing! It’s bonkers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As it happens the CBSA already carries out its own background checks in order to issue NEXUS cards. So what is preventing Canada from issuing its own trusted traveller cards to Canadian citizens who aren’t going to the US I haven’t been able to get a proper answer to that question. And so I recently tabled a motion in the Senate calling on the government to investigate the creation of a sovereign, domestic Verified Travellers program for Canadian air passengers.

It’s well past time for us to repatriate control of our airport security systems and stop contracting out our security assessments to a foreign power. It may cost a bit more. But it will be worth every penny for us to reclaim our national sovereignty, and to ensure that every Canadian has the equal right to travel efficiently—even with toothpaste.

Paula Simons is an Alberta senator and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. 

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