By Collin May

Time was a former political leader’s expected role was to enjoy retirement in relative obscurity, resisting the urge to wade into political debate. Conservatives generally stick to that tradition. Ralph Klein certainly did after his term ended. Stephen Harper has made no attempt to upstage his successors. Yet former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney can’t seem to help himself.

From the boardroom of Bennett Jones, one of Calgary’s oldest law firms, Kenney recently offered his thoughts on the unspeakable horrors that await the province should it entertain a debate (perhaps even call a referendum) on separating from Canada. While dismissing Alberta separatists as a “perennially angry minority”, Kenney nevertheless declared a vote on separation would “would divide families, divide communities, divide friends for no useful purpose.” Business partnerships, church and community groups, even marriages and families would break apart, he warned, “shredding the social fabric of the province.”

It was a remarkable burst of untethered hyperbole, but it says more about the former premier than it does about the province he once led.

Kenney’s take on the history of Alberta separatism is telling. It’s a 50-year-old “discredited concept,” he said, whose acolytes “couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this province.” Exhibit A in his analysis was Gordon Kesler, an Alberta rodeo rider and oil company scout who believed independence was the only way to save Alberta from Ottawa’s depredations. In a 1982 byelection, Kesler got himself very much elected as an MLA under the Western Canada Concept banner. He later lost in the general election to Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives, but Lougheed did not belittle Albertans for entertaining separatist notions. Instead, he asked for a mandate to fight Ottawa more effectively — and got it.

Kenney, by contrast, ridicules separatists while simultaneously painting them as an existential menace. Worse, he likens them to followers of Vladimir Putin and (perhaps even worse?) Donald Trump. “[I]f you just follow them on social media,” he claimed, one will quickly see that they cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and Trump’s threat of making Canada the 51 st state.

Kenney’s latest intervention fits a pattern. As premier from 2019 to 2022, he could not resist trying to stamp out dissent. During the pandemic, he alienated political allies by dismissing their concerns about mandatory vaccines with contempt. He saw his ouster as UCP leader as the result of a Trumpian-inspired or “MAGA” campaign. UCP party faithful, however, said their rejection of him had far more to do with his top-down leadership style and habit of “blaming other people for the errors he made.”

What’s especially striking about Kenney’s separatist obsession is that he seems to understand as little about Albertans now as he did while premier. Albertans have long debated separation without the province descending into chaos. When Kesler won his seat, people talked about separation, argued its pros and cons, but couples were not running to their divorce lawyers over the issue and business partners were not at each other’s throats.

And there are legitimate reasons for concern about Canada’s social and political structure, as well as the role provinces play in that structure. Canada’s institutions operate largely on an old colonial model that concentrates power in the original population centre of southern Ontario and Quebec. This has not, and does not, make for great national cohesion or political participation. Instead, it feeds constant fuel to separatist fires.

The current threat to Canadian identity comes as well from the ideological commitments of our federal government. Early in his time as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau declared Canada to be a “post-national” state. This sort of moniker is consistent with the popularly-designated woke doctrine that eschews the liberal nation-state, democratic procedures and individual freedom in favour of tribalist narratives and identity politics.

The obsession with post-nation-state policies has initiated the dissolution of the Canadian nation regardless of whether Quebeckers or Albertans actually vote for separation. We are all becoming de facto separatists within a dissolving Canada, a drift that current Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ineffective “elbows up” attitude has done nothing to reverse.

Kenney’s panicked musings about Alberta separatists would have us believe the province need only continue the fight for a better deal within the Canadian federation. Kenney pursued just such a policy, and failed signally to deliver. For too many Albertans today, his advice does not reflect the political reality on the ground nor appreciate the worrying trends within Canadian institutions and among our political class.

Kenney likes to associate himself with Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism and defender of venerable institutions. But Burke was known as much in his day for his sympathies with the American revolutionaries and their creation of an experimental new republic as he was for his contempt towards the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. Burke’s conservatism still linked real actions with true words. It would be advisable, perhaps, to keep our own political language here in Alberta within the bounds of the plausible rather than fly off into the fanciful.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Collin May is a lawyer, adjunct lecturer in community health sciences with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and the author of a number of articles and reviews on the psychology, social theory and philosophy of cancel culture.

By Jonathan Barazzutti

Since 2020, steep increases to tuition fees have triggered large-scale protests by the students who pay those fees at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of British Columbia and at McGill University and Concordia University in Quebec, among many other schools. (A freeze on tuition fees in Ontario since 2019 explains that province’s absence from the list.)

It’s true that tuition has been on the rise. According to Statistics Canada , between 2006-2007 and 2024-2025, the average undergraduate full-year tuition fee at a Canadian university grew from approximately $4,900 to $7,360.

But do the students really know what’s behind the increases?

University administrators looking to deflect responsibility like to blame provincial government cutbacks to post-secondary funding. Here, the evidence is unconvincing. Going back two decades, nationwide full-time equivalent (FTE) student transfer payments from provincial governments have remained essentially constant, after accounting for inflation. While government grants have remained flat, tuition fees are up.

The issue, then, is where all this extra money is going – and whether it benefits students. Last year researcher and consultant Alex Usher took a close look at the budgeting preferences of universities on a nationwide basis. He found that between 2016-2017 and 2021-2022 the spending category of “Administration” – which comprises the non-teaching, bureaucratic operations of a university – grew by 15 percent. Curiously enough “Instruction,” the component of a university that most people would consider to be its core function, was among the slowest growing categories, at a mere 3 percent. This top-heavy tendency for universities is widely known as “administrative bloat”.

Administrative bloat has been a problem at Canadian universities for decades and the topic of much debate on campus. In 2001, for example, the average top-tier university in Canada spent $44 million (in 2019 dollars) on central administration. By 2019 this had more than doubled to $93 million, supporting Usher’s shorter-term observations. Usher calculated that the size of the non-academic cohort at universities has increased by between 85 percent and 170 percent over the past 20 years.

While some level of administration is obviously necessary to operate any post-secondary institution, the current scale and role of campus bureaucracies is fundamentally different from the experience of past decades. The ranks of university administration used to be filled largely with tenured professors who would return to teaching after a few terms of service. Today, the administrative ranks are largely comprised of a professional cadre of bureaucrats. (They are higher paid too; teaching faculty are currently paid about 10 percent less than non-academic personnel.)

This ever-larger administrative state is increasingly displacing the university’s core academic function. As law professor Todd Zywicki notes, “Even as the army of bureaucrats has grown like kudzu over traditional ivy walls, full-time faculty are increasingly being displaced by adjunct professors and other part-time professors who are taking on a greater share of teaching responsibilities than in the past.” While Zywicki is writing about the American experience, his observations hold equally well for Canada.

So while tuition fees keep going up, this doesn’t necessarily benefit the students paying those higher fees. American research shows spending on administration and student fees are not correlated with higher graduation rates. Canada’s huge multi-decade run-up in administrative expenditures is at best doing nothing and at worst harming our universities’ performance and reputations. Of Canada’s 15 leading research universities, 13 have fallen in the global Quality School rankings since 2010. It seems a troubling trend.

And no discussion of administrative bloat today can ignore the elephant in the corner: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Writing in the National Post, Peter MacKinnon, past president of the University of Saskatchewan, draws a straight line from administrative bloat to the current infestation of DEI policies on Canadian campuses.

The same thing is going on at universities across Canada that have permanent DEI offices and bureaucracies, including at UBC, the University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, Western University, Dalhousie University and Thompson Rivers University. As a C2C Journal article explains, DEI offices and programs offer no meaningful benefit to student success or the broader university community. Rather, they damage a school’s reputation by shifting focus away from credible scientific pursuits to identity politics and victimology.

With universities apparently unable to restrain the growth of their administrative Leviathan, there may be little alternative but to impose discipline from the outside. This should begin with greater transparency.

Former university administrator William Doswell Smith highlights a “Golden Rule” for universities and other non-profit institutions: that fixed costs (such as central administration) must never be allowed to rise faster than variable costs (those related to the student population). As an example of what can happen when Smith’s Golden Rule is ignored, consider the fate of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.

In early 2021 Laurentian announced it was seeking bankruptcy protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, under which a court-appointed manager directs the operations of the delinquent organization. Laurentian then eliminated 76 academic programs, terminated 195 staff and faculty, and ended its relationships with three nearby schools.

Ontario’s Auditor-General Bonnie Lysak found that the primary cause of the school’s financial crisis were ill-considered capital investments. The administrators’ big dreams essentially bankrupted the university.

The lesson is clear: if universities refuse to correct the out-of-control growth of their administrations, then fiscal discipline will eventually be forced upon them. A reckoning is coming for these bloated, profligate schools. The solution to higher tuition is not increasing funding. It’s fewer administrators.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Jonathan Barazzutti is an economics student at the University of Calgary. He was the winner of the 2nd Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest co-sponsored by C2C Journal.