When Canada's university leaders meet privately in Vancouver on Thursday to talk academic freedom, headline-grabbing incidents at schools such as Carleton, York and Waterloo will doubtless drive much discussion. Abortion, Israel and aboriginal rights, not to mention arrests of yahoos locking themselves by their necks to fences, have a way of monopolizing the highest-minded conversation. In reality, however, such events are town and gown conflicts -- university spaces hijacked by external partisans. They have little to do with true academic freedom. As the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada engages in its Dialogue on Academic Freedom next week, it would do well to deal with a more egregious threat to scholarly liberty. The AUCC should take sharp note of the assault being waged from with academe itself on the independence, and even existence, of Canada's faith-based universities. Since 2006, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has been targeting small, private, accredited, and invariably Christian, universities. Its method is to emit vague accusations that codes of conduct of such institutions somehow violate CAUT's definition of academic freedom. It then appoints its own "commissioners" to "investigate" whether the schools are guilty as charged. Last year, it used these tactics against Trinity Western University in the Fraser Valley. More recently, it has turned it sights on a Mennonite school in Manitoba, a Baptist academy in the Maritimes and similar Christian schools across Canada. What's risible about CAUT's singling out of these Christian schools is that, by its own admission, it has absolutely no legislative or administrative authority to conduct such investigations. CAUT has been around since 1951, primarily as a labour advisory body for academic staff. It also plays the role of equal opportunity foghorn on campus free-speech issues. Demonstrating classic mission creep, though, it has appointed itself Canada's guardian of academic freedom and launched its campaign to root out attempts by universities to "ensure an ideologically or religiously homogeneous staff." The meaning of academic freedom is what CAUT says it means. A CAUT document has a footnote to give authority to what it calls the "conventional understanding of academic freedom" -- and then cites itself as the authority. CAUT's campaign impugns the legal rights of faith-based institutions to require employees to conduct themselves in ways consistent with their affiliation to the organization's religious mission. Settled human rights law and religious freedom rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada entitle such organizations -- non-academic and academic alike -- to do just that. As Don Hutchinson, senior counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said recently about the case of Heintz versus Christian Horizons: "Christian institutions ... have particular rights that permit them to engage in selective hiring, requiring their employees to agree with their mission, beliefs, and behaviours -- provided the institution adequately explains ... why they are essential to the performance of the individual's work . . . ." Such rights are not, Hutchinson stressed, special exemptions or loopholes or simply sneaky ways to impose "Christian morality" within the academy. They are legal rights, straight up. Sending unauthorized "commissioners" to snoop into entirely legal conduct is not just impudent. It offends the very fundamentals of freedom. Nor does it matter that CAUT is limited to posting the results of its snooping on its website shame list. "An allegation that a university has 'violated the commitment to academic freedom' is an extremely serious matter [that can] easily damage the reputation of a university and place a cloud over the scholarship of its faculty," Jonathan Raymond, president of Trinity Western University, wrote in response to CAUT's bid to damage his school's good name last year. It can also cost huge amounts of money if legal action is required. Every dollar spent fighting allegations is one that isn't spent for scholarship. Every such engagement, even at the more limited level of meeting the demands of self-appointed CAUT "commissioners" for all manner of documents, hearings, explanations, justifications etc., diverts time and energy from the proper pursuits of academic life. In small private institutions, time and energy are always precious commodities and increasing pressure on them can lead to the worst effect of all. It can sow seeds of self-doubt -- even self-censorship -- among Christian scholars who, by ancient tradition and current law, are entitled to organize themselves into academic institutions that permit them to freely express their faith. One legal scholar I spoke to last week put it best: "In some ways, it's easier to be a Jewish academic than a Christian academic. We've done a good job of identifying anti-Semitism and protecting ourselves from it. Christians are just learning what it means to be a minority, and they're still awkward at defending themselves." Canada's academic leaders could strike a blow for freedom by lending them a supportive hand.

If the past month has proven anything to a baby boom about to turn 65, it's this: Millennials are sending a firm message that it's time for you to move on and, just maybe, take your institutions with you. The evidence is mounting. Rumours swirl of renewed efforts to engage Quebec through a new political construct, while in Alberta Danielle Smith, 39, has the Wildrose Alliance within striking distance of dethroning that province's almost 40-year-old Progressive Conservative leadership. A week ago, another new construct, the Alberta Party, largely populated by people weary of a previous generation's definitions of progressive politics, held its first policy convention. In Calgary, statistically Canada's youngest city, the new mayor is Naheed Nenshi, 38, who represents a radical changing of the generational guard. South of the border, the midterm demise of President Barack Obama's fortunes was foretold by a Harvard Institute of Politics report released in late October. It revealed that while the majority of millennials still preferred a Democrat-controlled Congress, young independents preferred a Republican-controlled Congress (48 per cent to 43 per cent). There, it looks like a golden opportunity for old-fashioned conservatism. But it's not. Millennials have witnessed the simultaneous moral and financial bankruptcy of both private and public institutions. In the luxurious days of yore, our parents might have been able to enjoy a cathartic scrap between the market and government camps, but now we can't depend on any of those institutions, even if we wanted to. Debt-ridden states in Europe are literally failing, propped up in a laughably unsustainable pass the buck economic order. Our markets are starting to feel like they take more than they give, and our governments are shifting into new realities, which seem conservative, but are really just an inevitable working out of tapped-out treasuries. Austerity is the mask of the new conservatism. It has the feeling of financial inevitability and the weight of political apathy. Why struggle to save institutions we never believed in to begin with? Conservatism used to be about a vision of human life, the good, which had important strategic, but not ultimately foundational, disagreements with its liberal counterparts. Devolution and autonomy are conservative virtues only insofar as they are tangibly oriented toward some common goal, some public conception of the good. But millennials are self-defining good now, our footloose technology cultivates mutually reinforcing psychographic clusters that span geographies. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, calls it the digital disruption, an eclipse of intermediaries and an increasing belief in the possibility of individuals, instead of institutions, to move culture. It is a potpourri of cult-like celebrity, built around people like U2's Bono and Hollywood's Angelina Jolie. It defaults to the local over the federal, and understands freedom not in national or ideological terms, but in private, self-actualizing ways. A postmodern potpourri of private goods might seem like good conservative pluralism, but when the system that holds it all together in productive conversation degrades, ideas about how we order those private desires for public good can take on dangerous, disillusioned tones. Respect for more traditional offices, like the presidency or the PMO, is only the first thing to go. Unless the system produces our results, it's not our system. How long until, like Iceland, we are electing people based on joke promises of free towels at public swimming pools and polar bear displays for the zoo? Will our public institutions really capture so little of our moral and social imagination? But there's good news: What Mr. Obama tapped into in 2008, what Mr. Nenshi did in Calgary and what other emergent entities aspire to connect with is the enormous energy latent in this generation for making the world a better place. So here, for those who have eyes to see it, is the real opportunity for leaders to prove that private institutions, once the bedrock of conservatism, can capture the imagination of a generation once again. As our public institutions buckle under the pressure of ideological and financial bankruptcy, there is a moral and political gap. Other institutions, especially family and faith institutions, have an opportunity to rediscover their public role: not to grab power, but to step in where public institutions and the market have failed and cast a (renewed) vision of the common good. Overlapping private institutions that work for public justice: That is change millennials will believe in.

For the degree to which it is discussed and debated, it is remarkable how little attention a significant shift in power can receive when it happens right before our eyes. The decision by federal Industry Minister Tony Clement to decline approval for Australian resource giant BHP Billiton's bid for Potash Corp. drew a lot of attention, little if any of which seemed to absorb the significance of how it vividly illustrated the nation's new political reality. Many expressed dismay that a government in the control of a party dedicated to the principle of open borders to trade would say "no" to the $38.6-billion offer. Clement's decision was ripped apart by editorialists, free market think-tanks and others of fundamentalist-libertarian views. Applause came from Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, supported by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, and if polls are to be believed, more than 80 per cent of Saskatchewanians who were delighted that Clement was persuaded by the argument that potash constitutes a strategic national resource. Senior business leaders in Alberta such as Dick Haskayne had, after all, argued the takeover could be the thin edge of a wedge that could cost Canada to lose commercial control over other vital resource-based projects such as the oilsands. Making life easier for the government was that its federalist opponents in Parliament -- Michael Ignatieff's Liberals and Jack Layton's New Democrats -- had already identified themselves as being as opposed to the takeover, too. Political commentators offered the expected and deserved wry phrases and cynical grins concerning how the government had abandoned its principles in favour of the expediency Conservatives claimed to so disdain about Liberals. Here's what's so unique and takes this story beyond the travails of a minority government: we were not debating the bailout of the auto industry in Ontario, a province that rarely appears in political commentary without the adjective "vote-rich" attached to it. Nor were we fussing over the cultural industry in "volatile" Quebec, where the artistic collective has usurped the Catholic Church as sacred defender of the francophone language and its people. We were talking about nouveau "vote-rich" Saskatchewan and its "volatile" 14 members of Parliament (13 Conservatives and one Liberal). Think for a moment. Think for a while. Think for a long time. When do you last recall all three federal parties determining that the strongly held views of the people of Saskatchewan were powerful enough to tip the balance in a matter of national economic or any other importance? You can't, can you? This is our new reality. The dominance of the Bloc Quebecois, which holds 47 of Quebec's 75 seats in the House of Commons, is so entrenched that federal parties only have 28 MPs from that province, which is just slightly more than the total number, 26, from Manitoba and Saskatchewan which, by the way, has a bigger government caucus than Quebec. Further informing this is that as of the 2006 election, the three westernmost provinces -- B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan -- combine to send more MPs (77) to Ottawa than Quebec, with only 75. All of this was, until last week, something that articulated itself in politics alone as the Ontario-Quebec bargain that had dominated Canada's first 130 years faded into history's rear-view mirror and the era of powerful regional interests began. Think, after all, of Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams's campaign against the Conservatives in the 2008 federal election. And now this: the BHP Billiton decision translated those politics into policy. Saskatchewan and its fraternal twin, Alberta, were provinces born in 1905 as children of a lesser god and battled throughout their youth for that which they did not have and other provinces did -- resources rights. Thus are resource issues and control permanently etched into their cultural psyches. In retrospect, and given that Britain's Margaret Thatcher was in the same years masterfully smoothing the way for privatization of Crown corporations through the creation of a single, but powerful "Golden Share" retained by the Crown, Saskatchewan perhaps should have employed that strategy when Potash Corp. was initially privatized in 1989. It didn't, however, and thus does Canada's long-standing debate over foreign ownership continue. Whether the BHP Billiton decision was a good call or a bad call, what may be most significant -- perhaps even historic -- about it is that when all is said and done it was Saskatchewan's call. And that is something very, very new.

A few weeks ago The Bow quietly slipped past the old Petro Canada (now Suncor Energy) Tower to become the tallest building in Calgary. The event, muffled as it was, may nevertheless have finally laid some of the city's ghosts to rest. It is astory I've been told many times since moving here and one that will reach its conclusion, the one that bears remembering, with the completion of The Bow next year. In 1973, David Lewis's NDP controlled the balance of power in Parliament and proposed the creation of a publicly-owned, national oil company. Pierre Trudeau's minority Liberal government happily complied and by 1975 Petro Canada had been born with a $1.5 billion public grubstake. Given the inherent unpopularity of energy companies, the new firm guided by the inscrutable Maurice Strong was reasonably popular, except in Alberta. Here, fears that the new state-owned company was a Trojan Horse for even more interventionist policies were realized when on Oct. 28, 1981, a day that lives in infamy, another Trudeau government (this time a majority that did not hold a single seat west of Manitoba) introduced the National Energy Program. Petro Canada was handed the responsibility for implementing the policy developed by, among others, senior Ottawa bureaucrat Ed Clark, known in those days as 'Red Ed.' And thus began the darkest five years in modern Alberta history. Private sector job losses were in the tens of thousands. Commercial and personal bankruptcy rates soared and housing prices plummeted. Thousands walked away from their homes or, as became popular, sold their property and its mortgage for $1. Calgary's population, for the only time in its history, declined. What was considered by many to be the final insult was that in the midst of all this, an unencumbered Petro Canada was building its new office complex smack in the middle of downtown. Its tower, at 215 metres, became the tallest building in the city. The company's offices were quickly branded Red Square, aka the Kremlin, and became an enduring symbol of Central Canada's desire to treat the West as a colony. The installation of Brian Mulroney's Tory governments brought a swift end to the NEP, but it was not until 1990 that the process of privatizing Petro-Canada got underway. That story ended when it merged with Suncor Energy. Today, the NDP's dream of 40 years ago is gone. Only the retail brand, its political legacy and the memories remain. Meanwhile, a company founded by Peter Lougheed's Alberta Tories created another story. AEC's first share offering, the province retained 50% ownership, was in 1975, roughly at the same time Petro Canada was created. It, too, became more private until by 1993 the province had sold its remaining 36% interest. Under the guidance of Gwynn Morgan, who grew up on a farm in central Alberta, AEC grew until Mr. Morgan executed a massive merger with PanCanadian Energy to create Encana, which is now among the world's leading energy firms split into two distinct companies, Encana and Cenovus. Mr. Morgan retired at the end of 2005 and handed the CEO reins to Randy Eresman, but before doing so he put in place the process that led to the construction of The Bow just east of the old Petro Canada Tower. At 1.7 million square feet, it is a massive building that encompasses an entire city block and upon completion will be 58 stories and 236 metres tall, Canada's largest office tower outside of Toronto. It is clear to most Calgarians eyes that the Bow has surpassed the Petro Canada/Suncor building as the city's dominant structure. Facebook photos and coffee shop conversations have taken notice but publicly there have been no grand celebrations of its new status. A party was held a few weeks ago involving those directly involved, but it was deemed impolitic to make too big of a splash. Lingering resentments from three decades past are subdued by the realization that Calgary (complete with a new mayor, Naheed Nenshi) has moved beyond aspiration and into the realm of genuine power on the national stage and prudence suggests the truly powerful utilize their influence discreetly. One bitter chapter has closed. History awaits authorship of the story to come. In the meantime, as the sun rises each morning in the east and casts its rays upon the city, the historic symbol of the NEP rests forever in the shadow of The Bow.

As usual, Calgary author Ezra Levant said it best without perhaps fully appreciating the significance of what he'd just said. "The average age would not be 25 for a right-wing event in Alberta," Levant told about 500 conservatives gathered in Quebec City last week for the founding meeting of the Reseau Liberte Quebec (Quebec Freedom Network). "I feel like an old man." Levant spent 75 minutes last Saturday morning delivering his trademark snappy patter on the horrors of human rights commissions, the grim litany of threats to free speech in this country and the evils of acquiescing to the "fascist theocracy" of militant Islam. Yet, it was his ad lib exit line on the youthful composition of the audience, and his own relationship to it, that stood as his most compelling observation. Only 14 years ago, after all, Levant was one of those mid-20 somethings at Calgary's Winds of Change conference, which he helped organize with David Frum. Ultimately, the Winds of Change set in motion the generational shift among Canada's conservatives that the Quebec Freedom Network hopes to stimulate in la belle province. Out of the Winds conference, a whole crop of 25-year-olds stepped forward to ease their elders aside and reunite divided conservatives. Just so, the under-30s in Quebec City may be the force to shift Quebec society in a direction it desperately needs. No one would pretend the 1996 gathering in Calgary, like last weekend's meeting in Quebec City, was anything but a tentative first step. It took a decade of false starts, electoral disasters and wound healing for fractured Canadian conservatives to forge an effective coalition within Stephen Harper's Conservative Party. The time frame is a realistic one for conservatives in the Quebec Freedom Network to keep in mind if their end is power and not just talk. The Quebec network's long-term goals remain unclear. None yet knows whether it will be a Tea Party North talking shop, seek to re-energize the troubled Action democratique du Quebec provincially, or help create a new political party. Still, as with Winds of Change, there was an unmistakable feeling of something significant having begun in terms of organizers' stated ambition of shifting Quebec's political dialogue from the insular polarity of sovereigntist-federalist disputes to the left-right axis conventional in modern nation states. As political philosopher Frederick Tetu told the audience, the binary proposal of either sovereignty or federalism has left zero space or energy to debate the kind of economic renewal Quebecers desperately need. Discredited socialism remains entrenched within Quebec because the fixation on federalism versus sovereignty has left no time to challenge the left-nationalist orthodoxy that only the state can protect the nation. Maxime Bernier, the Conservative MP for the Beauce region south of Quebec City, pointed out the poisonous paradox that after 50 years of debate, and two torturous referendums on "the national question," Quebec is economically weaker and more financially dependent on Canada than when sovereignty first emerged as the primary political option. In fact, he argued, the "two nationalisms of Canada and Quebec" have reinforced each other in a codependency relationship that was toxic to the economic growth and genuine autonomy of the province. "Successive governments in Quebec have undermined our autonomy by demanding more and more from the federal government," Bernier said. "They want independence, yet they are more dependent than ever." Quebec, he said, need only insist on respect for the autonomy it's already guaranteed in the Canadian Constitution. The result would be a Quebec that regains legitimate constitutional autonomy within a united Canada, thereby allowing Quebecers to see their fellow Canadians as compatriots, not threats. Such talk naturally affronts the left-nationalist orthodoxy that created and sustains the so-called Quebec model of omnipresent state intervention in both economics and culture. In what has become de rigueur behaviour for Quebec's intellectually exhausted leftists, a handful of them responded by trying to disrupt the Freedom Network gathering, dumping manure on the front steps of the hotel where it was held, scrawling slogans in a washroom and conducting a noisy protest. Here, however, Levant again stepped out as the unrealized embodiment of the shift in Quebec that those behind the Freedom Network seek to represent. The unilingual Calgarian, called upon to address an audience that was almost unanimously francophone, tossed off his telling observations and trenchant one-liners entirely in English. And no one batted an eye. Fifteen years ago, there would have been showy walkouts, or at least audible hissing, had a Quebec political movement been kicked off by a speech from a high-profile anglophone unable to speak French in Quebec City. Last Saturday morning, though, they applauded even when Levant asked such pointed questions as: "How did Quebecers forget their lineage of freedom?" Wouldn't it be wonderful if a group of 25-year-old Quebecers, inspired by winds of change coming from Calgary, reminded their political class of the true meaning of the motto je me souviens?

By most measures, the city, which has just elected a freshly minted mayor and council is doing well. The Calgary Foundation's 2009 Vital Signs report showed a city becoming a better, safer place to live and the City of Calgary's Centre City Plan is a roadmap for a vibrant core. It has room for the growth of commerce, condos, shopping, arts and entertainment, pubs, restaurants. It satisfies the senses and without question is a fine document -- a dynamic template for a city with great aspirations. Yet a critical element -- one found in all of the world's great cities -- has been overlooked. The Centre City Plan leaves no room for the growth of faith institutions to serve the 40,000 additional residents expected to fill its core. What are the consequences of this in terms of brick-and-mortar space as well as program delivery? If city living is intended to meet the wide range of its residents' needs, isn't spiritual nourishment among those? If the plan makes no reference to the need for growth of the faith institutions, what will flourishing in the future be like? Can a great city exist without nurturing its most deeply held beliefs? Cardus, a think-tank that studies social architecture and which has undertaken similar work in Toronto and Hamilton, has now completed the first of a multi-phase undertaking designed to answer these questions. We have conducted an audit of the physical infrastructure that supports the work of faith communities in the Calgary city centre. The existence of structures like churches, mosques, and temples speak to the fact that worship has been part of what it means to be human since the beginning of time. Faith communities, just like arts and business communities, have impacts on citizens whether or not they participate in them. This is what we have discovered and some of the questions we hope to address in the next phases of our work. There are 25 spaces devoted to worship within the boundaries of Calgary's Centre City. They range from historic Christian churches, to a Buddhist Monastery, to spaces provided for Muslim Friday prayers. There are no synagogues, mosques, LDS, Hindu or Sikh temples. The spaces that do exist are in some cases used by multiple religious communities. They are networked with each other, with governments, non-profits, and businesses to provide a vast range of social services. The religious communities in the downtown core are responsible for the creation of significant levels of social capital in volunteer hours, charitable activity and infrastructure serving the needs of the underclass. Additionally, churches offer a wide range of services which aren't specifically religious, nor necessarily aimed at the poor, but contribute to the arts, physical fitness, language learning, job search and skills enhancement. The precise impacts of limiting the participation of faith institutions in these areas will be the subject of future work but it is clear that without the Mustard Seed, Salvation Army, Inn From the Cold, Calgary Urban Project Society (CUPS), Neighbourlink, FaithLink, AA, NA, and other groups using religious spaces in downtown Calgary, the city core would be a very different place. One does not have to be a believer to recognize that institutions of faith have -- if nothing else -- sociological value as incubators of social virtues. Calgary's historic churches played a significant role in the establishment of the city, its character and its culture. St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church was built in 1883 in East Calgary, was later moved and renamed Our Lady of Peace before finally becoming St. Mary's Cathedral. Knox United Church (originally Knox Presbyterian) was built in 1883, Cathedral Church of the Redeemer by the Anglicans in 1884, and Trinity Lutheran Church in 1889. Over the years, other venues were added to reflect diversity and include worship spaces for francophones, Hungarians, Ethiopians and Eritreans, Vietnamese, Hispanic, Chinese and other Asian communities. Beyond the spiritual, the Cardus work shows these congregations provide a vast range of services to the wider community, including language instruction, food and clothing banks, addiction recovery groups, work with the homeless, the unemployed, single mothers, HIV patients, temporary housing and social assistance. These spaces are also used for music concerts, performing arts, marriage counselling and child care for those who live, work in or visit the downtown core. As the makeup of Calgary's downtown residential population changes, so too will the need for worship spaces to reflect those changes. Adding 40,000 residents means there will be a need for space well beyond present capacity. The extent to which the current Centre City plan creates a disincentive to diversity within the core will be a matter for further study. It's also a conversation that needs to engage us all.

Phase 1 of Cardus' project, Calgary City Soul, was recently released. It consists of an inventory of worship spaces in Calgary's city centre. The project report can be found here.

The Calgary Herald covered the launch of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal on Saturday, October 16. Read the story and their encouraging comments about the growth of roads between faith and culture.

Danielle Smith's first year as leader of the Wildrose Alliance Party not only produced anxiety within Alberta's political establishment, but it also may be influencing the thinking of mutual friends in Ottawa. Ms. Smith, a former Calgary Herald editorial writer, television host and Alberta director for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, took the Wildrose reins on Oct. 17, 2009. Her party has since drawn three defectors from Premier Ed Stelmach's ruling Progressive Conservatives, Rob Anderson and former cabinet ministers Heather Forsyth and Guy Boutilier. Rarely has Canada's political scene had to deal with a phenomenon such as Ms. Smith, stylish, intelligent, female, articulate and philosophically unambiguous. Wildrose soared in the polls, at one point hitting 39 per cent. The Tory infrastructure, deeply embedded after almost 40 years of power, panicked. Dozens of riding officials defected to Ms. Smith, and former Conservative strategist Hal Walker became Wildrose president. Interviews with leading columnists, the CBC's Peter Mansbridge and the Rick Mercer Report followed swiftly, and Ms. Smith passed muster so assuredly that, had an election been held last fall, Wildrose would've attracted a strong enough list of candidates to overthrow a Tory dynasty that appeared as uncertain as an old man with a bad hip making his way down an icy stairway. Fortunately for Mr. Stelmach, an election was not imminent and the first provincewide test of Wildrose is unlikely to occur until the spring of 2012. Meantime, Wildrose continues to build its infrastructure, while the government paddles hard to rebrand itself as conservative first and progressive second. Most significant was Mr. Stelmach's choice of former leadership rival and academic Ted Morton as Finance Minister. Mr. Morton and Ms. Smith are so close philosophically that, as the Finance Minister's supporters point out, all that anyone needs to know about Wildrose's platform can be found on Mr. Morton's 2006 provincial Tory leadership campaign website. Pulses may have slowed around Wildrose since the heady 39-per-cent polling days of its honeymoon with Ms. Smith, but the party has embedded itself as Alberta's most likely government-in-waiting. And there are signs that the ruling Tories aren't dead, just resting. Yet, it's commonly said that the best way to have an issue debated within the government's caucus is not to lobby a Tory MLA but to whisper it into Ms. Smith's ear and have her raise it with the media. This is precisely why she's among the first topics raised by Alberta's 27 Conservative MPs when they return to their ridings. It is easily forgotten that many of these MPs were once Reformers who, as with many Wildrosers, grow faint at the recitation of the famous American observation that  "government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." They know as well as anyone that the sensibilities and infrastructures that launched Reform still exist in Western Canada and elsewhere within the federal Conservative Party's base. And they know that, after almost five years of Conservative power, there are those, primarily within the western ranks of their coalition, who are less inspired than they used to be. Like Ms. Smith, they know that, while Conservative pluralities in Alberta are often massive, history shows they remain a potentially fragile coalition of libertarians, so-called social conservatives and various other brands of conservatives who all expect to find hints of their DNA within the party's veins. Ms. Smith's popularity is a reminder to those MPs and others that the party that governs Canada is a child born of many fathers, that what happened before can happen again, and that sparks, ignored, can turn into flames.