Our Biggest Year Ever

On behalf of the entire team here at the Alberta Institute, I'd like to personally thank you for what has been, by far, our organization’s Biggest Year Ever.

Seriously - while writing this email, I could barely believe that all of this happened in just the last eleven months!

Just look at how far we’ve come in that time, and I think you’ll agree that 2022 has been a landmark year, not just for our organization, but for the principles of freedom and liberty that we all cherish…

At the start of the year, we were all in the middle of yet another lockdown, facing restrictions we’d been promised would never be reintroduced, like masking and business closures, along with the new addition of a vaccine passport that, just a few months earlier, the government had promised would never ever happen in a free province like Alberta.

Shortly after, we also found ourselves in the midst of a global energy crisis caused by the largest armed conflict in the last decade, as well as the beginnings of what could turn out to be runaway inflation.

But, in the months since, the freedom movement has won a succession of victories, and your support of the Alberta Institute and our work really did help lead the way in turning around Alberta’s fortunes.

The Alberta Institute is now, by far and away, the fastest-growing think tank and advocacy group anywhere in Canada, with record new supporter signups and record media coverage in 2022.

I couldn’t possibly list everything that we worked on this year in this email - you’d still be reading it next year - but here are just a few of my personal favourite highlights:

• We proposed and advocated for more than 50 new or updated federal and provincial public policy ideas on everything from education reform to abolishing equalization and from increasing lobbyist transparency to defunding the CBC.
  
  
• We succeeded in having almost every single one of our policy proposals supported by multiple candidates across both the federal and provincial leadership race that took place, including many being supported by both eventual winners in each respective race.
  
  
• We were the first advocacy group in the country to launch a campaign against the introduction of the Emergencies Act - before it was even invoked - and we continued to oppose this massive government overreach both during and after its use.
  
  
• We conducted a comprehensive analysis of both the Alberta provincial budget and the Canadian federal budget, and made recommendations to improve the financial situations of both governments. The Alberta government adopted our recommendation to reindex personal income taxes to inflation, and will hopefully return to a flat tax soon.
  
  
• We alerted Albertans to the federal government’s plans to censor the internet using Bill C-11, before anyone else was paying attention. Following our efforts, many other groups got on board, and even large corporations - for example, Google - are now speaking out and running adverts against the Bill.
  
  
• We forced the Alberta government to walk back their plan to bypass courts and impose fines and punishments for traffic violations without giving people access to due process.
  
  
• We ran a campaign to Abolish ArriveCAN that saw more than 50,000 Canadians get involved. We succeeded in forcing the federal government to make the app voluntary, but we will need to do more next year to make sure it doesn’t become permanent.
  
  
• We led the charge to eliminate Alberta's terrible vaccine passport once and for all. We also pushed to remove mask mandates in Alberta schools and keep kids in classes, despite the activist agenda of teachers’ unions who wanted to keep restrictions in place indefinitely.
  
  
• We rallied Albertans against the plans of radical environmental activists, who want to cap oil and gas emissions. Our work is helping to educate people about how this would effectively be a cap on oil and gas production in Alberta, and simply outsource more production to other countries with lower environmental standards.
  
  
• We were the first organization in Canada, of any size or type, to call for the federal government to get behind ethical Alberta oil and gas, and ban the importation of natural resources from Russia after their invasion of Ukraine. At first, the federal government refused, but once our petition hit 10,000 signatures, they agreed to ban crude oil, and once we hit 25,000 signatures, they gave in to our full demand to ban all refined products like gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, which made up the majority of what Canada actually imported from Russia.

The Alberta Institute itself also had some fantastic organizational wins, including:

• Growing our supporter list from about 80,000 Albertans to almost 150,000.
  
  
• Appearing in more than 1,000 (!) media stories, compared with only about 100 in 2021.
  
  
• Helping to launch the Alberta Parents’ Union, a new group promoting school choice and education quality, looking out for the interests of families and children across Alberta.
  
  
• Working with our partners at the Free Alberta Strategy group to help promote the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which will soon be law.
  
  
• Returning to hosting in-person events across the province - including highly successful pub nights in Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary, as well as dozens of smaller events in smaller centres.
  
  
• Expanding our staff to help increase our organization’s output and impact, including the hiring of a full-time communications coordinator and two summer interns who worked on exciting research projects.

As you can see, when we say that your support helped us achieve a lot this year – we really mean it - and remember, these were just a few of the highlights!

If you like what we’ve accomplished in 2022, just wait until you see what we have in store for next year.

Actually, no, don’t wait - help us make it happen!

Everything that happened in 2022 reminds me just how important our work here at the Alberta Institute – the work that you have loyally supported – is to protect and advance the freedoms of every Albertan.

We can’t thank you enough for helping make 2022 our Biggest Year Ever, but - with your support - we’re looking forward to doing it all again in 2023.

Regards,

Peter McCaffrey
President
Alberta Institute