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Last week, myself and four others were imprisoned for four to five years. The conservatives and the liberals have got it all sewn up. The narrative is set: for the conservatives, it's a job well done. For the liberals, it's another chance to go through the motions of an "injustice trial". But this is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for "protest" on "the climate." It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters. This is not about "climate change"; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being "melodramatic," that economies will be "devastated," they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statements have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going "well, you know." What do you think David Attenborough means when he said "we face the end of civilization"? A picnic? What do you think 1 billion refugees at 2 degrees Celsius, 20 times the number at the end of World War II, looks like? Really? Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice. They are the main problem. Of course, the Carbon State and its functionaries are going to put people in prison for years if they come up with a resistance plan proportionate to the level of criminality we objectively face. If they are willing to have a few hundred million black people starve to death, then why be surprised that they pervert the course of justice? This trial was not about "the right to protest." It is not about "a cause," "an issue." It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth, as Gandhi called it. We were not trying to win, we were trying to tell the truth as if the truth was real, as if this slaughter, starvation, and rape is real. It was integrity, not expediency. So obviously, we spoke that truth. Obviously, we got interrupted. Obviously, we continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning. Integrity at the present time is resistance, nothing more, nothing less. It's the opposite logic to expediency. Expediency is trying to have your cake and eat it. To maintain your privilege and status while appearing to do good. Expediency is to write an article about the trial but not glue your hands to your editor's desk. Expediency is to call for justice but not to challenge to judge because it will do in your career. Expediency is to lead a march but not have anyone sit down and be arrested. Expediency is doing everything that looks good but does no good. Expediency is betrayal. Betrayal of your family, your country, this world, but also of yourself—that temporary spark of consciousness in the void of eternity. Consciousness is truth, beauty, love. When you're on your deathbed, you will not be thinking about your career, the stuff you had; you'll be thinking about whether you became what you know yourself to be, a soul. Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale, said: when you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option. We might add, "in the 2020s," because if you don't, the cost will be far greater. In a week or two, all this trial business will be old news. All that will be left for us is the dual brutality of a British prison. Today I had boiled rice with fried rice. Yesterday, boiled rice with pasta. A few days ago, a note came through that cell door: two paragraphs, a guy down the row had killed himself. The new inmates bang on their iron doors all night, yelling, caged and enraged. As this article wrote itself in my head, I cried. Not tears of self-pity, not of anger, but of determination. I know who I am. I know what I am doing, and that's why I'm Britain's most influential climate campaigner, as they like to call me. Take note: in the end times, integrity trumps expediency. I'm smiling. Are you?

Since the election, we've grown the Heritage Fund from $17 billion to an expected $25 billion by the end of this year. Our goal is to build it to generate $12 billion in investment income, providing sustainable revenue for Albertans. We've focused on disciplined year-over-year spending, paying down our $80 billion debt, and freeing up $3.5 billion in finance charges. This allows us to offer tax breaks and affordability payments when we have surpluses. Let's keep building a stronger future for Alberta together!

Now, richer than Texas….. Alberta is winning economically; reaching escape velocity as it continues to set its own economic path within Confederation. Politicians have a choice to grow their tax revenue base through a healthier competitive economy that creates real jobs and grows GDP productivity - or borrow money - and force the next generation to make the austerity choices they refuse to make today. The charts below show the devastating impact of federal fiscal recklessness; making Canadians structurally poorer as Americans get wealthier. Canada’s inflation adjusted real GDP per capita is worse today than when the Liberal party came into power in 2015. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently ranked Canadas per capita GDP productivity the worst of all 34 advanced economies out to 2030 and 2060. But Alberta is the Canadian GDP outlier, with Saskatchewan close behind. Five years ago, we made some hard choices in a recessionary environment and now Alberta is carrying Canada economically, reversing all the failed economic assumptions of the provincial NDP, who just like the Liberals, tried to govern by avoiding hard choices with borrowed money. Just like the Liberals they borrowed more money than all previous governments combined and had only an inflated bureaucracy and negative economic indicators and billions in lost tax revenue to interest payments instead of schools and hospitals to show for it. We built a sector-specific economic development strategy around an opportunity society, so Albertans and businesses could take more of what they make home and reinvest it into themselves, creating more wealth and jobs and products and innovation, and giving everyone more choices. Then we kept looking at ways to update the government and expand school and health options, digitize services, expand private/public partnerships and pass sector-specific legislation that would make us more competitive. We’re not there yet, but Canadians are voting for Alberta with Canada’s fastest population growth, youngest population, best educated workforce, highest employment rate, fastest housing growth, highest net income, highest per capita investment, best educational attainment, and most innovative policy environment. Confederation is a laboratory of democracy. Canada isn’t facing a single challenge we can’t step up and solve with better ideas and some political courage. We can turn this ship around. Alberta knows it.