OP-ED: “Ignorance is strength” comes to Alberta
"When a pro-life advocate went undercover to expose the availability of late-term abortion in other provinces, the public saw the footage. Debates erupted. Journalists reported."
Author: Richard Dur
When a pro-life advocate went undercover to expose the availability of late-term abortion in other provinces, the public saw the footage. Debates erupted. Journalists reported. Legislators responded. And perhaps most importantly, a stubborn, oft-denied fact – that late-term abortions are happening in Canada and available upon request (no medical reason required) – was pulled out of the shadows and into plain view.
And this matters even more in a country like ours, because Canada remains the only country in the world with no law regulating abortion at all.
Whatever one thinks of abortion, the public at least had some visibility into the process – except in Alberta.
On a quiet street in Calgary, there’s a building most people would never take a second look at. Grey and featureless on the outside, but on the inside lies a darkness the concrete façade was built to hide. Here, behind unremarkable walls, unborn children remain legally featureless too: without protected status, without recognition, without rights. What occurs inside stays unseen and unexamined (though taxpayers foot the bill), not because it should be secret, but because the law makes it secret.
And the reason is as revealing as it is disturbing. Not because of patient confidentiality. Nor is it because anyone’s privacy is at risk. But because Alberta has created a zone where even recording your own conversation, asking your own questions, or documenting your own experience can be treated as an offense – a restriction that applies to no other interaction or setting anywhere else in the province. Only abortion receives this shield, sealed behind a legal iron curtain, an exemption unmatched anywhere else in healthcare or in the country.
Alberta’s so-called “bubble-zone law” is uniquely prohibitive: criminalizing documentation and even speech itself if it expresses disapproval of abortion.
In Ontario, Quebec, and BC, similar conversations were recorded: grainy footage, muffled audio, the kind of evidence that forces viewers to sit up and pay attention. But only in Alberta is releasing recordings made inside an Alberta abortion facility punishable by fines or jail time, not for violating privacy, but for violating a law designed to keep the public in the dark.
The timing could not be more ironic.
Even as the UCP government unveils a new licence plate design emblazoned with our provincial motto, “Strong and Free,” Albertans are still living under one of the most draconian speech restrictions in the country. The law makes it a potential crime – punishable by fines up to $5,000, six months in jail, or both – to reveal what happens inside an abortion facility, even when the evidence mirrors what has already been exposed in other provinces.
A province that brands itself as “Strong and Free” is maintaining a censorship regime so aggressive that it treats truth itself as a threat.
This isn’t strength. And it certainly isn’t freedom. If anything, it’s Orwellian.
George Orwell warned that when governments begin to fear the truth, they don’t debate it, they criminalize it. In 1984, he wrote of slogans that meant their opposite: “Ignorance is Strength,” “Freedom is Slavery.” You didn’t need to believe them; you just had to repeat them. And after a while, repetition did the work of conviction.
To be clear, this law didn’t originate with the UCP. It was born under the NDP (the UCP actually walked out of the debates). But it remains on the books today, unamended and unexamined, under a government that publicly, at least, champions free expression.
A government may not be responsible for what it inherits. But it is responsible for what it chooses to maintain.
And that makes the contradiction harder to justify.
If “Strong and Free” is more than just a slogan, if it means anything deeper than a motto on metal, then Alberta must allow the same transparency that Ontario, Quebec, and BC already permit. Instead, Alberta’s bubble-zone regime shields publicly funded practices from the very people who fund them (Alberta taxpayers) and turns opinion itself into a punishable act the moment you cross an invisible line on a sidewalk.
It is long past time to revisit this legislation.
Because no province that hides reality, and punishes those who reveal it, can honestly claim to be “Strong and Free.”