I suspect many of us voting for Alberta independence are the same people who challenged COVID mandates when doing so came with a social cost. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. We’re the risk-takers. The independent thinkers. The ones who have never been particularly good at following the crowd simply because it feels safer there. In another century, we might have been the ones who packed everything into a wagon and headed west. The ones who broke ground where there were no guarantees, crossed oceans toward places we had never seen, created something from nothing and ventured beyond the edge of the known map. We take chances. We choose the road less travelled. We’re willing to exchange the certainty of what is for the possibility of what could be. Trailblazers have never been handed guarantees. If they waited until someone could promise them the journey would be safe, the road would already exist—or more likely, not at all. So when we’re told Alberta independence comes with unknowns, that doesn’t frighten all of us. Of course there are unknowns. The future has always belonged, at least in part, to people willing to walk toward them anyway. Some people need the road to already exist. Others are the reason there is one. We’re just built differently. Vote option 2