Taking Alberta Back: Faith, Fuel, and Freedom on the Canadian Far Right

Abstract

Alberta, Canada is both a major extractive zone—home to the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, mostly in the form of oil sands located in the north of the province—and a place whose political culture has been profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity. It is both “petro province” and “God’s province”. Despite these distinct political economic and socio-cultural features, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the contemporary relationships among them. To explore this, we profile the populist far-right social movement organization Take Back Alberta (TBA), which, by channeling the interlocking “freedom” and separatist movements into the governing United Conservative Party (UCP), played a pivotal role in Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s rise to power. We ask the following question: what role do religion and a populist defense of the fossil fuel industry (or “extractive populism”) play, both ideologically and organizationally, within TBA? Drawing from TBA-related documents, including websites, podcasts, social media, and speeches, our analysis produces two key findings: first, that TBA deploys a radical, far-right version of extractive populism, which “anchors” the Danielle Smith government, and, second, that evangelical Christianity contributes to this extractive populism organizationally—by impacting TBA’s membership and resource infrastructure—and discursively, by influencing the collective action frames utilized by TBA leaders in advocating for the interests of the fossil fuel industry.

1. Introduction

Since 2016, the year that saw the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. (“Brexit”) and the election of Donald Trump, public and scholarly interest in populism has virtually exploded. While the precise definition of populism remains subject to debate, most scholars agree that it is not an ideology per se, but rather is constituted by distinctive discursive frames, communicational styles, and organizational strategies that generate antagonism between the “people” and “elites”. Often described as a “thin-centered ideology”, populism can and does align itself with many other, “thick” ideological structures (Mudde 2017). Keen to understand the resulting array of ideological projects to which populism has been dedicated, scholars have developed a series of qualified concepts—such as “market populism,” “extractive populism,” and “neo-liberal populism” (Gunster et al. 2021; Sawer and Laycock 2009). Moreover, given the powerful and culturally informed ways that it defines, binds, and mobilizes the “people” (Norris and Inglehart 2019), much attention has been paid to understanding populism’s relationship to other large-scale forces informing group identities, including nationalism, nativism, and religion (Brubaker 2017, 2020).

In this article, we consider how religion, specifically evangelical Christianity, intersects with extractive populism in Alberta’s self-described “freedom” movement—a mobilization against public health measures related to COVID-19 with strong anti-state, libertarian tendencies (McLean and Laxer 2023). Home to the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, Alberta is an extractive zone of global significance. It is also a place whose political culture has been profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity. It is for this reason that scholars have labelled Alberta both “petro province” and “God’s province” (Adkin 2016; Banack 2016). Despite these distinct political economic and socio-cultural features, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the contemporary relationships among them. Moreover, although Alberta is recognized as playing an outsized role in the development of the intellectual and organizational resources of Canadian conservatism, the role of social movements in cultivating Alberta’s right-wing political culture is often given scant attention, as the scholarship tends to focus on conservative provincial parties and leaders—from Social Credit to the Progressive Conservatives and the United Conservative Party—or on Western and Albertan-rooted federal parties like Reform/Alliance (Bratt et al. 2023; Finkel 1989; Harrison 1995; Wesley 2011). Studies on the role of evangelical Christianity in fueling the province’s right-wing political culture similarly tend to focus on political parties and their leaders (Banack 2016).

To fill these gaps, we conduct a qualitative study of the populist far-right social movement organization Take Back Alberta (TBA), which played a pivotal role in channeling Alberta’s freedom and separatist movements into the governing United Conservative Party (UCP). Drawing from a range of TBA-related documents, including websites, podcasts, social media, and speeches, we explore the organization’s engagement in tactics and frames that support extractive populism, while paying attention to its members’ relationships to evangelical Christian beliefs and institutions. Our analysis yields two key findings. First, we show that Take Back Alberta has engaged in a radicalized version of extractive populism both directly, by promoting the interests of oil and gas, and indirectly, via its role in “anchoring” the pro-fossil fuel United Conservative government. Second, our results indicate a strong elective affinity1 between evangelical Christianity and extractive populism, where, although religion does not take center stage, it plays an important role in the political activism of Take Back Alberta. The religious component is observable not only in the personal and political backgrounds of the TBA leadership, but also through its impact on the movement’s organizational and ideological structures.

In what follows, we begin by contextualizing our case, focusing on the dynamic relationships among provincial party politics, climate denialism2, and the Alberta freedom movement. We then present our analytic framework, which addresses the under-appreciated role of religion in defining the extractive populism of Take Back Alberta. Following a brief outline of our data and methodology, we proceed to our analysis and key findings.

2. Case Background: Provincial Party Politics, Climate Denialism, and the Alberta Freedom Movement

Despite having been widely perceived as exceptional with respect to the global rise of far-right populism in the 21st century, especially the strongly nativist and anti-immigration kind observed in the US and Europe (Adams 2017; Ambrose and Mudde 2015), Canada has not been immune to the recent intensification of far-right protest.3 The freedom movement against pandemic-era public health measures is the most recent phase of the protest cycle and culminated in the well-known Freedom Convoy that paralyzed the city of Ottawa for three weeks in early 2022. Several of the movement’s key organizers had ties to the prior Yellow Vests movement (Balgord 2022), which in 2018–2019 grafted Islamophobia onto grievances against the federal Liberals’ perceived hostility to the Albertan oil sands (McLean 2024). Both protest movements have been strongest in Alberta and have intersected with a revitalized Alberta separatist movement, which was gaining momentum towards the end of Justin Trudeau’s first term (2015–2019) and which grew dramatically in the wake of Trudeau’s re-election in November 2019.

Like the earlier wave of Alberta separatism in the early 1980s, the modern separatist movement centrally revolves around Ottawa’s perceived interference in the province’s fossil fuel sector. If in the 1980s the main grievance of Alberta separatism centered on Ottawa’s efforts to increase control over the sector and its revenues, then today, it focuses on the federal government’s efforts to mitigate the industry’s environmental and climate impacts (Pratt and Stevenson 1981; Ruiz-Soler and Chun 2022). Although Trudeau is quite pro-fossil fuel, embodying a “new denialism” premised on formal acceptance of the climate crisis without the requisite policy interventions to meaningfully address it (Daub et al. 2021), his efforts at regulating substantially surpass the laissez-faire approach of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government (2006–2015). These efforts include the cancellation of the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline, a moratorium on oil tanker traffic in the Pacific Northwest, an overhaul of the approval process for major projects via Bill C-69, and the establishment of a carbon tax. All have been met with fierce opposition from the fossil fuel industry, conservative parties, and far-right movements alike.4

Trudeau’s rise to power was not the only major political development against which the separatist movement was reacting. The Alberta NDP, a social democratic party, was elected in 2015, thus ending 80 years of uninterrupted conservative rule in the province.5 This NDP victory likely would not have occurred without vote splitting on the right between the more mainstream Progressive Conservatives and the far-right Wildrose Party, a fact that led the two parties to merge in 2017, forming the United Conservative Party (UCP). In addition to the end of this conservative dynasty, the province was also experiencing a protracted economic bust period, beginning in 2014, due to the fall of international oil prices, which led to layoffs, reduced wages, and unemployment (Hussey et al. 2021). This was combined with the rising strength and militancy of the environmental movement, which in many instances formed alliances with Indigenous rights groups to oppose—through protest and blockades—the expansion of oil sands extraction and called on governments to phase out fossil fuels (Black et al. 2014).

In this context, fossil capital mobilized around the idea that the oil and gas industry is under attack by elites and environmentalists and therefore requires “the people” to defend it as an expression of the popular will and common good (Gunster et al. 2021). Meanwhile, former Harper cabinet member, Jason Kenney, became the UCP’s first leader and successfully defeated the Alberta NDP in 2019 on a campaign to “fight back” against Ottawa’s environmental policies (Thomson 2023). Almost immediately, Kenney announced the creation of the Canadian Energy Centre, a provincial corporation with a mandate to promote the oil and gas industry (Clark 2023). Kenney also sought to both harness and redirect the separatist movement into his strategy to obtain a “fair deal” within Canadian confederation, which was ultimately unsuccessful as many on the right-flank of the party grew impatient with the lack of tangible results (Wesley 2023).

The pandemic exacerbated the pressures on the Kenney government emanating from the separatist movement. Despite his opting for what were likely the least stringent public health measures in the country and generally taking a “herd immunity” approach, a burgeoning freedom movement—which was particularly strong in Alberta—found Kenney’s approach too restrictive (Harrison 2023, p. 111; Young 2023). As Kenney failed to appease the extra-parliamentary wing of this movement, he also struggled to manage his divided caucus, particularly the rural “backbenchers” among whom were those who sympathized with the growing protest movement and began publicly criticizing Kenney’s approach (Young 2023, pp. 445–48). In this context, Kenney’s poll numbers plummeted.

The UCP’s far-right wing base migrated their voting preference towards the separatist Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta (WIP), which had grown out of the new separatist organizing efforts in the wake of Trudeau’s 2019 re-election. The re-appearance of right-flank electoral pressure just a few short years after Kenney had managed to unite the conservative movement gave a powerful impetus to remove Kenney, lest there be a repeat of 2015’s vote splitting.6 In this context, rural UCP constituency associations organized against Kenney and successfully triggered a leadership review. One freedom group, Take Back Alberta (TBA), looked to seize the moment.

TBA was founded in December 2021 by David Parker, a 35-year-old veteran of the conservative movement, with the principal goal of ousting Kenney (Tait 2022). More generally, TBA works to mobilize the overlapping freedom and separatist movements and those sympathetic to them—largely rural, white, conservative Christians—to become active within the UCP and thereby reshape its direction in line with movement principles. This work has been undertaken in a series of what the organization calls “phases”. Phase one involved mobilizing Albertans to join the UCP ahead of the leadership review vote in May 2022. Phase two involved mobilizing more Albertans to join the UCP, with the intent of voting for a new “solid freedom leader” in the October 2022 leadership race, with Danielle Smith as the organization’s clear preference (Take Back Alberta (Phase 2) n.d.). Phase three involved electing TBA members to the UCP Board of Governors at the November 2022 AGM, while phase four entailed mobilizing TBA’s resources to defeat the NDP in the May 2023 general election (McCoy 2022c). In all four phases, the organization has been wildly successful in achieving its goals—Kenney is gone, the UCP now has a “solid freedom leader” in Premier Danielle Smith, TBA-backed candidates took all nine available board positions at the AGM, and the UCP defeated the NDP in the general election on 29 May 2023. We show below that TBA played an important and likely decisive role in these outcomes, especially through the first three phases.

3. Analytic Framework: Extractive Populism and Religion

As we alluded to above, fossil fuel companies have developed a complex set of practices to legitimize and defend their extractive activities in Canada. Together constituting what scholars call “a regime of obstruction,” these practices include political lobbying, advertising, sponsorships, university partnerships, and social media communication strategies aimed at obstructing climate action and mobilizing public support for Canadian fossil capitalism (Carroll 2021; Graham and Carroll 2023, pp. 29–33). Such communication strategies are well-documented in the Canadian context, beginning with the 2010 publication of Ezra Levant’s Ethical Oil and the subsequent founding of the short-lived Ethical Oil Institute, which sought to popularize the argument that Canadian oil is “ethical” since it comes from a liberal democratic country, in contrast with oil from the Middle East (Kinder 2024, pp. 32–62). Levant may have “ignited the oil culture wars” (Kinder 2024, p. 33), but it was not long before fossil capital itself became more directly involved in such social media strategies. In 2014, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), Canada’s largest oil and gas association, launched the Canada’s Energy Citizens initiative, a website, Facebook page, and online campaign that has attracted over 200,000 followers by presenting extractivism as a Canadian public good and source of national pride (Wood 2018). Together with other closely networked groups like Canada Action, Oil Respect, and Oil Sands Strong, these organizations provide “connective leadership” by creating online fora in which content produced by pro-industry think tanks, advocacy organizations, and right-wing media is repackaged into digestible, social media-ready forms (Gunster 2022; Neubauer et al. 2023; Neubauer and Graham 2021). Besides emphasizing job growth and other alleged material benefits to communities, these communication strategies often entail mobilizing “discourses of community and place” to frame industry activity as aligned with community members’ moral and cultural values, including gendered norms such as familism and “frontier masculinity” (Massie and Jackson 2020, p. 40).

To comprehend the relationships and discourses sustaining these promotional activities, scholars have increasingly drawn on the concept of extractive populism, which Gunster et al. (2021, p. 198) define as “an emerging effort to position extractivism as under attack from elites, as an economic and political project that demands popular mobilization to defend, and as a democratic expression of the public will to fight for an industry that serves the common good”. Thus understood, extractive populism is “both derivative of and complementary to” broader forms of conservative populism that foreground antagonism between a hardworking and morally pure “people” and a corrupt liberal “elite” (Gunster et al. 2021, p. 198). Importantly, the discourses adopted through extractive populism obfuscate the capitalist interests and settler–colonial relations underpinning fossil fuel extraction and obscure the environmental dangers and social inequities that result from such extraction.

Given the ways they rebrand “elite” interests as the will of the “people”, organizations engaged in extractive populism are sometimes described as “petroturf” (Kinder 2024), an extension of “astroturf” implying that they adopt a “grassroots” façade to advance corporate interests and goals (Cho et al. 2011; Lyon and Maxwell 2004). Others have questioned such terms, arguing that they reinforce a perception of citizen advocates “as shams, dupes, or hired guns,” ultimately providing little insight into the reasons such advocates choose to align their interests with those of the business sector (Wood 2018, p. 78). To address these concerns, some have opted for the alternative notion of “subsidized publics”, wherein industry actors work to “catalyze and refine the participation of particular groups within the public sphere, thereby giving them a coherence, focus, and elevated profile that they would not have on their own” (Gunster et al. 2021, p. 199).

Despite these terminological differences, there is general agreement that studies of Canadian extractive populism ought to avoid analyzing industry supporters as merely passive recipients of pro-industry messaging. Our approach to Take Back Alberta recognizes the contributions of these literatures and utilizes a bi-directional analytical frame that attends to both the top-down role of industry-connected actors as well as the bottom-up agency of social movement organizations and participants in the process of grafting the interests of fossil capital onto those of the “people”. Such a bi-directional analysis is particularly important for explaining what we detail below as extractive populism’s radicalization process, as autonomy from industry affords the deployment of more existential and conspiratorial collective action frames.

We also seek to account for the relationship between extractive populism and partisan politics. As we demonstrate in further detail below, TBA played an active and influential role in propelling Danielle Smith—a heavily pro-oil candidate, sympathetic to the objectives of the freedom movement—to the UCP leadership and the premiership of Alberta. To understand this role and its implications for extractive populism, we draw on the concept of “anchoring”, whereby social movement organizations strategically accrue influence by providing parties with money, time, and networks. In exchange, such organizations are granted a say in policy decisions (“ideological patronage”), “vetoes over key appointments and positions, public jobs for supporters, esteem and prestige, and access to ongoing state policies” (Schlozman 2015, p. 18).

Our aim in this study is to comprehend how the religious ties of social movement organizers impact this process of anchoring in the context of extractive populism. Research has shown that the success and resonance of extractive populism significantly depend on its proponents’ capacity to “re-christen” pro-industry ideas as rooted in and reflective of extant ideologies and belief systems appealing to the “people” (Gunster et al. 2021, p. 200). Yet, although studies exploring the populism–religion nexus in the Western world abound (Haynes 2020), religion’s relationship with extractive populism in particular is a relatively less examined field, particularly in Canada. Scholars in this domain generally focus on secular pro-oil organizations pursuing mass appeal. Such organizations differ from TBA, which does not refrain from mobilizing religion, and whose target audience is much more specific—the far-right wing of a major conservative party. The omission of religion in Canadian studies of extractive populism is a notable lacuna, especially given the well-documented connections between evangelical Christianity, right-wing populism, and climate denialism (Sheldon and Oreskes 2017). This is particularly true given the significant role of Christianity, and evangelical Christianity in particular, within Albertan conservatism, both historically and at present, as well as its role in the development of the province’s fossil fuel economy (Banack 2016; Dochuk 2013; 2019, pp. 346–52).

To understand how religion informs the extractive populism of Take Back Alberta, we apply insights from the literature to the role of religion to populisms. Studies have shown that religion interacts with populism in multiple ways, serving, in various combinations, as an identity marker and worldview, a set of cultural resources, and a multifaceted strategic asset (for an overview, see Peker and Laxer 2021, pp. 322–24). Ideologically, religion may help define “the people” through ethnocultural boundaries, sometimes as a nativist tool used to distinguish them from perceived outsiders (Brubaker 2017). Populists may also utilize religion to “thicken” their ideational framework, reinforcing them with narratives of shared ancestry, moral righteousness shaped by a Manichean and apocalyptic outlook, and a mission to combat societal decay. Stylistically, they may incorporate culturally religious symbols, language, and rituals to deepen their appeal (Zúquete 2017). Strategically, religion may support populist movements by mobilizing its followers and networks, legitimizing leaders as the embodiment of the people’s will, and shaping policies and public life through agenda setting (Gorski 2019; Peker 2019).

The potential significance of religion for populism is also recognized in the literature explaining growing public support for populist parties and movements (Berman 2021). According to this literature, socioeconomic factors such as globalization, technological change, rising inequality and unemployment, declining social mobility, and resulting status anxieties are among the primary causes behind populism’s rise. Importantly, these socio-economic forces are fused with sociocultural grievances generated by factors such as immigration and ethnic diversity, the cultural and economic divides between urban and rural areas, and the transformation of social values and gender hierarchies (Hochschild 2016). Religion, in this framework, could not only become an identity marker vis à vis immigrants, but could also become a symbol for established cultural norms, small community life defined by honest work, and traditional values against the perceived normlessness and corruption of the modern urban ethos (Norris and Inglehart 2019). Drawing insight from these studies, our analysis aims to tease out the organizational from the discursive/ideological roles of evangelical Christianity in supporting TBA’s extractive populism.

4. Materials and Methods

Our case and methodology differ from those commonly found in the literature on Canadian extractive populism in five important ways. First, it is not a single-issue group narrowly or even primarily focused on oil and gas. Second, during the period under investigation, TBA focused on Albertan politics and did not address a broader Canadian public.7 Third, unlike typical extractive populist groups covered in the literature, TBA is a registered third-party advertiser (TPA), meaning that it is more directly partisan, with the ability to use its resources to support or oppose specific political parties and candidates, whereas other extractive populist groups must remain non-partisan and issues-based.8 Fourth, TBA’s objective is not simply to spread pro-oil discourse via social media or to organize pro-pipeline protest actions, but to organizationally channel extractive populism, along with other ideologies, directly into partisan activity. Finally, TBA is led by individuals who are integrated into the milieu of far-right social movement organizing, especially the overlapping freedom and separatist movements. In all these ways, our case is unique in the literature and suggests the need for an alternative set of research questions and a revised methodology.

Unlike other studies of extractive populism (e.g., Gunster et al. 2021), our aim is not to quantitatively determine which frames are most prominent. Nor are we seeking to claim that TBA should be primarily understood as either an extractive populist or faith-based organization, or even necessarily as a freedom group focused on opposing public health measures. A different methodology would be required to rank TBA’s most important issues in this way. Instead, we have designed our methodology around the following question: what role do extractive populism and religion (fuel and faith) play, both ideologically and organizationally, within TBA and, by extension, within the dramatic events that shook Albertan politics between January 2022 and May 2023?

To answer this question, we began by scraping TBA’s Telegram, taking screenshots (337 in total) of all posts from 22 July 2022 (when the account was started) until 18 May 2023, shortly before the Albertan general election on 29 May 2023, when TBA celebrated success in its fourth phase. The TBA Telegram channel is unidirectional and top-down, serving as a platform in which TBA leaders communicate information to the over 4000 individuals who follow the channel. These data provided us with organizational information on the group, including its leadership structure, personnel, and the frequency, location, and (rough) attendance of its town hall events. TBA held 70 town hall events from July ’22 to May ’23, but attendance data are only available for 21 of them. In all cases, these data were gleaned from TBA leaders posting either the number of attendees or a photograph that captures the crowd, from which a visual estimate was made. Parker estimates that, from January through April 2023, he addressed about 5000 individuals across the province (Tait 2023). Combined with an analysis of one video recording of a TBA town hall featuring Parker’s standard 1 h speech, which according to the Globe & Mail he delivered at every meeting (Tait 2023), these data provide insight into the role of extractive populist and faith-based collective action frames within the organization (Benford and Snow 2000).

TBA cannot be understood in isolation, though, as many TBA leaders organize outside of TBA and are prolific content producers across various media. In short, TBA needs to be understood as organically integrated “within a multi-organizational field consisting of various SMOs” (Benford and Snow 2000, p. 617). We aim to situate TBA’s leaders in this multi-organizational field by examining the structures and personal networks that connect TBA to other organizations. We therefore conducted further research into TBA’s leadership, including Parker and the various “regional captains” (see

Table 1. TBA’s leadership.9

Name	Position(s)
David Parker	Founder and Executive Director
Marco Van Huigenbos	Chief Financial Officer (Van Huigenbos n.d.). Regional Captain for Southern Alberta
Jarrad McCoy	Regional Captain for Southern Alberta
Roy Beyer	Regional Captain for Calgary
Vince Byfield	Regional Captain for Edmonton
Blain Cellars	Regional Captain for Calgary
Tim Hoven	Regional Captain for Central Alberta
Mark Hunt	Regional Captain for Northern Alberta
Mitch Sylvestre	Regional Captain for Northern Alberta
Benita Pedersen	Regional Captain for Edmonton

), who appear to have been hand-selected by Parker rather than elected via a formal leadership selection process. We draw on publicly available information about these individuals—including insights into their demography, network associations, and worldview gleaned from personal websites, social media accounts, podcast appearances, newspaper articles, and op-eds—in order to further assess both the organizational and ideological interconnections of extractive populism and faith amongst the leadership strata of TBA (see Table 1). This corpus includes 9 episodes of David Parker’s podcast, The Canadian Story, in which he interviews other TBA leaders, and/or in which the main theme/guest interviewee was pertinent to the themes of religion and fossil fuels.

5. Results

5.1. TBA and Extractive Populism

Although the immediate focus and apparent cause of the freedom movement were opposition to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, TBA cannot be understood as a single-issue organization but must instead be situated within the broader context of Canadian extractive populism. The connections between the freedom movement and pro-oil and gas activism might seem oblique at first—what, after all, does COVID-19 have to do with fossil fuels? Yet, many of the organizers of the Freedom Convoy had earlier experience in pro-oil and gas activism, including via the Alberta separatist and Yellow Vests movements (Mirrlees 2022; Wesley 2022). Our analysis of TBA, beginning with leader David Parker and moving on to the regional captains, provides further evidence of these connections.

David Parker’s worldview and career are steeped in support for the Albertan oil and gas industry.10 Recounting his excitement about the 2011 election of a Conservative majority government, which he had ambitions to work for, Parker told a crowd of TBA supporters: “I felt like my team just won the Stanley Cup and I’m going to play for them … I believed the Conservatives are in, we’re gonna change Canada, we’re going to fix the problems. We’re gonna get our oil to market”. Parker here exemplifies a strong identification with the fossil fuel industry, in which the interests of fossil capital are equated with those of citizens: it is “our oil” and “we” need to get it to market.

After occupying a range of political positions in Ottawa and Alberta, including a stint in the Prime Minister’s Office, Parker’s career became more overtly related to oil and gas advocacy during the Trudeau years. For most of 2018 and 2019, he was directly involved in fossil fuel promotion, first as a senior advisor to the Conservative Opposition Critic for Environment and Climate Change, and next as a manager at the Modern Miracle Network (MMN), an organization that mobilizes extractive populist discourses. In the former role, he managed a staff of five and recalls “working 16-h days trying to fight” Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, which proposed to overhaul the federal approval process for large industrial projects. Industry and conservative parties alike dubbed it the “no more pipelines act,” and argued that it laid out such a restrictive review process that it was a de facto ban on future oil sands pipelines (Anderson 2023).

During this same period, extractive populism in Canada grew from a discursive strategy aimed at mobilizing support for the industry via social media and began demonstrating some organizational heft, manifesting in a wave of protests and convoys, some of which intersected with the far-right Yellow Vests Canada movement and many of which were specifically targeted at Bill C-69 (McLean 2024). Yet, rather than see Parker as a “dupe,” it is clear he had his own vision of how to advocate for the sector, which differed from that of fossil capital. Not yet the public-facing firebrand of TBA town halls and protests, at this point, Parker was behind-the-scenes. Reflecting on his time in this role, Parker recalls feeling that industry was not sufficiently defending itself:

“I got very angry at oil and gas executives. They would show up at these meetings and they would say, ‘maybe change a few things, you know, we can probably live with some of this.’ They would not say, ‘this is horrible. It’s going to destroy our industry, it’s going to destroy our way of life.’ They wouldn’t even fight back when they were being attacked themselves” (TBA Event—Grand Prairie 2023).

In other words, while industry proved amenable to certain regulatory mechanisms laid out in Bill C-69, notwithstanding a concerted effort to weaken the legislation through lobbying (Cox and Riley 2019), for Parker, this compromise reflected unacceptable and existential risk. Where fossil capital maintained it could “live with” certain policies, Parker would have preferred to see outright opposition, viewing the legislation as something that was “going to destroy our way of life”. This more existential and radical way of advocating for the oil and gas industry would be given full rein just several years later in the context of TBA.

After leaving his position as advisor to the Opposition Critic, Parker joined the Modern Miracle Network (MMN), which, as he puts it, “probably sounds like an evangelical Christian organization, but actually they talk about the modern miracle of hydrocarbons—of oil and gas—how it’s lifted more people out of poverty than any technology in the history of the world” (TBA Event—Grand Prairie 2023). MMN supports the claim that fossil capitalism is buttressed by “theological investments in oil,” and the organization’s framing of fossil fuels as “modern miracles,” in particular, has direct precedent in a 1920s ad campaign by the American Petroleum Institute emphasizing their product’s “miraculous” applications (Rowe 2022, pp. 30, 135–36). MMN is part of the broader extractive populist ecosystem of organizations and was once described by Jason Kenney as a “clearinghouse for effective pro-oil and gas advocacy” (Marsters 2019; Parker and Gerber 2022d).11 In an interview with a former colleague at MMN, Parker describes the organization’s mandate as “changing the narrative that has been pushed by basically radical environmentalists claiming that Canadian oil is dirty, whereas it’s actually the cleanest in the world” (Parker and Gerber 2022a).12 Within less than a year after leaving MMN, Parker took his first long-term break from politics, which was interrupted, as we will see in the following section, when his faith drove him back and spurred him to found TBA.

TBA’s origins, too, are connected to pro-fossil fuel advocacy. In his town hall speech, Parker tells the story of a “yak farmer” from Olds, Alberta by the name of Chris Kinnear, who became involved in politics in 2015 when “he watched the NDP win, and he watched our industry tank”. According to Parker, after the 2021 UCP AGM, Kinnear became convinced that Kenney was likely to cause another NDP government and was soon put in touch with Parker through a fellow UCP member. The two men met up shortly thereafter to talk strategy, and agreed to hold an event in Sundre, Alberta; Kinnear would bring the crowd, and Parker would bring the plan. Kinnear managed to bring out 280 people to what would be TBA’s first town hall.

Missing from Parker’s account is Kinnear’s connection to the oil and gas industry. In 2018, Kinnear co-founded the organization Sustaining Alberta’s Energy Network (SAEN), which was dedicated to promoting what it called the “RStar program,” a policy proposal that would incentivize oil and gas companies to clean up old wells by offering them a reduced royalty rate on new drilling (Kaisar 2023). In other words, RStar proposed a public subsidy for new oil and gas drilling in exchange for companies cleaning up old wells, which they are already legally obligated to do. As president of the Alberta Enterprise Group, an influential Calgary-based business lobby, Danielle Smith became a proponent of RStar, lobbying the Kenney government and publishing an op-ed in mid-2021 in favor of the proposal (Kaisar 2023; Smith 2021). Kenney’s government, however, rebuffed the idea, with the then-Minister of Energy, Sonya Savage, writing in June 2021 that “the proposal does not align with the province’s royalty regime or our approach to liability management and upholding the polluter-pays principle” (Savage 2021).

Thus, while Kinnear may have sought to remove Kenney from the premiership for the reasons identified in Parker’s telling (namely, to avoid an NDP government), it is evident that Kinnear had another bone to pick with Kenney: his refusal of SAEN’s signature program. Less than half a year after helping launch TBA, Kinnear became Campaign Coordinator for Smith when she announced her bid for UCP leadership in May 2022. When Smith became Premier in October 2022, she included RStar in the mandate of the Minister of Energy, while rewarding Kinnear with the vague position of Special Project Manager, a position he has held since, according to his LinkedIn. While Kinnear’s role in TBA beyond the initial meeting with Parker is unknown, TBA’s original momentum was clearly drawn from the resource infrastructure of Kinnear and the SAEN, a pro-oil and gas group with a unique business case against Kenney’s government.

In addition to these organizational connections with pro-fossil fuel advocacy, TBA routinely invokes climate and energy politics in its collective action frames, as well as in organizing efforts outside of TBA. During phase two (the “election of a solid freedom leader” to head the UCP), Vince Byfield, TBA’s one-time regional captain for Edmonton, shared a list of questions to the Telegram, which he planned to ask the leadership candidates in upcoming interviews. These included the following: in light of Trudeau’s efforts to “block Alberta energy companies from getting their oil and gas products to the world market … will you begin negotiations with the US to get in pipeline from Alberta to the closest available tidewater port?” (Byfield 2022d). Byfield simultaneously shared these questions with the Alberta Statehood Party (ASP), a short-lived far-right fringe party of which he was an active supporter and which advocated for Alberta to become the 51st US state (Byfield 2022b). Byfield, who wished to join the US because the Canadian government is “seemingly hell-bent to destroy our province’s primary industry [i.e., the fossil fuel industry],” does not appear to have lost any political capital within mainstream Albertan conservatism for having adopted such views (Byfield 2020a).13 In sum, Byfield’s support for the oil and gas industry was so strong that it led him to campaign for Alberta to join the US, including through an open letter to Premier Jason Kenney arguing his “fair deal” approach was too slow, which he published in the far-right alternative news site, the Western Standard (Byfield 2020b).14 When TBA later developed a plan to remove Kenney and replace him with the more autonomist (even quasi-separatist) and “freedom-minded” Danielle Smith, Byfield’s radical support for oil and gas was redirected into the UCP.

Throughout phase four, Byfield was granted one-on-one interviews with several major candidates for UCP leadership, including Smith, which were held in-person in “the Byfield home” (Byfield 2022c). Additionally, in October 2022, he was elected to the 18-member Board of the UCP, a body that includes the Premier herself. Although his new position meant he must step aside from his role as regional captain, Byfield maintained posting privileges on the TBA Telegram, to which he sent pictures of a UCP canvas in Edmonton during phase four, adding, “BTW, Danielle says it’s a great photo 🙂” (Byfield 2022a).

David Parker, for his part, channeled his background in oil and gas advocacy directly into his collective action frames for TBA. During phase four, Parker composed a list of “Nine Reasons that the NDP must be stopped,” including “The NDP have already proven that they do not support the oil and gas industry” (D. Parker 2022c). However, now that Parker was head of an organization and did not have to answer to anyone higher, he was free to advocate for fossil fuels using the more radical discourse he had longed to in his earlier employment. A common slogan used as a diagnostic frame, for example, was, “You are the carbon they are trying to reduce” (D. Parker 2022f). In his town hall speeches, this was accompanied by Parker’s claims to his supporters that they were living in an “anti-human society,” evidence of which was to be found in low birthrates caused by climate alarmism and feminism—the former because it “teaches our children that they are a disease on this planet,” and the latter because it has given women the sense that “their careers are more important … than the continuation of the human race”. In such diagnoses, Parker goes a step further, constructing an identification not only with the fossil fuel industry, but with its most destructive waste product: here, the “people” are carbon. Extractive populism is thereby radicalized in part by discursively constructing an “inverted crisis,” where the existential threat facing society is not climate change, but what “they” (elites and nefarious Others) are going to do about it (The Zetkin Collective 2024). To reduce carbon in this framing is literally to reduce the “people” and thus jeopardize the “continuation of the human race”.

This is where standard extractive populist frames—e.g., the idea that fossil fuels are good for the common “people”—make a qualitative leap into the realm of globalist conspiracy theories.15 Although most of the Telegram posts by Benita Pedersen, another TBA regional captain, were logistical in nature, one featured a picture of a roadside billboard she had made, reading, “#RejectAgenda2030”, and linked to her personal website, “AllFiredUpForFreedom.com” (McCoy 2023a). There, supporters learn that global elites, via institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and United Nations (UN), are waging a “war on fossil fuels” as part of their plan to abolish nation states, create a “one-world government”, and depopulate the earth using vaccines (Pedersen n.d.). Similarly, Parker’s podcast, The Canadian Story, advertised one of its episodes by posting the following questions: “Sick of paying more for gas and food? Is the WEF and UN trying to bankrupt and starve us on purpose?” (@thecadstory 2022). The episode features Dennis Modry, then-head of the leading separatist organization, the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), and Parker describes how the two organizations are “planning on working together towards the same eventual objective, which is a freer and more independent Alberta” (Parker and Gerber 2022b). Throughout the interview, Modry grounds his diagnostic frames in the globalist conspiracy theory, which doubles as a rationale for separation. He proposes that

“The federal government is really controlled by the WEF, [the] UN and their Agenda 2030, and this all goes back to the fallacy of manmade climate change … WEF, UN-controlled federal government policy is designed to harm us, all in the name of climate change by restricting our access to energy and to food products … The whole implementation of the World Economic Forum, UN Agenda 2030 is just anathema to humanity. It’s diabolical and it’s genocidal on a massive scale” (Parker and Gerber 2022b).

By depicting the threat level as existential, the globalist conspiracy theory offers a radicalizing diagnostic frame through which to interpret climate politics. This far-right, conspiratorial version of extractive populism served as an ideological anchor for TBA’s collective action frames, including support of Danielle Smith’s UCP leadership campaign. During phase two, Parker shared a Smith tweet to the TBA Telegram, in which she announced, “no one in my government will be permitted to have any ties to [the WEF],” characterizing the organization as “anti-democratic elites” who “want to destroy our economy with carbon taxes”, who support Trudeau and Notley, and from which the Alberta Sovereignty Act, her signature policy proposal, would offer Albertans protection. In this way, the widespread “great reset” conspiracy theory of the pandemic (synonymous with Agenda 2030, “one world government”, etc.) was coupled with Albertan regional grievances and given a quasi-separatist coloring. Parker praised Smith’s announcement, writing that “we need to demand that the WEF has zero sway over Alberta going forward” (D. Parker 2022e). Thus, Smith’s campaign not only offered the extractive populist subject—i.e., “the people” as constructed by this discourse—protection from Ottawa’s environmental regulatory overreach, but by extension, from nefarious globalist elites linked in a “chain of equivalence” with domestic political opponents (Laclau 2005). TBA’s collective action frames worked to mobilize support for Smith on these grounds.

By anchoring the Smith government in these ways, TBA has thus served as an organizational conduit for steering the UCP towards more radical expressions of extractive populism that increasingly overlapped with far-right ones. Danielle Smith herself would seem to concur with this interpretation (if not the terminology). In her interview with Byfield during phase two (the leadership race), Smith credits TBA with Kenney’s downfall: “I must say, I think you guys did the work of rallying the forces to make the change that we’re in the middle of now” (Byfield 2022f). Indeed, given the close margin of Kenney’s defeat in phase one (the leadership review), TBA’s mobilization of 15,000 disaffected voters was almost certainly decisive (Bellefontaine 2022).16 Of course, TBA did not manufacture anti-Kenney sentiment or the far-right ideologies and movements fueling it. Separatist organizing had been on an uptick since 2019, and the freedom movement held numerous large protest actions against Kenney during the pandemic. Polling, moreover, clearly shows that anti-Kenney sentiment was hurting the UCP and was causing “freedom-minded” voters to swing to the separatist Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta (the WIP). TBA did not manufacture that migration. Rather, TBA’s unique political contribution was to channel that anti-Kenney sentiment back into the UCP. It did so, in part, by drawing upon collective action frames consistent with a radicalized version of extractive populism and turning those frames into anchors supporting the Smith government and its climate policy.

5.2. TBA and Faith

In this section, we examine the organizational/material and discursive/ideological role that evangelical Christianity has played in TBA’s extractive populism. We argue that the elective affinity between the two is perceptible in at least three ways. Religion (1) motivated the founding of TBA and provided a rationale for key leaders to become involved, (2) provided a resource infrastructure to TBA as a set of “everyday organizations” from which to draw a mass base, and (3) inflected TBA’s conception of freedom with Manichean, apocalyptic, and persecution narratives that have implications for climate denialism.

The majority of Take Back Alberta leaders are evangelical Christians, including founder and leader David Parker.17 Parker was born on April 8th 1989 in Lacomb, Alberta, a small city between Calgary and Edmonton, to Mac Parker, a pastor, and Lorraine Parker, a homeschool facilitator.18 As a home-schooled child in this environment, Parker claims to have memorized the book of Romans and to have “read the Bible end to end over a dozen times” (Kennedy-Glans 2024). After home schooling, Parker attended Trinity Western University, an evangelical Christian university in Langley, British Columbia.19 These early experiences laid the foundation for a political life fueled by faith. As Parker describes it to TBA supporters, at least two of his major political moves were driven by faith, both of which brought him into close contact with Danielle Smith.

The first of these moves was his opposition to then-Premier Alison Redford’s education reforms in 2012, which Christian homeschoolers interpreted as forcing them to teach their kids about evolution and gay rights, thus violating their “divine” parental rights (Wingrove 2012). Although at the time he was working in Ottawa for a Conservative MP, Parker describes how he “took [Redford’s policy] personally” and began drafting letters denouncing it. In one letter to the editor of the Lacombe Globe, his hometown’s local paper, Parker asked, “When did parents lose the right to educate their children?” and proclaimed “Freedom starts and stops with the family. Do not hand over your children to the state, fight for the only thing that is truly yours” (D. Parker 2012). Here, as in many future speeches and interviews, Parker identifies freedom with the expression of individual and family choices, and counterposes this with the state, which is framed as antithetical to this construction of freedom and rights. The defense of this particular expression of freedom—the family’s “right” to educate children—is also a recurring focus of Parker’s politics. Later, Parker would join far-right protests against LGBTQ education in public schools, oversee the launch of a new Take Back Alberta phase focused on electing anti-LGBTQ candidates to Albertan school boards, and launch a “parental rights tour,” featuring James Lindsay, an American MAGA extremist who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a leading voice in the reactionary anti-student inclusion, anti-LGBTQ, and conspiracy propaganda movements” (SPLC n.d.).

One of Parker’s letters opposing Redford’s education reforms caught the attention of the Wildrose Party, which promptly recruited him on that basis to join leader Danielle Smith’s team of strategists. This seems to have been the first time Parker would have met and worked with Smith, thus beginning a relationship that would deepen over the years into friendship and culminate in an important synergy between TBA and Smith’s eventual rise to power.20

More germane for our purposes, though, is the second major faith-based political move made by Parker, the founding of TBA. Immediately before founding TBA, Parker was on his first extended break from politics following his role as Director of Field Operations for Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party of Canada leadership campaign, a move in part motivated by his desire to defeat O’Toole’s main competitor, Peter Mackay, on the grounds that Mackay opposed social conservatives and “people of faith”. After the O’Toole campaign, Parker moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and started a podcast and “several businesses”, including a roofing business with his cousin. “I was actually kind of happy and things were doing well”, he recalls, “and then Jason Kenney started arresting pastors”; this is a reference to the arrest of religious leaders who had refused to follow COVID-19 health measures, which Parker viewed as an attack on religious freedom, the “cornerstone of Western civilization”. Parker’s concerns here reflect a general tendency among conservative evangelicals, who tended to downplay the risk of the pandemic, engage in riskier behaviors, and frame public health measures as infringements on religious freedoms (Bartkowski et al. 2023; Haynes 2021). It has been speculated that perhaps this was not Parker’s complete rationale for founding TBA, however, and that personal grievances with Kenney, in whose UCP leadership campaign he played a leading role before a falling out, may have been a factor (The Alberta Advantage 2022). Even if faith was just one among multiple motivating factors, though, he clearly felt that the “Kenney started arresting pastors” origin story was powerful enough that he ran with it as his “official” narrative, repeating it in interviews, emails to supporters, town halls, and on Telegram. At the very least, Parker felt that such a story would sell well with his target audience, which itself tells us something about the importance of faith to TBA, its demographic base, and its political mission.

Parker’s faith-based rationale for founding TBA is mirrored by religious connections at the organizational level. Social movement scholars recognize that movements often rely not only on the resources of activist organizations, but also “everyday organizations” whose primary purpose is not necessarily social change. Such organizations “provide the mass base to an emerging social movement, especially in regions without many activist organizations or at points in history when a new type of movement is surfacing on the political landscape” (Almeida 2019, p. 67). In the context of the pandemic, when the freedom movement emerged, churches served this role as an “everyday organization”, with a pre-existing mass base that could be mobilized to protest public health measures. In part, this was because the everyday operations of churches were disrupted by public health policies limiting in-person congregations.

As a result, some of the most intense protest events of Alberta’s freedom movement occurred at or outside churches. In April 2021, during the province’s biggest-yet wave of COVID-19 infections, 500 individuals gathered outside the GraceLife Church on the outskirts of Edmonton to protest and physically obstruct the raising of a fence around the perimeter (Harrison 2023, pp. 107–8).21 One of the individuals later arrested in connection with the GraceLife protest was Alex Van Herk, the best friend of future TBA regional captain and Chief Financial Officer Marco Van Huigenbos, and who, in a viral photo, is seen trying to take down one of the fences (Parker and Gerber 2022c; R. Parker 2022).22 Given these personal connections, it is unsurprising that, when Van Herk was arrested in August 2022 and charged with obstruction of a peace officer (in connection to GraceLife) and with mischief over CAD 5000 (in connection to Coutts, which we further detail below), TBA mobilized its membership to protest outside the RCMP detachment, demanding his release (R. Parker 2022). “RCMP are arresting one of the Coutts boys right now”, Parker informed supporters. “Please pray. Flood the detachment with calls. Anyone close enough, peaceful protest gathering there … We built this group for moments like this” (D. Parker 2022d).23 The church thus provided a mass base for some of the freedom movement’s most significant protest events like the one at GraceLife, from which Van Herk emerged as a notable activist willing and able to escalate tactically. In turn, the close personal connections between Van Herk and the TBA leadership meant that the latter’s resources were used to mobilize in his defense through prayer and action, a task TBA was “built for”. The “everyday organization” of the church thus intersects with TBA, the two mutually complementing and reinforcing each other.

Faith also fueled the Albertan freedom movement’s most dramatic protest event—the border blockade in Coutts—from which TBA recruited two new captains, Marco Van Huigenbos and Jarrad McCoy. In early 2022, Van Huigenbos and Van Herk saw the Freedom Convoy take off and became determined to be a part of it. Unable to travel to Ottawa owing to family commitments, they instead joined a local “slow roll” convoy heading south on Highway 4 towards Coutts, a small village on the border with Montana (D. Parker and Gerber 2022c). The “slow roll” quickly escalated and eventually turned into a 17-day blockade that, coupled with the coterminous Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario (another border crossing), led to the federal government implementing the Emergencies Act.24 The two friends became “key players” and spokespeople for the Coutts protest, a position that later found them, along with one other, convicted of mischief over CAD 5000, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years (Graveland 2024b). The most serious charges, however, were laid against Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert, who brought stockpiles of weaponry to the blockade, believing it to be their “last stand” against the UN, Chinese communists, Trudeau (“the devil”), and the RCMP (the “devil’s arms”) (Graveland 2024a). Ultimately, they were found not guilty of conspiracy to murder police officers, but convicted of mischief and possession of weapons for a dangerous purpose, with Olienick convicted for possession of a pipe bomb (The Canadian Press 2024). The Coutts blockade lasted from 29 January to 15 February 2022, and David Parker, who had his eye on the upcoming 19 March deadline to join the UCP and vote against Kenney, would use the protest to recruit for his new organization.

Jarrad McCoy, another TBA regional captain as well as a pastor and carpenter from Milk River, Alberta, saw public health policies as an infringement on his freedom of choice, a freedom he described as “fundamental for faith” and the reason “why a lot of Christians had red flags” about such policies (D. Parker and Gerber 2023). Aside from refusing to suspend in-person congregations—“I wasn’t going to forsake the gathering of the Saints,” he explained, adding “Jesus broke the law by healing lepars [sic.]”—McCoy had not been directly involved in any protest events until the convoy to Coutts swept him along, showing him how “regular Canadians … could impact the world, if they trusted God and took action” (McCoy 2022f). It was during this experience that McCoy met Parker, who was in the area, in part to deliver a speech in Milk River in support of Coutts. Shortly after the blockade came down, McCoy and Parker spent a “a refreshing day gopher hunting” together, after which Parker invited McCoy to become a TBA captain (McCoy 2022f). About McCoy’s role, Parker later stated, “Jarrad is an absolute rock of this organization, it would not have continued into Phase 2 without him” (D. Parker 2022b). In sum, McCoy’s faith-based opposition to public health measures was transformed into collective action when a protest, led by individuals with previous experience in faith-based activism rooted in the “everyday organization” of the church, emerged in his area, an event which in turn connected him with further collective action opportunities via TBA, within which he went on to play a leading role.

The faith-based emergence of TBA continued to inform the movement’s resource infrastructure throughout its phases. A number of TBA events were held at churches, including the Third Day Church in Lethbridge, the Church in the Vine in Edmonton, the Southside Victory Church in Calgary, the River of Life in Milk River, and the Red Deer United Church (McCoy 2022a, 2022d, 2022e, 2023b, 2023c). Of course, churches are somewhat common sites for SMOs across the political spectrum to hold meetings, and it does not necessarily mean the organization and church share a political vision. It is also worth noting that the majority of TBA events were not held in churches, but in community centers and halls, in homes, farms, restaurants, and stores. One of the single largest TBA events, though, was held at Church in the Vine, with what Parker described as an “amazing turnout” of over 400 (D. Parker 2022a). The pastors of the church were among those who faced criminal charges for violating public health measures, and TBA used the opportunity to help fundraise for the related legal fees, with Byfield encouraging TBA supporters to “bring along some cash to aid in their fight with AHS [Alberta Health Services]” (Byfield 2022e). The Church in the Vine, then, was not simply a politically neutral host of TBA, but provided a mass base, resulting in one of TBA’s largest town halls with an audience willing to hear the organization’s plan of action, in return for which TBA offered financial support. The church and TBA were thus linked within the broader multi-organizational field of the freedom movement.

Faith also played a major role in the collective action frames used by TBA leaders. We found evidence of a theologically grounded, anti-statist interpretation of “freedom,” which is in turn linked to far-right extractive populism. During phase three (electing TBA-backed candidates to the UCP board), for example, McCoy cites scripture to frame participation in the UCP’s governance structures as backstopped by God, who leads the movement for the sacred purpose of restoring freedom, “Jesus’s idea” (McCoy 2022b). Freedom for McCoy is not merely the individual freedom to refuse a mask or vaccine, then, but a far broader and fundamentally theological concept, the violation of which is simultaneously a violation of God’s will. Benita Pedersen takes a similar view, describing to a Christian podcaster live from the Freedom Convoy how she found God about one year into the pandemic:

“I surrendered to Jesus and said, ‘your will, not mine’, … and since I did that, I’m all in for the freedom movement, because the freedom movement goes 100% with Jesus. He wants us to have free will. He wants us to have free choice. He gave it to us” (God A Minute 2022).

Similar to McCoy, we have here the equation of freedom with free will/choice, understood in sacred and individualistic terms. From this perspective, vaccine mandates, border closures, curfews, and masks are all seen as violations of divine freedoms.

This emphasis on individual free will as divine, and the presentation of state-mandated restrictions as anti-Christian, also underpin TBA members’ critique of climate-related regulations through a conspiratorial framework. An anti-statist conception of freedom is frequently used to separate “the people”—who are associated with a theologically grounded conception of freedom—from “elites” and “others”, who are framed as globalists seeking to use the state to crush individual liberties. This Manichean divide is in line with existing research on (evangelical) Christian nationalism in the United States, which frames its political cause as “a cosmic struggle between good and evil” and presents the global “elite” as concocting apocalyptic scenarios (Gorski 2018). Parker’s previously cited take on climate-related regulation as an “anti-human” initiative that threatens the “continuation of the human race” aligns squarely with this religiously inflected end-of-the-world outlook.

Such a Manichean, anti-statist conception of freedom is easily transferred from the terrain of the COVID-19 pandemic into the diagnostic framing of other policy areas. Pedersen was convinced, for example, that the Freedom Convoy was just a first step for the movement, since further mandates would likely be forthcoming under the auspices of climate change (Barrera 2022). Thus, about one year after the convoy, in the middle of phase four, she found time for activism outside of TBA and co-organized a protest in Edmonton against 15-minute cities, where speakers and signage warned of imminent “climate lockdowns” (DJBenita 2023).25 Given the capaciousness of the globalist conspiracy theory and its many internal chains of equivalence between enemy categories, Pedersen could similarly see evidence of the UN’s “depopulation agenda” in the efforts of local teens to paint a rainbow crosswalk, against which she organized a successful plebiscite in her town of Westlock, thus banning pride symbols and mandating “neutrality” on municipal property (McKay 2024). This is a notable departure from earlier forms of extractive populism, which occasionally co-opted the pride flag to incorporate a “resource homonationalism” into its ethical oil discourse, framing Canada as pro-LGBTQ and therefore a more desirable country from which to purchase oil (Kinder 2024, p. 116). TBA’s combination of overt queerphobia and climate denialism is another indication of the radicalization of extractive populist discourse. As we have seen, this radicalization is reflected in a theologically grounded conception of freedom that is counterposed to globalism, the effect being a far-right politics opposed to all forms of state-led or “mandated” progressivism, whether social or ecological.

Roy Beyer—another TBA regional captain, former pastor, and founder/executive director of Taking Back Our Freedoms (TBOF)—also espoused a theological conception of freedom, which he likewise counterposed to globalism.26 For Beyer, “freedom is a fundamental Christian value … God gave us the gift of freedom and that is being ripped out of our hands unless we stand and say, ‘this belongs to us’” (Faytene TV 2023). Appearing on a conservative Christian web show to mobilize the faithful into praying and volunteering for Smith’s campaign, Beyer presented a dire diagnosis of what awaits should the NDP prevail:

“I don’t believe it’s an overstatement. I believe that what we’re talking about is nationhood. Us as a nation being free, and it’s not just about individual freedom, it’s much bigger than that … God celebrates that there’s nations in the world. And that’s a beautiful thing. The globalists have an opposite view. They’re going to eliminate nationhood and turn it into this grand scheme of a global government” (Faytene TV 2023).

Here, Beyer ties his anti-statist conception of freedom into a theo-nationalistic opposition to globalism. His contention that “God celebrates … nations,” moreover, has roots in the longue durée of Albertan evangelical conservatism, which views the state’s role as being to “ensure that individuals were free and thus granted the potential to seek out God” (Banack 2016, p. 202). By incorporating the globalist conspiracy theory into his diagnostic frames for phase four, Beyer depicts the provincial election as a stark choice between good and evil, freedom and tyranny. Although he does not specifically address climate change here, the reference to globalists sets off a chain of equivalence in the minds of the initiated. This is because, as we saw above, the globalist conspiracy theory often builds on the premise of climate denialism, according to which climate change is a hoax created by elites, who use it as a pretense to usher in a form of global government. Thus, shortly after finding success in phase four, Beyer founded yet another organization, this one opposed to the efforts of the liberal mayor of Calgary, Jyoti Gondek, to increase urban density via blanket rezoning. For Beyer, state-mandated urban densification is yet one more curtailment of his theologically grounded conception of individual rights and freedoms, in this case the claimed “right” to suburbia. Hardly tangential to his work in TBA, this new organization works on many of the same fronts: first, by obstructing climate-oriented policy, and second, by continuing to anchor the UCP, in this case by eroding support for Gondek, which he views as critical to electing a conservative city council and thereby providing the conservative movement with a more formidable apparatus in the city, which they only narrowly won in 2023 and which will be a key battleground in the 2027 provincial election (Alberta Prosperity Project 2024).

The intersection of faith and fuel is also found in the prognostic frames of TBA captain, Vince Byfield. In an episode of The Canadian Story, Byfield was asked about his vision for Alberta’s future, responding, “Oh, my vision is to bring us back to the past. … I pray, literally pray for righteous governance in this province”. Byfield goes on to provide a lengthy summary of the life and career of Ernest Manning, whom he praises as “the best premier we’ve ever had” (D. Parker and Gerber 2022e). He places particular emphasis on Manning’s pioneering role in the oil sands and its connection to evangelical Christianity. Manning was one of four key “architects” of the Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOSs), all of whom were evangelicals (Dochuk 2013, p. 43). Byfield praises Manning for being a man of faith, balancing the province’s budget every year, and for having “set in motion the oil sands industry,” all of which render him the greatest Albertan premier of all time, “by a country mile” (D. Parker and Gerber 2022e).

Asked what his hopes are for Danielle Smith, Byfield responds that she has “fantastic potential,” but is a “spiritual newbie”. “So I’m praying,” Byfield went on, “that she’ll get saved” (D. Parker and Gerber 2022e). When he interviewed Smith, he gave her a copy of his father Ted Byfield’s book about how he found God, and believes that, if Smith too can “grow spiritually,” then she “might very well rival Ernest Manning” (D. Parker and Gerber 2022e). In other words, Byfield believes Manning is the best premier not solely for the materialist reason of kickstarting the oil sands, but for the unique combination of this with his evangelical principles; therefore, although Smith is aggressively pro-fossil fuel, this is inadequate from Byfield’s perspective. For Byfield, faith and fuel must go together.

6. Conclusions

This article set out to examine how evangelical Christianity and extractive populism intersect in the mobilizing activities of the far-right social movement organization, Take Back Alberta (TBA). The results reveal that both phenomena—faith and fuel—inform the organizational field surrounding TBA’s leadership, as well as its personal background and the collective action frames deployed by it. We found that TBA is not only a freedom organization focused narrowly on COVID-19 policies. It also functions as an organization that converts the “elite” interests of the fossil fuel industry into an emphasis on the “people’s” will. This function of the organization is evinced by founder and leader David Parker’s history within the extractive populist ecosystem, as well as by the TBA leadership’s use of extractive populist frames. However, TBA’s autonomy from more established, longstanding organizations representing the fossil fuel industry has enabled it to deploy a more radical, far-right version of this discourse, which our evidence suggests significantly anchors the climate denialism of Danielle Smith’s government.

This finding coincides with a broader, global shift in organized climate denialism, which in its earlier phases had been driven predominately by corporations, think tanks, and conservative parties, but which, since 2016, has entered a “far-right phase,” where far-right parties play the leading role (Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021, p. 38). As we have shown, Alberta entered this far-right phase in good measure due to the dynamic relationship between an ostensibly mainstream conservative party (the UCP) and a field of far-right social movement organizations, including TBA. Danielle Smith does not directly engage in overt climate denial as often as other populist far-right leaders around the world, though. Instead, Smith continues to mostly employ “discourses of delay” (Lamb et al. 2020) and, by comparison with the far-right figures who anchor her government, appears moderate for seeming to agree that the province needs to pursue emissions reductions. Meanwhile, in practice, despite the increasing frequency and intensity of climate disasters like the wildfires in Jasper National Park in July 2024, Smith, although appearing on TV to make a tear-filled speech mourning the destruction, continues to obstruct very nearly all meaningful mitigation efforts. At the same time, overt climate denialism has been delegated to the multi-organizational field of far-right groups like TBA, on whose efforts she rode to power and to whom she remains beholden.

Our investigation further revealed that evangelical Christianity plays a significant, and under-appreciated, role in establishing this dynamic. While it is not a primarily faith-based organization, TBA’s membership and organizational infrastructure are heavily influenced by the church’s role as an “everyday organization”. In addition, we found that a religiously inflected discourse of freedom informed TBA’s representation of fossil fuel extraction as benefiting the “people” against a global elite conspiring to initiate a “great reset” to “eliminate nationhood” and threaten “the continuation of the human race”. Such representations rely heavily on apocalyptic, Manichean messaging that construes politics, with direct references to 21st-century evangelical worldview and vocabulary, as the ultimate battle between good and evil (Gorski 2018). Therefore, while TBA can be seen as belonging to the conservative, evangelical political tradition in Alberta, it represents a radicalized, far-right version of that lineage with strong tendencies to embrace conspiratorial outlooks and end-of-the-world narratives.

Future research would benefit from an examination of other far-right social movements whose activities anchor governments’ extractive populist agendas. Moreover, future scholars might explore how a broader range of religious faiths or inter-faith alliances intersect with extractive populism. Preliminary evidence suggests that evangelicals like Parker and conservative Muslims may be uniting around anti-LGBTQ stances. TBA’s sixth phase, for example, is focused on taking over school boards with the aim of restricting LGBTQ education, and Parker has described having had “amazing conversations with the Muslim and Sikh communities and they’re all on board” (Scott and Lambert 2023). This nascent alliance between TBA, a predominantly white rural organization made up of many evangelicals, and other religious minorities around issues of gender and sexuality could generate novel research opportunities. In addition to exploring potential sources of disagreement or rupture, with particular attention to Islamophobia, research might investigate whether and to what extent non-Christian religious groups and organizations are participating in the rhetoric of extractive populism.