Albertans are hurting. Healthcare wait times stretch longer than ever, public education faces chronic underfunding amid rising enrollment, disability benefits like AISH have been rolled back or frozen when we need indexing the most, and the cost of living—groceries, rent, utilities—keeps climbing faster than wages. Yet our provincial government just authorized up to $900 million in borrowing through the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission (APMC) to expand the Bitumen Royalty-in-Kind (BRIK) program. This isn’t about “maximizing value” for Albertans—it’s a high-stakes gamble that risks public money in volatile oil markets while propping up an industry where the real winners are foreign shareholders, mostly American.