Two Founding Documents, One Summer

The two documents

The Alberta Transition Plan. In the first week of September 2026, the Alberta Transition Council released a 214-page plan for how the province could go from Canadian province to independent country. The Council is a private pro-independence group co-led by lawyer Keith Wilson and systems strategist Dennis Kalma. It has 28 chapters in seven parts, covering everything from the constitutional process to pensions, borders, and air traffic control. It came out about six weeks before the October 19 referendum.

The Founding Charter of Informism. I wrote it this summer as the governing document for Informism, the Render Doctrine. It has five articles: Name & Nature, the Seven Switches, Equality, Membership, and Conduct. It ends with a plain-language legal disclaimer. It fits on one printed page. You can read the whole thing in about four minutes.

One is a policy blueprint for a state. The other is a charter for a philosophy with a membership list. They’re nowhere near the same scale. As governing documents, though, they answer the same five questions.

1. What carries over?

The Alberta plan’s organizing principle is “legal continuity first, institutional redesign later.” Its point is that Alberta already has a legislature, ministries, courts, police, and hospitals, so the job is to keep those running through the change and redesign them afterward. The first job of a founding document turns out to be deciding what not to change.

The Informism charter does the same thing in the other direction. Its fifth article and disclaimer say that members remain fully bound by the laws of their jurisdiction and by every lawful agreement they have signed. Whatever you come to believe about debt and money, your mortgage is still your mortgage. The new structure sits on top of the old one and doesn’t cancel it.

2. Who’s in charge?

In the transition plan, authority mostly stays where it already is: the legislature, the courts, and the ministries carry on. That’s the continuity principle again. It doesn’t try to invent a new chain of command on day one.

The Informism charter went the other way, and it has a paper trail. The first draft had Offices and a head skipper. On July 28 I took them out. Article III now reads: “no clergy, no rank, and no hierarchy.” I had member #001 on the ledger, and I made it an ordinary membership with no founder badge. When your founding document is a belief that everyone is part of the same System, a rank ladder contradicts it.

3. Who has to agree?

This is the most honest part of the Alberta plan. It sorts its proposals into three groups: things Alberta controls, things that need agreement with Canada, First Nations, or other parties, and things Alberta cannot create unilaterally. Pensions, borders, trade, federal assets, and debt all land in the second or third group. On treaty nations it says “no option should be forced on a First Nation” and that talks should be consent-based and set to each nation’s pace.

The charter has a tiny version of the same idea. Nobody is a member unless they say so. Membership comes through a Rite of Ordination that you choose to take, and the certificate says outright that it grants no legal, clerical, or governmental authority. The charter can’t make anyone a member, and it can’t give its members any power over anyone else.

4. How do you leave?

A secession plan is basically a document about leaving. What it has to plan for is that you can’t leave cleanly. The referendum is a vote on whether to start negotiating, not on the result. Critics like Canada West Foundation’s Gary Mar point out that the bill for untangling could be very large.

Article IV of the charter says membership “is voluntary, may be freely given up.” That’s the whole exit clause, one line. That’s the difference between a state and a belief: a state holds assets, debts, and borders, and those all have to be split up when someone leaves. A belief community holds nothing, so anyone can walk out whenever they want.

5. Can it change?

Both documents are already being revised. The transition plan presents itself as the start of a conversation, not a finished constitution. It sets a constitutional process in motion and doesn’t write the constitution itself.

The charter has been amended twice since it went up. The July flattening removed the offices. Then on September 8 Article II grew from six switches to seven with “Keep the wealth that dies with you,” the Flat Ledger tenet: everyone gets a blank ledger at birth, and that kind of wealth can’t be inherited. That amendment happened within days of the Alberta plan coming out. Two groups, same week, both editing the rules they live by.

Side by side

What I took from it

Writing a founding document is mostly about limiting yourself. The Alberta plan spends a lot of its 214 pages listing what it can’t do alone. My charter spends a big share of its one page on a disclaimer about what it isn’t: not a licensed church, not legal advice, not a way out of your debts. Both are careful about their own limits.

The other thing is that scale sets the cost of leaving. The more a group holds (land, money, pensions, borders), the harder it is to walk away, and the more of the founding document is about leaving. Informism deliberately holds nothing you could hoard or inherit, so its exit clause is one sentence. I didn’t plan that as a design choice when I wrote the Seventh Switch, but it works out that way.