By Brad Mudd, Students For Liberty correspondent

Every April 1, there’s a prank played on Canadians. But it’s no April Fool’s joke; it’s a federal tax increase that happens every year, without a vote by Parliament or Canadian citizens.

Called the Alcohol Escalator Tax, the law increases the federal excise tax on beer, wine, and spirits across the country — without a vote. At least for now. Because that tax is the latest bit of government overreach targeted by Leam Dunn-Opper, an alumnus of Students For Liberty and the leader of an influential policy group in Canada.

Leam was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, part of the fourth generation of his family to call that city home. He grew up in a culture proud of its independence, its distrust of government, and its aversion to taxes and rules that get in the way of the economy. And after graduating from the University of Calgary in 2024, Leam made that culture part of his career path: He became the Executive Director of Generation Screwed, the largest non-partisan, student political group in Canada.

“We focus on identifying and training university-aged Canadians who want to get more involved with our overall mission of promoting lower taxes, less waste, and more accountable government in Canada,” Leam said. “My job as executive director is to travel across the country to universities to find and recruit students, help them develop campus groups, and have them host events to promote our message for young Canadians.”

That kind of principled organizing, centered around young people, should sound familiar: Leam said the ideals and structure of Students For Liberty aligned with his long-held beliefs.

Leam was involved with Generation Screwed before joining Students For Liberty, but said of SFL, “Their heavy emphasis on free-market economics was very appealing to me. When I first joined SFL, I didn’t know a whole lot of specifics; I just knew it was best for the government to get out of the way of the people who actually do things in the economy.”

As an SFL student coordinator, Leam not only learned the specifics of free markets but was also empowered to implement them. He began organizing events at a pub near the University of Calgary. He would rent a room there, buy a few pitchers of beer, and invite students of drinking age (18, in Alberta) to socialize.

“We would hand out literature, and sometimes we would have prominent speakers come and talk about why free markets are the best way to go or why lowering taxes is a great thing,” Leam said. “I would have the speakers stand on a chair to be heard because I didn’t want a fancy PA system. I wanted everything to feel part of a grassroots movement.”

While Leam was provincial coordinator of Alberta for SFL, and while working for Generation Screwed, he collaborated with SFL’s Garreth Conner and Ethan Lecavalier-Kidney to organize and collect the more than 1,200 signatures that helped end the Canadian consumer carbon tax in 2025.

Now as the Executive Director of Generation Screwed, Leam is using that experience with SFL to level up, and to make Canada a little freer still. And he’s doing it with SFL’s sense of strategy: Discussing the tax inevitably raises broader questions of government accountability.

“While we want to see taxes lowered in general, we want to push to have this automatic increase scrapped altogether,” Leam said. “If the government wants to increase the tax on alcohol, they should need to have a vote and be held accountable for the increase.”

For Leam, targeting the Alcohol Escalator Tax brings the story full circle: With SFL, he used his local pub to hold events and create dialogue to share the ideas of liberty. Small pubs in general have, for decades, served as natural places for friends and neighbors to gather to share ideas and experiences.

Now Leam is fighting for those pubs’ very survival.

“I have been speaking to small business owners of pubs in big and small towns across Canada, and they are telling me that each year, it’s getting harder and harder. They have to keep raising their prices while their margins get thinner and thinner,” he said. “We have seen a lot of local neighborhood pubs having to shut down because they can no longer afford to operate. In fact,” he added with a tinge of heartbreak, “my regular pub at the University of Calgary has gone out of business.”

But Leam Dunn-Opper was born and raised in Calgary, where they don’t take kindly to government overreach. And he learned how to network and organize with SFL, where we don’t, either. So don’t be surprised if that tax escalator soon goes out of order.