I have questions about hugging. Considering that the transmission rates of COVID took off at Thanksgiving, Halloween and Diwali, was it just that so many people gathered together indoors, or was it hugging, too? How many hugs did you do or witness? Did people hug for greetings or good-byes at these functions?
Loud, clear and often. No hugging. An interesting question that no one has dared to ask and no one has volunteered an expected answer. Where is our PM going to spend Christmas with his family? Will he burn jet fuel and personally pay the carbon tax? What cost might the PM incur? I can hardly wait for the answers that we are entitled to under FOIA.
Statistics Canada data shows Alberta posted a net gain of 24, people from international locations in While still in positive territory, that was a drop of 49 percent from 48, net international migrants in Canadians don't want to move to Alberta. Remembrance Day memorial in Cranbrook, B. Fort Macleod brewery invents strange brew for Ghostbusters: Afterlife screening. My parents were born and raised and worked in Alberta, and my grandparents, too.
My family were Calgarians, my mother raised in tony Mount Royal, my dad in working class Bridgeland. They were journalists and knew the province like few others. From Peter Lougheed to Ralph Klein, Alberta has always been at the centre of the national debate, and always felt that nobody even recognized they were there. For the past many decades, despite occasional forays into separatist diatribes, Albertans were grumpily content to make fistfuls of money, send a whack of it to Ottawa in taxes, and have Ottawa spread it around the country in various forms.
Not much came back to Alberta, it seemed to folks, but Albertans generally shared the nation-building sense of pride Lougheed nurtured, and they were making so much darned money that what went to Ottawa almost seemed like spillage.
Petro-Canada—the federally owned oil company, Red Square in Calgary—was sold off eventually, and Calgarians and Albertans began a slow, inexorable descent into hard-core social conservatism, supereconomic right-wing politics, the era of Reform and Alliance, and Stephen Harper.
Albertans have always been independent, self-reliant, and stubborn or ornery, depending on your point of view, but they were actually not super right-wing economically. Telus was originally state-owned Alberta Government Telephones. Lougheed bought an airline to keep the headquarters in Calgary. The government put billons into oil refineries, the oilsands, forest companies, and more. Clearly, the 50, or so Americans who moved into Alberta with the oil industry, generally in management jobs, and the influence of the huge U.
But over the past decade, even beginning with Harper and with enormous acceleration under Trudeau, Alberta has lurched into a full emotional tailspin. With more than , unemployed in a persistent, unbelievably long-running recession, Alberta has faced thousands of bankruptcies, a huge increase in suicides, and a tremendous loss of long-term capital investment that scares the bejesus out of the business community.
People here do not identify necessarily that their life and economy and future depend on their employer, or a particular sector even, because B. Not so in Alberta. Attack big oil, you are attacking the truck driver, the rig service company, the office worker, the manager, the investor, the entrepreneur, the inventor, and even the farmer and rancher. The farmer and rancher? Yes, because these days, most farmers have side jobs working in the oil patch, and their land has oil or gas wells on it paying royalties and their ranch—even, incredibly on leased Crown land—gets payments from oil companies.
And by the time they got serious, it was too late. Environmental groups in Canada and the U. Harper and his ministers, like Jason Kenney and Joe Oliver, went ballistic as environment groups and Indigenous leaders started tying up pipeline projects through the assessment processes and the courts. Harper, typically, reacted by trying to gut environmental assessment legislation and by rushed and incomplete Indigenous consultation. He lost big time in court, and in the court of public opinion.
Harper was whupped by Trudeau. Trudeau killed the Northern Gateway project and approved what seemed an easier bet on TMX, which was mostly on an existing right of way, unlike NG. At the same time, however, market access for Alberta oil was becoming a crisis. Barack Obama refused to sign off on another major pipeline, Keystone XL, and another, Line 3, became mired in red tape. But in the end, I tell them, it is a telling example of Albertans' belief that their economic might, their enterprise and their hard work have again been taken for granted by a Liberal government that promised to be different, open and inclusive.
Forty years and another Trudeau later, Albertans feel they're still on the outside looking in at a moment when their future is under siege. There are no easy answers to the questions that siege mentality raises. But it is going to take more than a part-time sage like me — or a full-time one, for that matter — to come up with the answers.
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