Jen Gerson: A Word to My Haters
Alberta's real advantage isn't its tax structure.
The Journalism Gods gifted me some of the most colourful and vicious feedback I have ever received this week. CBC Calgary published a column of mine which critiqued Alberta Premier Jason Kenney's doomed strategy in the wake of the Keystone XL cancellation. The column ended up being surprisingly popular, or at least well read, and I was inundated with hundreds of emails — more than I have ever received for any single piece I’d written. Truthfully, most of them were kind and supportive notes.
A few, however, were not.
Highlights include:
"You stupid arrogant leftits (sic) fucking millenial (sic) cunt. Leave this province you piece of shit. I hope you die in a horrible accident or a prolonged battle with cancer. What goes around comes around. Now go suck Notley's asshole," from Bob Smith. Someone by the name of Richard Scott Kane offered this gem: "People like you should go to the nearest hospital and donate your carcass to the burn unit. Do something postive for once in your life. You are a waste of skin anyways so donate it to the people who really need it." Then there was: "USELESS CUNT" from one Barry Borutski. Message: CUNT.....CUNT....CUNT.....CUNT.....CUNT....CUNT....."
This went on. I even received a death threat from one gentleman named Dave, whom I will not torment further as he later apologized rather abjectly.
You get the picture; a lot of these guys were angry at me for offering the truth that Alberta’s energy sector isn’t going to keep growing the way many had hoped, and that there isn’t much we or Trudeau can do about it. (I think that’s the truth, anyway.) They have hung on to their hopes and believed the promises of politicians who said that they would somehow make it all better. That clearly isn’t happening. These people are furious, but none of them could pinpoint what I got wrong. It was inchoate rage.
This isn't a column intended to shame such people, exactly. These responses rarely bother me. Rather, I'd prefer to respond to some of it.
Firstly, a lot of the people who were angry about what I wrote were deeply triggered because they seem to associate Alberta with her rulers; a pointed attack on the tactics of the UCP is therefore confused with an attack on the province. This conflation has been deliberate. If a politician can convince you that he is the embodiment of your provincial identity, then he's made you a partisan by default. You will defend his failures and protect his ego like you would defend your own.
I think that's manipulative. The UCP doesn't embody Alberta any more than the Liberals embody Canada. We elect politicians to serve as leaders, not avatars. Even a pointed critique of a leader is not an attack on the province or the country — and it certainly isn't an attack on the people within it.
The second reason why these letters didn't bother me is because I see in this anger a kind of grief.
The world is changing, and anger is part of the process of coming to terms with that. Whether you believe in climate change, or buy into the idea — as some Albertans do — that we're victims of an international conspiracy of Marxist environmentalists bent on creating a new world order, is irrelevant.
The world largely accepts the threat posed by climate change. Governments and investors are acting on those threats. We have two choices: We can accept that reality, and take a role in steering the conversation about how to manage the global risks of carbon emissions. Or we can scream and yell and fund war rooms and conspiratorial inquiries — in which case, we will be marginalized, mocked, ignored, and ultimately crushed by that change.
Electric cars appear to be creeping closer to the tipping point of mass adoption. GM has announced that it plans to have all of its products and plants “carbon neutral” by 2040. Solar and wind power is increasingly competitive, and we may yet see significant opportunities in nuclear power. Yet, as the rest of the world tries to envision a greener world, Alberta is doubling down on the old; it recently announced plans to revoke a 1976 policy that prevented open-pit coal mining along vast swathes of the Rockies.
Everybody likes to fight, but nobody likes to lose. Would we rather fight, or win?
Accepting reality does not mean accepting doom. Alberta will be mining oil and gas for the foreseeable future. TransMountain is going to get built, although it will probably be the last of its line. Alberta will continue to be a wealthy province, although perhaps not quite so super-charged by oil and gas booms.
And maybe accepting that reality creates the space we need to imagine what kind of province we wish to become in the long run. We need to start thinking about a future that is less dependent on oil and gas, indeed, it would be downright irresponsible and un-conservative to fail to plan for that future.
I'm not a pessimist about Alberta. Anyone who knows me knows that I am an unapologetic evangelist for Calgary — and I can even be drafted into a defence of Edmonton, if it's absolutely required of me. (Good tacos!)
COVID-19 is driving young people away from major urban centres, and work is now less tied to geography than at any point in history. Calgary's downtown office vacancy rate is a record-high of 30 per cent. There is a clear opportunity for a city like Calgary here. To submit to despair would represent a catastrophic failure of imagination.
When I speak to my friends who are trying to raise families in cities like Vancouver and Toronto, I am ceaselessly baffled by the kinds of financial and material compromises they make every day. I want to scream at them: "Hey, guys, you can live in a decent house with a nice yard near a charming shopping area for a fraction of the price of your current one-bedroom condo!"
For young families especially, there is no better mix of opportunity and quality of life in all of Canada than what you can get in Alberta. I believe that's true even today. It's why I'm here.
But in order to seize this opportunity, our leaders need to spend less time pandering to the past, and more time offering us a vision about how to build the future. If you want young people in this province — young people with talent and ambition — you need to build a province that offers an attractive place to live. That's more than just jobs, it's also a vibrant arts scene, good schools, recreation, unique shopping zones, walkable communities, and lots of alternative transportation and transit modes. These are not luxuries. They are absolutely essential if we want to compete to attract people in an era in which we can no longer rely on high salaries to do the work for us.
And many of the options proposed above — like more bike lines, or changes to zoning — aren’t expensive, but merely controversial among people who are trying to recreate the successes of the past.
Why not try something radical? Buy up all that empty office space and offer it at cost to qualifying start ups or companies willing to move west. It would be expensive in the short term, but a government willing to take on such a portfolio might make its money back in the long term.
Our dependence on oil and gas left us wealthy but blind; it created a downtown core that hollowed out in the evenings. We had money, sure, but no soul. And when the money dried up, there was little reason to stay.
Our cities have improved enormously in the 10 years since I've moved here, but those big oil head offices aren't coming back. We can't build to the specs of 1995. That's a recipe for a province that will age out and decline. We need an Alberta for 2035.
As COVID-19 restrictions begin to lift, those renters and families who fled larger cities are beginning to look for a place to land next. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the case for ourselves, and for our province. But our rhetoric, indelibly fixed in nostalgia for a dying era, is not serving us.
There is a wonderful quote from Winston Churchill worth repeating here:
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
Our finest hour was not 2005, nor 1995. This is our moment. We must rise to it, or we must fail.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com
This piece in my opinion is one of your best. Thank you.
Jen's columns often push me to view issues in a different light. For that reason alone, I subscribe to premium content from The Line and other sources. If I wanted boring echo chambers, I'd be on social media or engaging a certain state owned broadcaster.
I fully agree that Alberta needs to push its advantages: reasonable cost of living, high quality workforce (strong work ethic and highly skilled), generally well maintained infrastructure and attractive natural environment. All that in spite of overly long winters and existing within a hopelessly dysfunctional federation. I also agree that the world seems to lack politicians that lead, instead gravitating towards those that project some idealized version of a value set. Avatar is the perfect word to describe the marketing persona that currently inhabits the Prime Minister's office.
I differ or would elaborate on some other points:
1) Throwing the energy industry under the bus is not a litmus test to prove one's progressive credentials or to signal that one "believes in science". Alberta has a natural advantage in producing energy. Failing to capitalize on that advantage would be stupid, as is allowing so-called climate change and other activists to get in the way without a fight. The absolute truth is that consumers drive demand for energy, Producers are simply easier targets than minivan driving soccer moms and Millennials subsisting on energy intensive food delivery services. Alberta can defend the energy industry and chase the future at the same time, even if that doesn't align with some pre-defined, social media friendly archetype
2) The "war room" and inquiries into NGO activities are at least partially motivated by seeking the facts. The execution has been poor and maybe the timing too late, but uncovering the truth is always laudable and I'm surprised that so many journalists have been offside
3) Where Alberta continues to live in the past is failing to reduce government spending to something that doesn't require $10/GJ natural gas prices. So many observers fail to grasp that bitumen royalties were always speculative. In the good old days prior to US shale, natural gas royalties (not crude or bitumen) enabled Alberta's health and education overfunding. Twelve plus years later, few politicians have dared to adjust spending down to something more typical to other jurisdictions. The Feds face same reality check: the collapse of the Canadian energy industry means austerity. Taking on debt only delays and amplifies the inevitable
4) Government will fail if it tries to make Alberta more attractive to entrepreneurial people by building hipster amenities. Rather, the approach should be to remove barriers and allow creative and ambitious people to do what they do best. Places like Texas and Colorado started out as resource producers and leveraged tax advantages, well managed administration and cost of living to attract people who in turn created new opportunities
5) Alberta was diversifying nicely and had largely kicked its non-renewable resource revenue addiction by the late 90's. Nortel was briefly Calgary's largest private sector employer. The three largest manufacturing plants east of Ontario were in Calgary: Nortel's plant that made phone system, Nortel's plant that made wireless base stations and Smed's high end office furniture plant. Corporate head offices such as Canadian Pacific moved to the province. When energy prices started to rise, the provincial government got lazy and started indiscriminately throwing around money and lost its obsession with economic competitiveness at the same time
So if I were in a leadership position, which thankfully I am not, I would advise Alberta to own it. Do not shy away with the province's libertarian values. We built something from nothing in one of the coldest and most remote inhabited regions on Earth in spite of an often hostile national framework. We should take pride in that and if other Canadians disagree, that is their defect. Developing the agricultural and energy industries took brains, guts and hard work, qualities that will succeed in any endeavor.