Alberta the Good
A progressive, prosperous province giddies up
BY Iain Ilich
Illustration by Raymond Biesinger
If you pay much attention to Canada’s national news media, you’ve probably come to a couple of conclusions about Alberta and Albertans: One, that we’re filthy stinking rich, with tycoons in top hats wandering the streets, lighting hundred-dollar cigars with fifty-dollar bills; and two, that it’s an entirely conservative sort of place, in which the likes of Ralph Klein and Stephen Harper speak for a united, socially regressive Alberta. You’re bound to get caught up in stereotypes, what with the whole we-hate-Kyoto thing, and the constitution-schmonstitution approach to same-sex marriage legislation. Yes, to leftists everywhere, Alberta is the loveable villain, the Rob and Amber of Survivor/Amazing Race fame. It’s easy enough to dismiss the province as a backwater, but it’s also a sadly simplistic take on a very diverse, non-homogenous grouping of people that happen to live in this particular corner of the country.
What many people fail to realize is that, buried deep under the slick coat of oily conservatives that purport to speak for all Albertans, is a strangely hidden undercurrent of progressive thought. You’ll find it in the strangest places, and generally when you least expect it. Is Alberta a liberal place? Far from it. Is Alberta a bastion of hippy-dippy love-ins and new-age crystal vendors? Nope. But it sure has a long history of doing liberal-minded things, and has its fair share of progressive, innovative thinkers, regardless of what happens on federal election nights.
So, to help celebrate the first 100 years of Alberta’s place in confederation, we’ve put together a list of some of the socially progressive things that you might not know about this very misunderstood, and often overlooked, province. Don’t blame us if you’re pleasantly surprised.
1. Alberta’s Wind Energy Farms
Alberta loves fossil fuels. Everyone already knows about the booming oil sector, which has helped line the pockets of the provincial treasury with oily lucre; in fact, the whole oil thing tends to overshadow Alberta’s role as a major producer (and exporter) of coal. The relative cheapness and widespread availability of coal has meant that Alberta currently uses it as the primary source of energy for generating electricity. (Though estimates are wide-ranging, some list between 80 percent and 90 percent of Alberta’s electricity as being generated in coal-fired plants.) Yep. We sure like to burn stuff.
But what you may not have known is that Alberta is leading the charge in Canadian wind power development. Alberta’s southwest corner—particularly around Pincher Creek, Fort Macleod and the Crowsnest Pass—is naturally blessed (or cursed, if you have to live with the incessant howl against your windows) with an abundant amount of free, renewable wind, which has translated into a successful growth industry in wind-powered electrical generation. Alberta currently has 275.4 megawatts of wind generation capacity, which is more than any other province, and which represents just a little under half of the country’s total 570 MW worth of wind power.
Granted, that’s a relatively small drop in the coal bucket, but wind power is steadily increasing in importance. Vision Quest, Canada’s largest wind power company, is based in Alberta, and has plans to continue expanding their network of wind farms. Not bad for a province so heavily invested in fossil fuels, is it?
2. The Electronics Recycling Levy
As you may already know, Alberta’s economy is booming in a very big way. Of course, increased growth tends to go hand in hand with increased waste, leading to what could be an ecological disaster as Alberta businesses, flush with cash, purchase palettes full of new computers, printers and fax machines to kit out their corporate headquarters. Why is it such a problem? Well, either those computers are replacing older machines that will then be discarded, or they’ll be disposed of in another few years, after they’ve served their useful life and/or the accounting department can deduct a new batch of upgrades. That could amount to hundreds of thousands of computers, printers, televisions and monitors destined for the dump every year, each one full of all sorts of toxic electronic waste.
But then, out of the blue, along comes an innovative program aimed at keeping all of that high tech detritus out of the landfills. The Alberta Electronic Recycling Program, the first province-wide recycling program of its kind in Canada, is designed to curb the negative effects that a healthy economy can have on the health of the environment. As of February 2005, a fee is collected at the time of a new electronics purchase, which is then used to fund a massive recycling program that turns unwanted gear into useful materials, keeping nasties like cadmium, lead and mercury from wreaking havoc on mother nature.
This means that every time an Albertan buys a new laptop, a new television, or any other item on the government’s list of applicable electronic stuff, they have to shell out an extra $5 to $45 (depending on the device) to pay for the recycling of the product once it gets abandoned for the next latest and greatest electronic gadget. Industry and consumer response has been mostly favourable and, for the most part, people don’t seem to mind spending a bit more if it means that they’ll be keeping the four pounds of lead in their old computer monitor out of the landfill (and the local groundwater).
And the most surprising thing of all? This is a brand new initiative from Ralph Klein’s regressive Conservative government, the same folks who start kicking and screaming any time they hear the word Kyoto. It’s nice to see a bit of progressive action out of the Conservatives from time to time, isn’t it?
3. Blue Box/Bag Heaven (And Composting Too!)
It may sound funny, but in Alberta, the oil executive that lives down the street is just as likely as the next guy to have a blue plastic bag sitting beside the trash can at the end of his driveway. To Albertans in general, and Edmontonians in particular, recycling has become second nature.
Back in 1988, the City of Edmonton introduced a revolutionary curbside pickup program for recyclable materials, handing out thousands of plastic “blue boxes” to residents across the city at a time when such an idea was considered to be truly ground-breaking. The program caught on quickly, and Edmonton’s recycling system is still considered to be a model for other major cities worldwide who are struggling to cope with their own waste management issues.
In 1999, the program was substantially simplified and expanded with the introduction of the Blue Bag, which eliminated the need to sort cans, paper, bottles and the like before putting them out on the curb. This saves extra time on the part of residents and eliminates one of the last excuses that non-recyclers have for not pitching in. In addition, the city built a giant composting plant that removes organic materials from household waste, creating nutrient-rich topsoil from materials that would otherwise have ended up in the landfill. And the final entrepreneurial Albertan touch? The city sells the topsoil.
Edmonton’s recycling program has a been a resounding success, with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 84 percent of Edmontonians choosing to participate. Not only that, but the city manages to divert roughly 60 percent of its waste from the landfill through the combination of recycling and composting programs. Is it any wonder, then, that Edmontonians are prone to burst out laughing when they hear tales of Toronto’s trash woes? “Shipping garbage south of the border?” asks Joe Albertan, sipping on a pint of Big Rock while watching an Eskimos game. “Are you easterners nuts?”
4. Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund
Back in the heady days of 1976, when Alberta was swimming in more oil revenue than it knew what to do with (kind of like today, actually), the government had enough foresight to establish the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, a rainy-day investment account that has helped fund programs of direct benefit to Albertans. It’s the only program of its kind in Canada, and has been a source of debate for many years, especially during leaner times after oil prices tanked. Should we have used it to pay off the debt (which has now been eliminated)? Should we be contributing more cash to it now that we’re rolling in oil dollars again, and have a balanced budget to boot?
Since its creation in 1976, the fund has earned roughly $27 billion in revenue from interest on investment, even though capital contributions to the fund were halted in 1987. Today, the fund sits at a sizeable $12.2 billion, which, if estimates are correct, should earn Alberta an extra $669 million in revenue in the 2005/2006 fiscal year. This revenue is then spent on things like scholarships, extra funding for health care, and cash for the provincial park system. By resisting the urge to simply chop taxes during times of prosperity, Alberta’s investment in the Heritage Trust Fund has yielded, and should continue to yield, a very healthy return for all Albertans.
5. Experiments in Education, Edmonton as Leader
Okay. I’ve got one for you. What do Guvernator Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edmontonians, and Time magazine have in common? Easy. They all know that Edmonton has one of the best public schooling systems in North America. When California needed to reform their education system in a very big way, they looked up, waaaaaay up, to little ol’ Edmonton for inspiration. So, what makes Edmonton’s public education system so special?
Think of it as free-market schooling. Just like in any number of other Canadian cities, new families started moving into new neighbourhoods in the suburbs, leaving the existing schools in older neighbourhoods to struggle with a decreased base of students. To solve this growing problem, the school board decided to allow parents to choose from schools outside of their neighbourhood, creating an environment in which schools compete for students, with funding following the student to the school of choice. This, in turn, has encouraged schools to have specialties, be it fantastic fine arts facilities, a wide range of second language instruction, or a stellar academic program. Parents are given a greater amount of choice as to where they want their children to attend school, which has helped breathe new life into schools that were previously in danger of closing.
But wait! There’s more! The whole thing is decentralized in such a way that the principals at individual schools have much more control over the way that their school is run. More responsibility means more accountability, and if changes need to be made in the way that a school is run, it can be made by the people running it, and not a group of bureaucrats at a head office downtown. It’s an innovative approach to public schooling that California is paying close attention to, while an even larger number of American school boards have already adopted the system south of the border. Not only is it working wonders with Albertan achievement test scores, but it’s providing a model for the rest of the continent to follow. Not too shabby.
6. Emily Murphy and Feminist Thought
A writer, legal expert and defender of womens’ rights, Edmonton’s Emily Murphy led a politically active life by any standard. While Murphy has a range of accomplishments to her name, the most well-known was her success in having women legally declared “persons” under Canadian law.
See, back in 1916, the British North America Act of 1867 didn’t recognize women as “persons,” which caused all sorts of complicated legal problems for women who wanted to gain access to positions of power that had traditionally been the sole domain of men (who, as you can probably guess, were most certainly “persons”). When Murphy was made a magistrate in 1916 (the first woman in the British Empire to hold such a position), her ability to serve was immediately challenged, owing to her not technically being a “person,” which was a legal requirement for the job. As a result, Murphy, along with a group of four supporters (known collectively as The Famous Five), got together to change the law, which would give Canadian women the right to be judges, senators, or hold any other position that required them to be a legal person.
While initial attempts in Canada were unsuccessful, on October 18, 1929, the Privy Council in London, England ruled in favour of Murphy and her supporters, declaring that women were persons under the British North America Act, which consequently opened the doors to a world of new possibilities for Canadian women. The first female senator, Cairine Wilson, was appointed to the Canadian senate some five months later.
7. Two-Gun Cohen and Multicultural Community
The Canadian west was a wild, wild place back in the early 1900s. Unwanted in England, Morris Cohen, a criminal type often referred to as Two-Gun Cohen, the result of his habit of packing a pair of pistols, left the UK for the hinterlands of Western Canada, eventually making his way to Edmonton. While there, he took part in the dirty dealings of the day, gambling and drinking in Chinese-run taverns and making friends with the other outcasts who existed on the fringes of society. The result was that Cohen developed a deeply held friendship with many members of the Edmonton Chinese community, even going so far as to defend their establishments from robbery, which was a very odd thing to do at the time.
This respect for the Chinese became a ruling influence in his life and he eventually left Canada for China, where he became friends with, and a bodyguard for, Dr. Sun Yet-sen. With time, he climbed the ranks of the Chinese army, ultimately becoming a general, which was unheard of for a foreigner, and especially for a dodgy Jewish pseudo-gangster with British and Canadian roots. Arms dealing and violence aside, Morris Cohen’s respect for other cultures was a precursor to the harmonious multicultural, multi-ethnic society that exists in the Canadian West to this day.
8. Alberta’s History of Immigration (And the Legacy of Farming)
Vegreville, Alberta, only a short drive east of Edmonton, has one very large claim to fame: it has the largest Ukrainian Easter egg in the world sitting atop a metal pillar in a local public park. Oh sure, you laugh. But seriously, out here it’s all part of a proud historical tradition that dates back to the time of the settlers.
Back when Alberta was little more than a stretch of wall-to-wall wilderness, the federal government provided incentives for the impoverished farmers of Europe to move to Canada. Immigrants were promised a quarter section (that’s 160 acres, for you city-folk) of free land to farm, with only a few rules and conditions attached: you had to be at least 21 years old, agree to live on your land for at least three years, be willing to farm at least 30 acres of it, build some form of a house on it, and pony up a $10 registration fee. The result, not surprisingly, was a giant wave of immigrants from places like Ukraine, all arriving to start their lives anew with their very own piece of Canadian soil. Which means that almost everyone in this part of the country knows at least one person who has a baba, and has likely sampled a perogy at some point in their life.
Immigration still plays a vital role in Alberta, even though the numbers are obviously in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal’s favour. According to Statistics Canada’s 2001 Census information, there are 438,335 foreign-born people living in Alberta, which is around 15 percent of the population. On top of international immigration, the province consistently draws in residents from other Canadian provinces, many of whom are eager to fill one of Alberta’s myriad unfilled jobs. All of this leads to a surprisingly diverse atmosphere, especially in larger centres like Calgary and Edmonton. Alberta doesn’t just like immigration… it needs it.
9. Social Credit Movement
Since nobody really wants this article to degenerate into an amateur lesson in economics, let’s just try to distil the fundamentals of the Social Credit movement down to a couple of sentences: The Social Credit ideology combines elements of experimental egalitarian economic policy with Christian social conservatism. Instead of today’s predominant God-loves-me-most-so-he-made-me-rich reading of the Bible, the original Alberta Social Credit Party, founded in 1935 with the same basic principles as the larger Social Credit movement, was all about the meek inheriting the earth, loving-thy-neighbour, and helping out the poorest members of society. It was, in many ways, similar to what Tommy Douglas was doing next door in Saskatchewan in that it too combined elements of Christian teachings with progressive socialist ideologies. The movement was especially popular during and after the Great Depression, when the traditional economics of the day had caused a great deal of society-wide suffering, prompting the affected society to re-evaluate its views on money and credit. As such, the Socreds formed the government in Alberta from 1935 to 1971, which makes the federal Liberals’ current run in Ottawa look positively anaemic by comparison.
Unfortunately, modern Alberta has kept the bad parts of its Social Credit past, and has thrown out most of the good stuff. The rural vote, once so focused on the need for a real, revolutionary form of social justice when faced with the hardships brought on by banks and big-business types, has now been convinced that the best way to help itself is to vote for the very same big-business types that regularly cause it grief.
The Alberta Social Credit Party exists to this day, though with only 1.2 percent of the popular vote in the 2004 Alberta election, it’s hardly a major player. Still, its shotgun approach to the political spectrum, with a platform at once both progressive and left-leaning, and distinctly right-of-centre, makes it an interesting participant in the Alberta political scene.
All that oil money (and no debt) means that Alberta is flush with enough cash to pump up social programs into the future, and to invest in a more diverse, more sustainable economy to ensure continued prosperity well after the oil runs dry.
All Albertans, regardless of their political affiliations, care about issues like health care, education and the environment, and the government is well aware of it. The problem, however, is that many Albertans care more about saving a few grand in tax cuts than on using the money from a non-renewable resource to help prepare the province for the potential funding famine of a petroleum-free future. If Alberta can set its sights on a progressive, more balanced future, and not just on short-term election gains and senseless privatization and deregulation schemes, Alberta will become the great economic and social power that it desperately wants to be.
