Harry Shannon
I sent the article below to the Calgary Herald as a possible contribution to their Opinion page. I haven’t even had an acknowledgement.
Some context: I wrote this after hearing the Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on the news. Kenney and his government have tried to keep the province’s economy open during the COVID-19 pandemic. And now they’re in deep trouble, with case numbers soaring and hospitals under severe pressure. The news report stated that Alberta is considering asking the Canadian military and the Canadian Red Cross for help setting up field hospitals. It was how Kenney characterized the request (see below) that prompted me to write this. I’ve added the URL links for the blog post.
Dear Albertans
Harry Shannon
Yes, I know, I’m from Southern Ontario; I live close to the infamous Toronto. So you probably hate me already, before you read a word more. But, please, at least let me have my say. We in central Canada hear what seems like a constant stream of whining from you, and I for one am fed up. So if you give it out, then be ready to take it.
Alberta’s economy is heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry . Your complaining and bullying led the federal government to waste billions on buying the Trans Mountain project, that is doomed to irrelevancy. If your heads weren’t stuck so far up your pipelines, you would have noticed that the price of renewable energy is now below that from oil and gas, and the gap is widening. Moreover, unlike fossil fuels, air pollution from renewables doesn’t kill people. (And I’m not even considering climate change.)
You grossly mismanaged the royalties from your resources. Compare the Norwegians, whose population is a little bigger than Alberta’s (5.4 million vs. 4.4 million). They have built up a sovereign wealth fund worth a trillion dollars. That’s a thousand billion, and those are U.S. dollars. It works out to $238,000 per person in Canadian dollars. In contrast, the Alberta Heritage Fund is worth $17 billion, less than $4,000 per capita. That’s a sizable amount, but the Norwegians have 60 times more.
And now there’s the pandemic. Your numbers are shocking, thanks to your (at least your government’s) cavalier attitude to COVID-19. You wanted to keep your businesses and society open, against all health advice, and now there’s an entirely predictable crisis.
So you’re paying the price. Well, I hope it’s you, not the rest of Canada, who pay. Many people are suffering elsewhere in Canada because other provinces did the right thing and tried to control the pandemic by closing large parts of the economy.
Yet news reports tell us that Jason Kenney is now ready to call in the army and the Red Cross. I sure hope he offers to pay; otherwise, he’ll be trying to have his cake (the open economy) and eat it (free help), too. Your Heritage Fund was intended for a rainy day. The rainy day is here, and you should be using it to cover the consequences of how you’ve dealt with – or rather, haven’t dealt with – the pandemic. (The same way you should have used the Fund to retrain fossil fuel workers and build a renewable energy industry.)
Kenny even had the cheek to call his request for help “responsible planning.” Truly responsible planning would have ensured Alberta didn’t get to this point.
Harry Shannon lives in Dundas, Ontario