In Alberta, Oil, Cowboys … and Liberalism?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/opinion/in-alberta-oil-cowboys-and-liberalism.html

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EDMONTON, Alberta — WHEN I moved from Houston to Edmonton, Alberta, in 2008, I was told to prepare for a soft landing, politically speaking. Alberta was supposed to be just like the Lone Star State: a place full of backslapping good ol’ boys in cowboy hats, riding high on the hog of oil money.

The province’s politics were even more predictable than Texas’. The Progressive Conservative Party had been in power longer than I’d been alive. By the time I arrived, one writer for The Globe and Mail, the country’s leading newspaper, had labeled the place “Saudi Alberta.”

Alberta had indeed become a petrostate: 30 percent of its gross domestic product came directly from oil and gas. Conversations about housing, jobs, health care and even academic research revolved around the price of oil.

But the dependence on oil came at a cost. Despite having the highest wages in Canada, Alberta also has the lowest rate of participation in postsecondary education. Why bother with a degree when you could drive up to the center of the oil industry, Fort McMurray (or as some call it, Fort McMoney), and with a high school diploma, make six figures operating heavy equipment in the oil sands?

This was all part of a grand bargain. Despite the conservative hegemony, Albertans got a steady helping of royalties to fund a decent social safety net while enjoying some of Canada’s lowest taxes.

Oil lubricates everything here, from universal health care to the arts. In an age of academic downsizing, I landed a plum university job bankrolled, in part, by oil royalties. Even stubbornly dissenting media outlets and hip music festivals are underwritten by oil companies. So, regardless of how you may feel about climate change, Albertans know their bread is buttered by sticky tar sands.

Yet this arrangement left an unsavory taste in my mouth. I was an American newcomer who expected better from Canada. But as with the difference between a Tim Horton’s Timbit and a Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkin, I began to realize there are subtle and important differences between how Americans and Canadians view the patrimony of natural resources.

Then came the “Alberta Spring,” the May elections in which the Progressive Conservatives were swept from power by the left-leaning New Democrats. In the run-up to the vote Rachel Notley, the New Democrats’ leader, argued that Alberta’s oil belonged to the people, not to the foreign corporations that do most of the exploration and extraction in the oil sands. She called for a review of the province’s current royalty regime, as well as a 2 percent increase in corporate taxes. It’s hard to imagine mainstream Texas Democrats making that case, let alone sweeping the state elections, and yet that’s precisely what happened in Alberta.

Since the election, Ms. Notley has walked a fine line: reassuring oil companies that she is not some Hugo Chávez of the Prairies, while also vowing to take big oil to task over royalties and environmental issues. Some oil companies have seen the rise of the charming and fresh-faced Ms. Notley as a chance to remake the image of an industry tainted by news stories of train derailments and ruptured pipelines.

To my ears, attuned as they are to the sacred American concept of private property, the idea that ordinary people own natural resources sounds, well, kind of socialist. That may be a dirty word in the States, but so is the business of strip mining the tarlike substance known as bitumen and diluting it to be shipped through pipelines.

The victory of the New Democrats, however, wasn’t necessarily about ideology. It was also about the identity of a province that has evolved from a ranching-and-drilling, meat-and-potatoes kind of place to an urbane, cosmopolitan magnet for people from Brazil to Pakistan looking for a better life.

Albertans have come to see petrostate politics as outmoded, and change at the local level has been happening for years now. In 2010 Naheed Nenshi of Calgary became the first Muslim to be elected mayor of a major North American city. Mr. Nenshi was also the first mayor to lead the gay pride parade in a city best known for its annual stampede. Edmonton’s mayor is a geeky hipster who often rides his bike to work. The ruling Progressive Conservatives were too arrogant to see change coming. In March Alberta’s premier, Jim Prentice, submitted a budget that called for new taxes on individuals and cuts in education but no new taxes on corporations. It was the sort of hubris that could come only from an entrenched party, and it was only a matter of time before New Albertans like me couldn’t tolerate it any longer.

As much as I’d like to see our province become a Norway on the Prairies, with little income inequality, free university education and a healthy environmental movement, I know that isn’t happening. No matter what happens after the Alberta Spring, however, it’s clear that we have a new political landscape, with at least five major parties, all with their own interesting colors and fonts, as well as ideologies, vying for a post-petro-dynasty future. Now that’s something I wish we could put in a pipeline and export down south.