Alberta Bound
For the extent of my increasingly long Calgary memory, pundits have promoted the idea that the vast numbers of people who have moved to Alberta will bring values and inclinations from other parts of the country that will inevitably lead to change.
Elections have failed to provide even the tiniest morsel of evidence to support this theory but you can expect it will be prayerfully offered up when the next opportunity rolls around. What this points to is a fundamental misunderstanding within the punditry of the dominant features of Alberta culture, the people who live here, move here and the subtle nuances that guide its society.
Dr. Peter Hackett, president and CEO of Alberta Ingenuity, is among the province’s more articulate spokesmen on this point. “. . . Ingenuity is a defining characteristic of our culture here,” he said in one of his earlier speeches. “Risk and ingenuity is still very close to the surface here, it’s in the mountains, it’s at the rodeo and it’s under that limitless big blue sky. We have not forgotten what it was like here when we had to do new and risky things every day just to do anything at all.” “. . . We must build a culture of innovation in our grade schools, in our universities and in our companies, in the hearts and minds of our researchers, our employees and our managers. We need more entrepreneurs, willing to believe in themselves and their ideas, take risks and grow their companies.” There are other pithy descriptions of Calgary, in particular, as a place where failure isn’t so much considered a source of shame but a temporary affair that offers evidence of a man or woman’s courage to take risks.
As the old saying goes, it’s not how hard you fall that matters, it’s how high you bounce.
Certainly the people who come here are initially not so much motivated by cultural inclinations as they are by jobs and money and what it can buy – beer, for instance. A great many still arrive in rusty cars towing a U-haul trailer. But each has also at some point made that same, difficult and emotional decision to pack up, bid tearful (or perhaps relieved) farewells to family and friends and head to Alberta in the hope of a new life; a better life; a place where there is the freedom and opportunity to succeed. It doesn’t work for everyone.
Today, as always, some go home broke and disenchanted. But most often the people who stay and become civically and culturally engaged and vote do so because their values are a generally comfortable fit with those that have dominated historically.
Consciously or otherwise, they feel more at home here, more confident that they will be judged only on the strength of their ideas and effort than their heritage or what school they went to, than they did where they came from. And that rebellion against class structures and institutional barriers that are more prevalent in other parts of the country in turn leads to Albertans’ tendency to behave in a somewhat contrarian fashion.
So, when people wonder why Alberta can’t be more like the rest of the country, the answer is pretty apparent. They came for jobs but they stayed because they discovered they didn’t actually want to be exactly the same as the rest of the country or felt like they didn’t fit in anymore “back home.” As a result they have, as country singer Paul Brandt puts in his song, Alberta Bound, “got independence in my veins.” The “new” Albertans are very much the same as the people who began pouring into this land after the barbed wire first went up.
Whether they arrived here in 1905 or 2005, they are people who weren’t, or aren’t, afraid of adventure. The one thing they won’t leave to chance, however, is change that would put their culture of risk in peril.