Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
Alberta has regained the title of fastest-growing province, basking in a baby boom and a renewed wave of people moving here from other parts of Canada.
-- Calgary Herald
Thank God (or maybe OPEC). Alberta is back in its rightful place atop the heap, looking down on the rest of Canada. The Herald story conveyed a palpable sense of relief. I shared it.
You see, one by one, my favourite column targets have disappeared from the shooting gallery. Martha Stewart went to jail. Ditto for Conrad Black and Paris Hilton. Bill Clinton pulled his pants up. America treats George Bush like an embarrassing memory, the guy who looked good through 2 a.m. beer goggles being more toad than prince in the light of day.
Even Alberta, the biggest, fattest target of all, withered away last year, the economy -- and the population -- plunging with natural gas prices. Bad news for Alberta, worse for me. It's no fun taking the air out of a flat tire.
Why poke fun at Alberta? Because it's there. Because the Yukon is too small to pick on. Because the U.S., our only other neighbour, is too big (and comes with the threat of nuclear annihilation). Because if Alberta were one of the three bears, it would be just right.
Alberta is everything B.C. is not: successful, rich, hard-working, gets up at the crack of dawn to bulldoze something. It has no sales tax, has paid off its student debt, drives a shiny new SUV that it uses to kill Greenpeace campaigners, thumpety-bump. It's also smugger than Glenn Beck, looking on B.C. with self-righteous contempt, forgetting that its petro-wealth derives from an accident of geography, not financial wizardry.
I have, over the years, noted that Alberta's values are out of sync with the rest of the country, that it sings O Canada on Father's Day but is pretty sure Ronald Reagan was its real dad. Thinks Stephen Harper is a communist.
Eats hippies for breakfast, deep-fried, then smokes an Export A, unfiltered, for dessert. Ask an Albertan to name his favourite fruit and vegetable, he'll pick pickled eggs and Spam. Alberta's idea of a good time is Commonwealth Stadium in November. Its sports cars are made by John Deere.
Its lifelong ambition is to die of backbreaking toil. Swimming in oil wealth, Albertans are nonetheless always angry about something: Trudeau, the National Energy Program, Kyoto, the gun registry, Chris Pronger.
Even their cows are mad. Tourism Alberta's slogan: "Come for the mosquitoes, stay for the frostbite!"
For reasons I cannot fathom, these observations have caused some Albertans to turn red in the face, swallow their Copenhagen, and fire off letters to the editor WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS demanding an apology/testicle. One writer labelled me mean-spirited for pointing out that the phrase "drunken Albertan" was redundant, while another was miffed when I said Quebec banning smoking in bars was as unlikely as Alberta pulling the beer machines from daycare centres.
The description of Ralph Klein as "Premier Jed Clampett filling the cee-ment pond with Texas tea" proved particularly vexatious to humourless Albertans (sorry, redundant again) as did references to the narrow-minded paranoia of the fanatical Albertaliban.
Now, some might point out that we British Columbians have a stereotype of our own.
That Alberta sees B.C. as an indolent, woolly-hatted, woolly-headed stoner who gets up at the crack of noon to collect his taxpayer-funded medical marijuana, then cycles naked to the legislature lawn to demand the government do something about, well, um, he forgets. B.C. works just hard enough to qualify for unemployment insurance or go on stress leave.
B.C.'s lifelong dream is to dream. B.C. forgets that its mild climate and natural beauty are an accident of geography, not good planning.
B.C. eats a diet consisting entirely of silage. Pretends that tofu doesn't taste like drain sludge. Heats his house with grow-op waste. Phones in sick when it snows (Alberta shovels its flakes, but we elect 'em) then calls the CBC to blame Harper -- or chemtrails --for the weather.
But these, of course, are just the uninformed ravings of Albertans and other Eastern Canadians.
