Kevin Lowe haltingly says what we're all thinking.

Or at least what I'm thinking...

I awoke this morning to the sweet sounds of Radio 1 on my alarm clock, and the subject of talk was Daryl Katz's recently-finalized purchase of the Oilers. Kevin Lowe was being asked to comment on the purchase and on Katz. In characteristic professional athlete fashion, his response consisted of a series of sentence fragments and clichés awkwardly and haltingly fused together, but what he said nonetheless struck me. The quote, as near as I could render it after hopping out of bed and over to my desk and frantically searching for a pen and pad:

"For someone who's been so successful to be an Edmontonian, to be so committed to the city..."

(The ellipsis is actually Lowe's on this one; that's not me truncating the quote, he just didn't really finish the sentence)

Basically Lowe is saying that it's surprising that someone so successful actually stayed in Edmonton. I have to admit that I've unconsciously wondered the same thing as an increasingly large portion of my peers shuffle off to Vancouver, Toronto, or elsewhere. And when considering Katz and the empire he's built here -- or any successful Edmonton company, like PCL or Stantec -- I always find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting as a matter of course that entities like these will at some point "outgrow" Edmonton and head for greener pastures. In my view, Lowe's comment brings to light the fact that these feelings permeate the city, and in case it wasn't clear I'll spell it out: this is not a good thing.

It's funny, because if you look to traditional indices of success -- namely, growth -- Edmonton should be one of the top destination cities in North America. However, as anyone who's taken a stroll through the acres of downtown surface parking well knows, this is clearly not the case. The point that I'm trying to make here: there is a very big difference between economic prosperity and livability. To again reference hockey, this was embarrassingly illustrated when Michael Nylander took a free agent offer from the Washington Capitals over an offer from the Oilers that was for more money because his wife didn't want to move here.

The outcomes -- economic, social, cultural, environmental, etc -- of Alberta's cities will be tied the outcomes of the province as a whole, but talk of improving these outcomes specifically in the context of cities, from I've seen, has been largely absent from the priorities of any of the major provincial parties. Certainly much of the responsibility for improving cities lies at the feet of the municipalities themselves, but particularly with the municipal layer of government being relatively impotent in Canada the province has a large role to play.

Consider Ontario, which in recent years passed the City of Toronto Act (which redistributed certain powers from the provincial government to the city), and, according to comments I heard from Rick Haldenby  (director of the University of Waterloo school of architecture ) at a recent talk, will soon be introducing legislation to tie municipal funding levels the extent to which municipalities can control their physical growth.

Such leadership would be welcome to anyone who, like me, feels more than vaguely nauseous when entering or exiting Edmonton or Calgary and seeing the unfathomable acres of land devoted to Fabriclands, pavement, and clusters of spectacular-in-their-homogenuity houses (which may or may not be surrounding man-made lakes), or worries about the talented people leaving Alberta to live in cities they view to be more desirable.

I suppose, though, before we went about improving Alberta's cities, we could work on correcting Ralph Klein's gerrymandering and make sure they were represented proportionally in the legislature...