Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying

POSITIVE THINKING: #4

Installment 4 of the POSITIVE THINKING series comes from BF, a 25-year-old construction engineer who has a strong rural connection. We mention this because for his contribution, BF has focused on the province's strong rural connection as something he likes about Alberta. Lets hope this post can contribute in some small way to the bridging of the gap between urban, white-collar, ivory-tower-dwelling, elitists like us and the residents of rural Alberta, something that needs to happen if we ever want to see a legitimate opposition in the province -- especially 'cause their votes count for way more than ours do!

It took me a long time to make the effort and sit down to put this together.  I think a part of me was afraid to think too hard about it and risk realizing that there weren’t as many positive feelings as hoped for.  This doesn’t seem to be the case.  Now that I’ve started, it’s been like free-association… the paper has just filled up with ideas.  I have many a “shining beacon of warm positive light” when it relates to Alberta.  For this post though, I better just settle on one, otherwise it ain’t gonna make one ounce of sense.   

A common theme among my “beacons” was the outdoors and the connection to rural life.  Although I have been a city dweller now for the best part of eight years, I came from deep rural Alberta – starting in a town of about 100 and then moving on to a town of about 2000.  I guess that technically I’d be called a farm-boy, but it was pretty rare that you’d ever find me riding bareback on the prairie or castrating the calves with my teeth (leave that for family).   I was destined to be city-boy, I dare say even “metro.”   It continues to amaze me though, the amount that the rural mentality continues to influence not only my life, but the lives of those I meet in urban centres.

How many of us lust for camping in the mountains, or swinging down to the lake during the weekends?   Who doesn’t have a good slo-pitch story or Big Valley Jamboree anecdote?  I continue to meet people who all seem to have similar past-times and interests… although from looking at them,  they’d be the last person you’d guess to enjoy ice-fishing or beersby™; the last person you’d think you’d run into at the farmer’s market.  To me, this isn’t simply having common interests with others.  It’s a unification of a huge slice of our generation…..something that is completely rare in other areas.   I get inspired when I start thinking about the amazing group of friends that I have.  And I continue to meet people that not only surprise me with their similar interests, but with how down-to-earth their values are.  This is a heavy realization.  Now that I’ve figured it out, it’s something that I fully intend on keeping within my life.

Due to the current “prosperity” that Alberta is facing right now, I can’t tell anyone where I’m going to be next year, or the year after.  Let’s face it, the economy is fragile thing and I’ll be forced to work where the work is.   I know, though, that I will always come back to Alberta if offered the choice.  I will choose to raise a family and enjoy the best years of my life surrounded by the many people that make this place so great.

POSITIVE THINKING: #3

Today, EC offers up the third installment in the POSITIVE THINKING series. EC is 24 years old and is currently "in transition" between jobs. It appears she had a little bit more trouble than most in coming up with something positive -- perhaps because, like us, she is still stinging from the election results. However, after a bit of struggle, she has managed to fight through her cynicism and create a quite original conception of what it is she loves about our province: community radio. One more thing: EC supplied a headline with her contribution, and although every post in this series get the standard "POSITIVE THINKING: #X" title, we thought we had to mention it because it somewhat hilariously encapsulates her struggle to come up with something. Her title for the following contribution: "Community radio in Alberta: The hidden gem in a land of tar."

A few weeks ago I was kindly asked by my friends at AGRDT to write a guest post about something that I love about Alberta. I’m not going to lie, at that point  it was quite difficult for me to come up with anything I liked in Alberta. I was still trying to come to the realization that 22% of the people surrounding me had just successfully elected the Conservatives to 87% of the seats in our latest version of a provincial government. But, now that the days have passed and the sun keeps coming up in the morning, I’m starting to cheer up, and realize that Alberta is my home and while I may not be happy about the election outcome, it does provide an opportunity to  highlight my favorite thing about this province. Now more than ever, there is a critical need for alternative and oppositional voices to be heard in this province and we here in Alberta should consider ourselves lucky that we have such vibrant community radio stations.

While there are a variety of ways which progressive people have found to get their message out, community radio in Alberta has been a great vehicle for many alternative voices. There are hundreds of volunteers across the province, who work tirelessly to bring a brilliant alternative to mainstream radio. While there are many great music programs that continuously play the latest and greatest in (predominantly) underground music, I particularly love Alberta's amazing collective of alternative journalists who gather in grassroots radio news rooms from Edmonton to Lethbridge. For the past two and a half years, I have been fortunate enough to work in one of these news departments and as a result have had an abundance of amazing experiences. Yes, I have had the opportunity to interview a lot of great authors, musicians, community leaders and academics, but more than anything I have had the privilege of working with dedicated and impressive people who have made it their mission to bring real, uncensored and pertinent news to Albertans.

Each week they bring timely news about the environment, aboriginal issues, women’s issues, alternative gardening and much, much more. In addition to the great programming that community radio stations in Alberta offer, I’m continuously astounded by the culture that has been created by these collectives. It doesn’t matter what you look like, what your gender is, what you wear, or how old you are, everyone is accepted. Come to think of it, for me, these radio stations are like a safe space where critical thinking is not only allowed, but is encouraged. It might seem like I’m describing any where on a university campus, but it is different, at community radio stations pretentiousness and egos are checked at the door. Fresh, new ideas, radical or not, are constantly filling the air. I love that the person who has their doctorate in English is working on the same show as a first year engineering student, both are given the same credibility, both are viewed as equals.

Now you may be thinking: big deal, there are grass roots, community radio stations in many cities all over this country, what is special about Alberta? Well, I have been many places all over the country, and I have talked to many people at similar radio stations all over the country, and everyone is continuously astonished by the programming that is put out by Albertans. While progressive may have been defeated in the mainstream political arena, we are still thriving here in alternative spaces, and community radio continues to be a medium where our voices will always be heard!

POSITIVE THINKING: #2

The second installment in the POSITIVE THINKING series comes from JK. JK needs no introduction -- he's one of the three surly proprietors of this blog. That being said, these sentences basically constitute an introduction, so we may as well tell you what he'll be writing about: he's chosen to focus on an idea briefly raised in POSITIVE THINKING: #1: our crisp Albertan climate.

A lot of people, even the most loyal and proud of Albertans, loathe the weather here, which is pretty easy to understand. It's friggin' freezing for a good four months and kind of freezing for another four, which leaves only about a third of the year for cutoff jean shorts. Most people like cutoff jeans shorts and nobody -- me included -- likes freezing, but I nonetheless find many charms within a climate that to all outward impressions is horrible.

There are a lot of stupid reasons I like our climate. For example, it's conducive to sweater-wearing and I happen to be a guy who likes to wear sweaters, and in weather with any amount of humidity I quickly develop what some would call a "gross sweating problem." These, though, are obviously fairly superficial reasons, and carry about the same weight, I think, as liking a climate simply because "it's hot."

The crux of what I like about our weather is that it is one of the things that define us as Albertans. I like the weather because it's a challenge, and I think challenges like weather -- which doesn't recognize the generally trivial things like socioeconomic status or political affiliation that us humans tend to use as an excuse to ignore one another -- bring us together in some way. Inevitably, during a stretch of really miserable weather, I'll find myself talking to people I would have never talked to simply because we're both sharing something, and I really think that's worth something.

I definitely lament certain aspects of the weather here, an example being our almost complete lack of autumn. I lived in New England for a while, and I remember during my first fall there the leaves turning colour and staying on the trees for, like, two months. Around week six I was just looking at the trees thinking "are you kidding me?" Some part of me wishes we had longer autumns, but I'm ultimately glad that they're 2 weeks long because they are something that make us unique. I love that the leaves staying on the trees for so long was the primary focus of numerous conversations I had with people back home during the fall I mention above -- it's something that only a relatively small portion of people on our continent would get, and it's part of what makes us us.

There are a lot of images that people from the rest of Canada see when they think about Albertans, some of which I like and most of which I don't. One that makes me happy and also strikes me as accurate is the notion of the people here being friendly and unpretentious. It would be simplistic to attribute this to entirely to weather -- really, other parts of Canada have crappy weather, too -- but I nonetheless think that our climate has in some way played a role in this, maybe because it's exceptionally crappy. Experiences like getting pushed out of a ditch by a stranger or even just talking to a stranger simply because you're sharing the unpleasant experience of slowly developing frostbite while waiting for a crossing signal to change are things that I think subtlety shape us as Albertans. Ultimately, they're a part of what makes us unique in the country and the world.

POSITIVE THINKING: #1

The first installment in the POSITIVE THINKING series comes from RK, a 54-year-old financial planner and lifelong resident of Alberta. Although he likes many aspects of our province, he chose to focus specifically on themes of community and opportunity. We were also very happy to see that RK, albeit briefly, mentioned our climate as a positive feature.

Let RK know what you think of his first-ever blog post in the comments section. 

I was asked to comment on something I liked about Alberta. While there were a number of things to choose from including the diversity of geography (from mountains to prairie and everything in between), the climate, opportunity, etc, I decided on something I can best describe as community spirit.  While many of my experiences are from the Edmonton area, I think they apply to the province as a whole. I see it in the sporting world -- filling up Commonwealth Stadium to watch a hockey game when it's -20 C, hosting world-class events that are always well-managed and well-attended, and setting the gold standard of national-anthem-singing when the Oilers made their big playoff run. Standing in that crowd I could feel how proud those people were to be Canadians and Albertans. It seems to me those types of things aren't regular occurrences anywhere else in Canada.

I've gotten involved with some fundraising and I also see this spirit in people's willingness to give. It's demonstrated by Alberta always being at or near the top in the country when it comes to charitable donations and, more importantly, volunteerism. It seems there is never a fundraising goal that isn't met, and I think this is reflected by the numerous top-end facilities in our area: the Alberta Heart Centre, The Stollery Children's Hospital and The Winspear, to name a few. The authors of this blog would probably say that if the government provided proper funding there wouldn't be a need to raise more money but I tend to disagree with that. There will always be a need for more than the government can supply and so there should be.

One last thought on the idea of opportunity: I recently had a 40-year-old fellow stop by my office. He and his family had moved here 18 months ago from Sri Lanka. He had two children, one 5 and the other 11 months. He and his wife work as cooks at BP and are making about $3500 a month. I was amazed when he told me that in the short time they've been here they had put together enough for a down payment on a house. He also told me how great it was (other than the cold weather) for him and his family to be here. I wouldn't go so far to say that Alberta is a "beacon of hope" but for these people it gave them an opportunity to change their lives.

The bottom line is that every country in the world can do better and we need to push for changes. But sometimes we just need to have an appreciation of what we've got.

POSITIVE THINKING: Looking at what we like about Alberta

Regular (and probably even non-regular) readers of this blog will know that we here at AGRDT like to complain a lot. While we feel that every bit of this complaining is warranted, we thought it might be nice to give our readers an occasional respite from these bad vibes and try and focus on something a little more heartening.

Accordingly, we came up with an idea for a series titled "Things The Tories Haven't Wrecked Yet." Then one titled "Silver Linings," and then one titled "We Know It's Not The Tailings Ponds..." And then, finally realizing that none of these names quote captured the feel we were looking for, we decided on
"POSITIVE THINKING:" a series looking at what makes our province a good place to live.

If you listened to the government (via it's advertising/public-relations campaigns), you would likely come to the conclusion that the most remarkable thing about Alberta is its low tax load. As inspiring as that is, we think that there's more to the province than that. Like what? In a series of upcoming posts, ourselves and a number of guests from as large a cross-section of Alberta as we're capable of rounding up will be endeavoring to answer that question.

So, over the next month or so, look forward to our onslaught of cynicism being occasionally interrupted by a shining beacon of warm, positive light.