The Heart of the New West

(click to listen to New Wild West by Jewel, this was the best version I could find, it has some other stuff in the middle and end, but whatever)



I thought about this song after attending the grand opening of yet another mall in the city of suburbia. Few cities on this earth have the problem of urban sprawl like Calgary. We are a people that has moved into houses in packed communities void of culture and filled with vain materialism. We value strip malls more than museums. We like ample parking space instead of well developed mass transit systems.

Calgary's motto is 'The Heart of the New West'. What is the new west?

If Calgary is the heart of this new west, then it can best be described as the land that believes in Social Darwinism. Every man for himself. We have a political monarchy in Alberta, no party could ever challenge the right wing conservatives. King Ralph could throw books at little girls and spit at homeless people all he wanted, as long as he kept taxes low, he was going to be the King until he voluntarily vacated the throne.

Albertans seem not concerned with the plight of those who are less fortunate in society. We give to charity far less per capita than the much less affluent Newfoundlanders. We let our social infrastructure crumble all around us. A study completed a couple years ago found the majority of schools in Calgary to have leaking and otherwise damaged roofs. Classes sizes continue to swell, and not enough is being done to open up more spots in Albertan universities. Ralph Klein saw the demolition of the hospital of my birth, and did not build another one to help ease the shortages of beds in Calgary. He has done nothing to help curb the massive cost of overtime pay to nurses because of major nurse shortages province wide.

Alberta stands on the most economically important land on this continent. The Calgary-Edmonton corridor is the most prosperous region in North America and one of the fastest growing in the world. Alberta's massive oil reserves have ensured that Alberta remains prosperous for years to come. We are the only province that is debt free. So why do we have so many social issues?

Klein stated that his biggest regret during his stint as premier was that he never brought about two-tiered health care. It sounds decent on the surface, but it was really about having the rich be able to bump everyone else to the back of the line. The waiting list for patients who need care would actually end up getting longer if you could not pay. That is what Tommy Douglas fought against in Saskatchewan decades ago. The same fight happening in America, happened in Canada. In the end, universal health care won out and spread across the country after the Pearson government mandated it nationwide. This was a settled question. But Klein wanted it to end to favour the rich.

He was sitting on multi-billion dollar surpluses thanks to our being on top of a great deal of oil. He could have worked to fight against the decay he oversaw, but instead he used it as an opportunity to further the class distinction between rich and poor.

This is not one politician. This is the mindset of my province. This is the mindset of today's conservatives. Selfishness. Little regard for your fellow citizens. For your fellow man.

Pearson had a goal for this nation. He wanted us to give 1% of our GDP to foreign aid. He built a country whose diplomatic corps was astonishing for a country Canada's size. He got the UN to step between the British/French forces and Egypt's during the Suez crisis. We were a nation that never ignored the call from the UN for peace keeping missions. We were a nation that strived for global peace, and we made a huge difference.

Under Trudeau, we got the closest we ever were to reaching Pearson's target. It was little more than half. Today it is 0.28%. We eventually had to end our streak of always taking up the UN's call for peacekeepers. Our military crumbled to the embarassment it is today. We had the third best airforce and fourth best navy coming out of WWII. That obviously could not be sustained, but it shows how far it has fallen to insignificance. If our military capacity were greater, could we have heeded our own general Romeo Dallaire's plea for help in Rwanda? What about Darfur? Could a strong Canadian peacekeeping presence have stopped the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995?

I see my people as jaded and caught up in their own small worlds. No one is concerned about the impending crisis as we near the point of no return in climate change. We do not seem to care about the problems plaguing the health care and education systems. There is no urgency on our part to fix the third world conditions on first nation's reserves in Canada. Calgary is a city that actually increases its electricity consumption during earth hour.

As long as we keep getting new shopping malls to buy new shoes, we could not care less about other people.