Thirty nine years ago, armed only with a few dollars, a large suitcase and a sense of my own importance out of all proportion with reality, I arrived in this great province.
A lot has changed in the almost four decades since I landed in Calgary, not least Calgary itself. The city has gone from being a confident and bustling mid-sized community to become an enormous monument to urban sprawl, beset by mini-malls but with a sense of its own importance … well, you can see where I’m going with this.
Calgary and I parted ways many years ago – you can only eat so many mini donuts – but Alberta has remained my home for what is now well over half of my life.
I’ve learned that Albertans are a funny lot. Compared to most of the world, everything here is so new. With the exception of the First Nations very few of us here have roots in the province going back more than a generation or two. Alberta itself is only 120 years old. In global terms, that’s the blink of an eye. My wife, who isn’t that old, has lived in Alberta for more than half of the province’s existence.
We are people drawn from every corner of the planet, often we seem to have ended up here quite by chance.
We have some inherent contradictions. Albertans are, as a rule, suspicious of authority in general and government in particular. And yet we have a habit of electing the same leaders time after time after time after time in what I can only describe as a triumph of hope over experience.
But there’s more. In my first Canadian job, at a small retail outlet, I worked alongside an oilfield geologist who had become unemployed in the slump of the mid-1980s. She was desperately trying to keep up with the mortgage payments on the home she had bought in better economic times. The grit and determination with which she faced up to some very difficult times has always struck me as indicative of everything that is best about Albertans. We are many things, but we sure ain’t quitters. She pulled it off too. She kept the house and eventually found work back in her own area of expertise. Last time I saw her she was driving a brand new pickup truck, because, well, this is Alberta.
She was an immigrant, incidentally, like so many of the people who have defined our modern province. There’s a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-things-done attitude to much of what you see here. In part it’s the offshoot of the rugged individualism that brought folks here a hundred years ago. But there’s more to it and it’s more complex than that, although we unquestionably value initiative and enterprise.
Those are all good things but I don’t feel … and I’ve never felt in the 39 years I’ve lived here … that any one of those things makes me, or any other Albertan, any less Canadian. Any differences I feel toward the folks in Ontario or Nova Scotia or Manitoba or Quebec fade into insignificance compared to the things that unite us. We believe in honesty and the value of hard work. But we do so with the understanding that some of our neighbours are going to need a hand up every now and then.
I am a proud Albertan, but I am an even prouder Canadian.
Alberta is a great province and I consider myself lucky to call it home. And I love my province, but I also love my country. The separatists can say what they want, but I have no wish to be asked to choose between being Albertan and being Canadian. As far as I’m concerned they’re the same thing.
