January 22, 2002
Kamloops Daily News



Is Alberta premier Ralph Klein becoming a socialist?  

Drought-stricken Alberta farmers say they're being gouged by
their own neighbours.  "I'm getting the feeling ... the
price of it [hay] depends on how big a loan I can get from
my banker, not what the hay's worth." said farmer John
Bidulock.

Bidulock's talking about the downright un-neighbourly  way
in which fellow Albertan farmers are jacking up the price of
hay.   Without hay, cattle are starving, farms are going
under, and small town economies are drying up like the
parched soil.

Needy farmers shouldn't be surprised.  That's the way the
free market works.  If there is a shortage of hay, the price
goes up.  Markets have no heart.  But that doesn't sit well
with premier Klein.

 "I think now is the time to be neighbourly, and to rally,
and understand with compassion the plight of those farmers
that are indeed suffering," says  Klein.

Ralph is suggesting the socialist thing to do - - share
resources and the market be damned.  I'm not naïve  enough
to think that Klein will soon provide provincial  control of
public resources.  But it's a good first step. 

The bitter irony for Alberta farmers is that the kindness of
strangers is greater than neighbours. Farmers in central and
eastern Canada are giving away hay to drought-stricken
farmers.  Now, that's neighbourly.

The image of warm-hearted easterners takes a little getting
used to.  The feeling towards central Canada has been 
frosty in the past.  Especially when the government of
Canada tried to institute the National Energy Program in
1980.   Bumper stickers in Alberta "Let the Eastern Bastards
Freeze in the Dark."

The NEP was seen as a plan from hell devised by those
eastern Liberal fiends (to geographically challenged
westerners, the  east does not include Atlantic Canada). 
Energy producing western provinces saw the NEP as a money
grab by the feds.

In the minds of the federal Liberals, though, Alberta's
energy was once theirs and revenue sharing was logical. 
Ownership of Canada's resources is a matter of time and
place.

Until 1930, the mineral, oil and gas of the prairie
provinces belonged to the federal government .  The oil and
gas off the coast of B.C. still does.

Alberta's economic prosperity is not a result of good
fortune but good planning on the part of the government of
Canada.  Before 1930, when land was being settled by
farmers, the federal government had the foresight to keep
the mineral, oil and gas rights.  All those rights were
transferred to the government of Alberta.

The NEP  was not all that diabolical.  It attempted to make
Canada self sufficient in energy.  We already produce more
energy than we need but we lack a national energy policy to
price and distribute it.    

Canadian-made prices for Canadian energy can't exist as long
as that energy is sold on international (mostly American)
markets.   As long as we sell energy to the highest bidder,
we will be perpetually short of energy.

Capitalists would argue that energy is just another
commodity.  It is not.  Energy is the lifeblood of a
sovereign state.  The saber-rattling of George Bush in the
middle east is evidence of  his belief in that axiom.  He
will go to war to keep the U.S. awash in oil.

Without  control of energy, a country is forever hostage to
those with the deepest pockets.  The government of British
Colombia has yet to discover this simple logic.

If B.C. Hydro is privatized and the price of electricity
goes up, it will hurt not only low income citizens (who are
expendable to the B.C. government) but also big tax
producing industries.   Like Highland Valley Copper, for
example, one of the largest customers of B.C. Hydro.  

It's really quite simple.  If the U.S. can dictate energy
prices and in doing so put Canadian industry out of
business, we will be the losers.

I want to hear Ralph Klein take the next step in his
conversion and say "I think now is the time, not only to be
neighbourly but to remember that energy is the lifeblood of
all Canada, and that pricing of our own energy is not the
compassionate thing to do but the responsible thing to do." 

I can dream.

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