(2 of 3)
Novelist
Alberta should share its riches with the rest of Canada. The best gift would be to pass on some pride. Beautiful, smart, bold Alberta could help all of Canada achieve a better self-image.
Here's how: get Canadian culture out in front where we could see it. Start your own Canada Council, western style. Reinvent the film industry. (If New Zealand has one, why don't we?) Start your own publishing industry. Make Calgary a huge center for television drama. Build a gallery for contemporary arts in downtown Calgary. Promote the work of Canadian visual artists, sculptors and photographers. Don't forget the dancers. Build on the fantastic fringe theater in Edmonton. Become a fashion capital to rival Toronto and Montreal. Invest in media to get the message across. Beef up the cbc--and don't get all nervous when you don't like what it says. You can't possibly mind. You're bigger than that.
Lastly--and this is also about broader "Canadian culture"--extend your innate love of the wilderness, and pour money into the national parks. All of them, from east to west. I can see the signs: nature protected courtesy of the province of alberta.
GWYN MORGAN
Executive vice chairman of the EnCana Corp.
How can Alberta utilize its economic strength to help build the country's future in a fundamental, long-lasting way? My answer: by creating Centers of Excellence. Here's a model: the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research. Established 26 years ago by Peter Lougheed's government and supported by the Klein government, it has attracted top clinical and teaching physicians such as the cadre of world-class researchers studying the brain at the University of Calgary.
For Alberta, a medical-networking Center of Excellence could help fix a national health-care system that is cracking under the strain of dogma and dysfunction. Through this center, leading physicians in every clinical field could share the best practices and research insights with colleagues around the country via state-of-the-art information-technology systems.
A national Center of Excellence in public governance could address the downward trend in ethics worldwide. Its mandate could be to develop effective and accountable governance codes and practices to help move Canada to the top of the global indexes of transparency and ethics.
Lastly, Alberta could establish a Center of Excellence aimed at uniting all Canadians around the core values that have made this country great. A recent Fraser Institute study by a respected former Canadian diplomat, Martin Collacott, called for Canadians to find a balance between our long-standing value of honoring multicultural diversity and the overarching values that unite us as proud citizens of one Canada. It's a goal that an Alberta-funded center could help carry out.
Centers of Excellence are a means of discovering and demonstrating a way to a better future. Why shouldn't that be the legacy of Alberta's good fortune?