Quotes of the Day

CATHERINE FORD
Journalist- author

What price prosperity? That is the question Albertans should be asking themselves in the face of a C$7.4 billion provincial surplus. Unfortunately, it won't be the citizens of Alberta who will decide what to do with the excess. It will be the provincial government and its soon-to-retire premier, Ralph Klein.

What the people need and what the premier may want are two different questions. We need the "little" things that won't earn pride of place in history. We need funds invested in our cities, particularly Calgary and Edmonton, which are desperately trying--and failing--to keep abreast with newcomers demanding housing, public services and new schools. We need infrastructure money to fix crumbling roads and improve access to downtown; we need money to repair and upgrade schools already neglected and to pay for more hospital beds and doctors. And Alberta needs to invest in postsecondary students: our future scientists, teachers, researchers and thinkers.

Money diverted into such institutions doesn't carry a "legacy" label. Nobody would ever look at Alberta's universities and credit Klein for their success. The question is whether Klein will do the right thing.

MICHAEL ROBINSON
Glenbow Museum president

If I were the Grand Duke of Alberta, I would direct all surplus hydrocarbon royalties to a perpetual trust fund. The oil and gas that underlie Alberta do not belong just to this generation of Albertans; they are a gift to posterity. And they are rapidly being depleted. We need to turn these finite resources into infinite ones--in time to capture enough royalty revenues to do real good. At present, about 38% of Alberta government programs are funded by hydrocarbon-royalty revenues. If we could sequester just C$5 billion in royalties a year for 38 years, we could create a Heritage Fund of more than C$200 billion--a feat, in world terms, almost equal to Norway's Petroleum Fund. Assuming a sustainable endowment draw of 5%, a C$200 billion Heritage Fund would throw off C$10 billion a year, approximately the value of royalties the Alberta economy now takes.

Once established at that level of capital, the fund could sustain a variety of essential provincial programs and even enable creative risk taking for Canada and the rest of the world. We could recommit to the Canada Division of the Heritage Fund to provide loans at favorable rates for all territories and provinces. In that way, Alberta could help kick-start needed interprovincial energy and information-technology infrastructure. Another possibility is the creation of a small endowment (say, C$2 billion at 5%, or C$100 million a year) for loans to Canadian cities at favorable rates. Think of all the environmental and creative urban infrastructure that could be built. We could also catalyze an international program of Heritage Fund Centers of Innovation.

Albertans have a lot of generosity of spirit and no shortage of ideas. And we know intuitively that to whom much is given, much is expected.

KATHERINE GOVIER
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?

INDIRA SAMARASEKERA
University of Alberta president

Alberta's natural resources, though abundant, are finite. If we want to remain a "have" province, we need to invest now in in renewable resources with a high payoff: namely, learning, ideas, and discovery.

Vigorous investment in post-secondary education is a sure-fire method to convert our present resource wealth into fully renewable resources that will provide a hundredfold returns for decades to come. We must catch up with and surpass other jurisdictions: only 15% of Alberta high school graduates move on to a post-secondary institutions, compared with a Canada-wide average of 19%. Furthermore, we are well behind dynamic and promising technological countries like Finland when it comes to people with advanced degrees.

We need to build classrooms and labs that are hotbeds of creativity and collaboration across disciplines. Alberta's competitive advantage in the 21st century will rest in talented people who can combine knowledge and ingenuity in radical new ways. These areas will be vital in the knowledge economy. Extracting the utmost value from our remaining non-renewable resources requires both skilled and educated people, and building new industries based on renewable resources will demand exceptional creativity and social ingenuity.

Alberta has been visionary in creating endowments for medical and science research, resulting in dazzling successes like the Edmonton Protocol for diabetes and nanotechnology. Now we need a comparable endowment to spur discovery in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts.

We must promote a highly differentiated, thoroughly networked, completely seamless higher-education system through our Campus Alberta system. We already have a strong foundation for it. Our university is ready to help lead this effort, and our goal is classic Albertan: straightforward and ambitious. We hope to develop one of the world's great universities, to be in the global "Top Twenty by 2020."

This is a great opportunity for Albertans and for our government. Let's inspire great achievement and dare to discover.