On Ms. Gerson's Assertions
Turns out all those haters were right!
Previously on Vive l’Alberta Libre: A Word to Jen Gerson About Albertans
It’s interesting to re-read Ms. Gerson’s article, as well as her readers’ comments, three years later. Although her haters were wrong to indulge in vulgar, ad hominem attacks, they were right about many other things.
For instance:
these guys were angry at me for offering the truth that Alberta’s energy sector isn’t going to keep growing. Hmmm…according to the Alberta Energy Regulator, oil production has averaged 4.6% year over year growth since the article’s publication. Perhaps those guys were angry over the fake news on Alberta’s energy sector.
Source: Alberta Energy Regulator “Supply and disposition of Crude Oil and Equivalent” data.
a lot of the people who were angry about what I wrote were deeply triggered because they seem to associate Alberta with her rulers; Actually, it turned out Albertans were deeply triggered by their rulers, and in fact the premier of the day was defenestrated shortly after “A Word to My Haters” was published. I hope Ms. Gerson is as pleased with the new Premier as Albertans are, and I hope the Premier’s recent assertion on doubling Alberta’s oil production doesn’t deeply trigger anyone.
Electric cars appear to be creeping closer to the tipping point of mass adoption. The haters should not have been angered by that statement. An eye roll would have sufficed. If you like EV’s, I hear you can pick up a used one for a reasonable price from Hertz. Consider selling any stock you hold in the Ford Motor Company to finance your EV purchase.
Solar and wind power is increasingly competitive…Gerson should have added “heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, and terribly unreliable. A blight on our landscape, as well”. We should all be thankful for the provincial government’s new policies for renewable development. I would like to see an additional policy mandating that renewable power plants have 100% redundancy with fossil, or nuclear fuel backup. If you’re anti-fossil fuels, and anti-nuclear, then you’re pro-blackout. By the way, if you think Alberta is an outlier on this file you should check out the Renewable Rejection Database maintained by Robert Bryce.
COVID-19 is driving young people away from major urban centres, and work is now less tied to geography than at any point in history. Odd then that in Q4 2023, net migration into Alberta was 40,950 compared to 34,098 in Q4 2022, an increase of 20.1%. I suspect Alberta’s population increase is tied to all the high salaried resource sector jobs (ie. tied to Alberta’s Geography).
If you want young people in this province — young people with talent and ambition — you need to build a province that offers an attractive place to live. That's more than just jobs, it's also a vibrant arts scene, good schools, recreation, unique shopping zones, walkable communities, and lots of alternative transportation and transit modes. These are not luxuries. They are absolutely essential if we want to compete to attract people in an era in which we can no longer rely on high salaries to do the work for us. Actually, Alberta already has the youngest demographics in Canada - and those young Albertans have plenty of talent and ambition, thank you very much. Well paying resource jobs will do that for a province. If you have issues with Calgary’s arts scene, take it up with the arts community. Schools not up to your standards? Perhaps you should call out the Alberta Teachers’ Association. Who’s against walkable communities? A straw man, perhaps? Have you ridden the C-Train recently? That alternative transportation mode/mobile homeless shelter does not appear to be working for Calgarians.
To be fair to Ms. Gerson, no one can predict the future. It seems odd though that she would conflate her joyful aspirations for society with a devastating downturn for Alberta. Imagine someone saying “I see you’ve been knocked down, and are struggling to get up. That’s a good thing, for now you can finally become what I think you should be”.
Let us be thankful for the end to Alberta’s dark days of 2015 through 2021. They will come again, as they always do. I’m confident Albertans will rise to the challenge, as they always do.