Quote:
Originally Posted by Izzle
I'm curious. What sort of wake up call should the NEP have been? Why didn't Albertans learn that lesson?
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What should have been the lesson? Don't allow your entire economy to become reliant on one thing - oil and gas. Diversify. If you can't diversify, develop new ways your primary product can be used. Use the incredible wealth the province built up and use that to develop other means to support the economy long term. Saudi Arabia is doing this right now. They are looking to the future and see the petro market drying up, so they are investing trillions in making sure they have a future economy when those oil dollars go away. Alberta should have been ahead of this curve since they felt the kick in the nuts from the NEP. They got the oil economy back, but they still pissed the money and opportunity away.
Why didn't they learn this lesson? Because Alberta is a very conservative province and the people love to live in the moment or look back on better times. Alberta has always had a problem with looking forward and see where things were going. Calgary has been better than Edmonton in this regard, but both have been caught navel gazing as the obvious crisis creeped up on them. This is an area where the province needs to get better and quick, because the booming oil economy may never come back again.