Here
is an excerpt from the book:
“Pound
for pound, when I lived in Edmonton it was the most
vibrant, artistic city in Canada, even more than Toronto
Paul Gross, Canadian actor
“If the Kennedy years were America’s Camelot,
the Lougheed years brought the same magic to Alberta.”
Dennis Anderson, Alberta Minister of Culture, 1986-87
This
memoir is a personal view of an extraordinary period in the life of
Alberta, and of a time in my own life that still astonishes me. When
I look back through the lens of the political and economic realities
of the early twenty-first century, it is hard for me to believe that
for a decade and a half, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the government
of Alberta supported culture in ways unmatched, with the possible exception
of Quebec, anywhere, anytime in Canada. Premier Peter Lougheed, with
the active encouragement of his wife Jeanne, supported the arts with
strongly positive attitudes and with generous, well-placed funding.
The government treated culture as if it really mattered. And, in the
proc-ess, it changed the way that many Albertans, myself included, saw
themselves and their communities.
This
is not a political book; it is a celebration of the people who, during
a time that in hindsight seems almost magical, created a legacy that
includes some of Canada’s most important cultural institutions.
Few outside of Alberta think of the province as a fountain of culture.
Too many see only our almost embarrassing wealth, our abundance of oil
and natural gas. They are aware of the macho celebration surrounding
the Calgary Stampede and the spectacular beauty of the eastern Rockies.
Some chuckle derisively at the largest temple to consumerism in the
world, the West Edmonton Mall, appropriately, they think, located in
Alberta. Many quick-think Alberta as the Bible Belt province that elected
Social Credit governments for three and a half decades; the redneck
territory that spawned Holocaust denier James Keegstra and the Reform
and Alliance parties. Alberta is known as the home of the Ralph Klein
government that showed Ontario and British Columbia how to really cut
deficits. The right wing label sticks uncomfortably tight.
But
during the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, Alberta had a progressive red
Tory government that believed the province’s wealth had to offer
something for the spirit. Culture and the arts achieved a rare level
of respectability and success with the creation of such institutions
as the internationally recognized Banff Centre for the Arts, a leading
destination for young artists from around the world. The annual Banff
International Television Festival is now one of the most important events
on the international calendar for television executives and creators.
The Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival is the largest and most successful
event of its kind in North America. The Canadian Encyclopedia, the greatest
publishing feat in Canadian history, was a gift to all of Canada from
Alberta in celebration of the province’s seventy-fifth anniversary.
The Citadel Theatre complex is recognized as one of the finest facilities
for the presentation of stage drama in the country. Edmonton’s
Heritage Days, the nation’s, probably the continent’s, largest
multicultural festival, showcases the art and crafts, the music, and
food of as many as seventy cultures. Launched in 1974, it can attract
as many as half a million attendees. And throughout Alberta, the era
saw the launch of a sparkling constellation of annual festivals celebrating
the visual arts, film, jazz, folk, blues and country music, and every
kind of theatre.
Even
sports flourished. Don’t laugh. When the head of the Sports Network
(TSN) appeared before the 1985 Federal Task Force on Broadcasting Policy,
his first words to us were, “Ladies and gentlemen, sport is culture.”
The Edmonton Eskimos won five Grey Cups in a row. The Edmonton Oilers,
led by the greatest hockey player in the world, won five Stanley Cups
in seven years. Edmonton declared itself the City of Champions. Edmonton
Sun columnist Terry Jones wrote,
We had the (1978) Commonwealth Games, the (1983) World University Games
and (set the stage for) the 1988 (Calgary) Winter Olympics. New facilities
such as Commonwealth Stadium, the Northlands Coliseum, the Saddledome
and an expanded McMahon Stadium appeared in our facility-poor province
in addition to dozens of smaller but world-class facilities for other
sports. And Alberta, I submit, has never had a better friend to sport
than Peter Lougheed.
This
may not be a political book, but part of its purpose is to demonstrate
how culture and the arts, when properly supported, can change the life
of a community and a province. I feel lucky that the unusual trajectory
of my life, which has so frequently put me in the right place at the
right time, allowed me to play an active role during what some have
described as Alberta’s Camelot years. So the book is also, partly,
my story.
I
was born in Montreal in August 1932 and grew up in a mixed immigrant
and French Canadian community in the city’s east end. In high
school, I was spellbound by radio, especially after appearing as a student
disc jockey on radio station CJAD’s afternoon teen program, “Club
800.” I wanted, more than anything, to be a radio announcer. So
after high school, I hitchhiked all over western Quebec and eastern
Ontario, stopping at every small town radio station to tell them what
a “swell” job I could do for them as a DJ. Many, many stops
later, after waiting around for several days in Woodstock, Ontario,
for a job that looked promising but didn’t materialize, I ran
out of money. Very early one morning, before the town came to life,
I skipped out of the local hotel and hit the road for Toronto. Putting
my broadcasting ambitions on hold, I went to work as a shipper in the
original Coles Book Store at Charles and Yonge Streets, mailing Coles
Notes to students across the country.
In 1951, broadcasting legend Foster (“He shoots! He scores!”)
Hewitt gave me my first job in radio as an operator at his Toronto radio
station, CKFH. The man who had the job had quit just before I walked
in, and the station needed someone to cover the overnight shift. I,
never having done it before, told Hewitt, “Sure I can run a control
board.” That led to a real disc jockey job in Timmins, the play-by-play
hockey voice of the Barrie (Ontario) Flyers, and then back home to Montreal,
where I became a news re-porter at the highly respected CFCF (Canada’s
First, Canada’s Finest), the Marconi station that had been on
the air since 1919. I left Montreal for Regina in 1958 with an assignment
to produce a “sound biography” of Saskatchewan Premier Tommy
Douglas for the CBC. I was quickly caught up in the greatest Canadian
story of the time, the introduction of Medicare. In what seemed like
no time flat, I was offered a public relations job in Regina and stayed
in the city for seven years, later founding and publishing the Regina
Weekly Mirror, and still later, becoming Supervisor of Education for
the Saskatchewan Bureau on Alcoholism. An offer to do the same job for
more money brought me to Edmonton in 1965 as director of education for
the provincial alcoholism and addictions program. I was often its radio
and television spokesman.
In
1969, I returned to full time broadcasting as program manager of Canada’s
first on-air educational television station, the forerunner of ACCESS-TV.
And, over the next two decades, my broadcasting career ranged from co-anchoring
the CBC’s supper hour public affairs show to hosting the daily
Fil Fraser Show on ITV, to stints as an open-line radio and morning
show host. During
the same period, I produced documentary films for television and three
feature movies. In 1989, I found myself taking on the role of chief
commissioner of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, followed by teaching
a course on the evolution of human rights to third-year law students
at the University of Alberta.
Thirty
years after moving to the province, I left Alberta for a sojourn in
Toronto as president and CEO of Vision TV, a national multifaith and
multicultural television network. I told you my life has had an unusual
trajectory. There’s more – not for this book – but
you get the idea. My Saskatchewan-born wife Gladys Odegard and I never
intended our move to Toronto to be permanent. And so, after retiring
from Vision TV, we came home to Alberta in January 2001.
We
were surprised at the number of our eastern friends who wondered why,
after six years in the Mega City – the “world class,”
most multicultural city in the world (how Toronto bills itself in its
advertising) – we would want to return to Edmonton. “What’s
in Alberta?” they asked. Some were surprised to learn that we
had not sold our Edmonton home; that we had planned all along to return.
“Culture,” they advised us patiently when we told them that
Edmonton’s cultural life was a major reason for our return, “is
to be found in Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal, where all of the important
national institutions are centred.” Another reason for this book
is to tell them, and the rest of Canada, the remarkable story of why
a disproportionate amount of our country’s cultural creativity
is centred in Alberta. During the halcyon years of the 1970s, Edmonton
became a bubbling centre of creative innovation. In one wonderful flight
of whimsy, the city created a water-fall in the heart of the city, imagined
by artist and designer Peter Lewis. On special occasions, water cascades
in a block-wide curtain from the city’s High Level Bridge, which
spans the North Saskatchewan River. The waterfall is higher than Niagara
by 7.3 meters (24 feet).
I
will show you a different side of Peter Lougheed, premier of Alberta
from 1971 to 1985. He is the man many Canadians think of as the Blue
Eyed Sheik of Calgary, the man who battled Pierre Trudeau over the National
Energy Program in the early 1980s. But from the time he swept into office
in 1971 until his retirement party on October 11, 1985, Lougheed’s
Alberta experienced an unprecedented mushrooming of cultural and multicultural
activity. With oil revenues flowing copiously, the province became a
patron of the arts. Editorial writer Rosemary McCracken, writing in
the Calgary Herald in the mid-eighties, when deficits had already begun
to erode cultural spending, noted that Al-berta and Quebec had the only
two provincial ministries in Canada devoted exclusively to culture.
“Alberta,” she wrote, “has the highest per capita
expenditure on culture in Canada, and is second only to Quebec and Ontario
in total amount.”
What
you will read in the pages ahead is by no means intended to be the complete
story of this remarkable era. There are many arts disciplines in which
I had little involvement – music, dance, opera – and many
great events that recorded significant achievements. Rather, this volume
is a tribute to some of the people with whom I crossed paths –
innovative leaders who helped to create the most exciting cultural period
in the province’s history.
One
of the era’s most endearing characters was Horst A. Schmid, the
peripatetic minister of Culture during the 1970s. I first knew him toward
the end of the 1960s when he was a leader of the Edmonton German Canadian
Business Association. The remarkable rise of an immigrant who arrived
in Canada in 1952 with no money and no English to become a provincial
cabinet minister is a good story. But the better story – the one
that will give him a special place in the history of Alberta –
is how he used his position to help foster a veritable Golden Age of
the Arts. But if Horst Schmid was the angel who delivered support to
Alberta’s arts and cultural communities, he could not have done
it without the enthusiastic support of Peter Lougheed, and especially
of Peter’s wife Jeanne, an artist in her own right. She had studied
voice, music, and dance during her student years and could have gone
on to a professional career in ballet or in opera. She insisted that
Alberta’s prosperity would lose its lustre if it did not contribute
to an environment that went beyond just satisfying the mate-rial wants
and needs of an increasingly affluent community. She knew, and her husband
agreed, that the province’s wealth wouldn’t mean much in
the long term if it did not also nurture the spirit of its people. The
Lougheeds went to theatre and ballet and opera and symphony, not to
score political points, but because they had a real appreciation, a
genu-ine love, of the arts. And because they went, it became the thing
to do for thousands of other Albertans who, often to their surprise,
found themselves becoming enthusiastic patrons of the arts.
I
may be accused of short-changing Calgary and perhaps other parts of
Alberta in this book. I’ll do my best to explain the Edmonton/Calgary
conundrum (there’s enough material for a doctoral dissertation
to document and analyze the striking differences between the two communities),
but there is little argument that the arts have found a more receptive
environment in Edmonton. As recently as the summer of 2002, when an
art installation that looks (and, when the wind is right, acts) like
a giant pan flute was installed at a major Edmonton intersection, the
artist, Tony Leong, noted the difference. Leong, a Calgary designer
who with his partners Marc Boutin and Dave Goulden, had won a commission
to create the sculpture, told the Edmonton Journal that the city was
a better place for it than Calgary. Edmonton, he said, “has a
greater appreciation for the arts and culture.” Many Calgarians
confirmed the perception, telling me that their city came late to the
cultural table, that the blossoming of the arts in the province’s
undisputed financial power centre did not really begin until well into
the 1980s and never reached the heights achieved by Edmonton. It is
sadly illustrative that the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra was forced
to declare bankruptcy early in 2003.
The
book begins with an overview of the culture shock Alberta experienced
when it threw off the narrow worldview of the Social Credit government
that had ruled the province for three and a half decades. It ends with
an attempt to understand the culture shock that took on stark reality
when deficit fighting dominated, some would say hi-jacked, the political
and economic agendas. Sad Calgarians drove around with bumper stickers
that read “Lord, give us one more oil boom, and we’ll promise
not to piss it away this time.” Now, early in the twenty-first
century, we are enjoying the boom they prayed for. I hope that this
book will help to persuade Albertans to invest some of that wealth in
culture and the arts.