The Westerner for May 7, 2012

Posted by Brian F. Thompson 
on May 8, 2012
 
Meeting:   Chair - Mike Ryan;  Music - Jerome;  Grace - Brian

RYLA - Was held this past weekend with a record high enrollment.

RYPEN - Will be held this coming weekend with Mike Ryan co-chairing this District event.

50/50 - Duane Evans and Bill Buckham did not match cards, so $46 carries forward.

Finemaster - Sergeant-At-Arms Jim Spalding started with a commercial about the Cosmopolitan Music Society Spring Concert at the Winspear Concert Hall on June 3rd, and then came up with a wierd assortment of questions which had most people baffled.

PROGRAM - RON GLENN - EX CHIEF OF STAFF TO PREMIER STELMACH

Joe Lizotte introduced his long-time friend Ron Glenn, who is a class of 89 graduate of the University of Alberta.  Ron worked in Ottawa after graduation until 1995, when he returned to Alberta.  In 1997, he became Ed Stelmach's Executive Assistant, and when Ed became Premier of Alberta he subsequently appointed Ron Glenn as his Chief of Staff.

This is Ron's first speaking opportunity since his five year stint as Chief of Staff ended with Premier Ed's retirement.  Ron says that Ed is and was a very decent man, and he thanks him for giving him such an opportunity to meet people from all over the world.

The Chief of Staff job is not always fun because of the game of politics and the continuous fierce competition between parties and politicians for media attention.  He noted that the Greenpeace organization was very good at creating the type of stories that the media like and use.  The media reporters look for "stories with legs", and they tend to focus on rifts between people rather than the differences between the ideas that those people are espousing.

In late 2001 when Premier Stelmach came to power, it was just after the destruction of the World Trade Centre by the terrorists, China and India were just starting to boom, oil was becoming a strategic resource, and Alberta was being recognized as the second largest source of oil after Saudi Arabia.  Fort MacMurray was booming and it's infrastructure could not keep up with the rapidly expanding population.

By 2006, the Alberta economy was on fire, a minority Conservative government had been elected in Ottawa,  Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie was being shown everywhere, there was much criticism of Canada for not ratifying the Kyoto Accord, and there was much talk about carbon taxes.  The stories by the national media were along the lines that Alberta was not properly managing the environmental impact of the oilsands developments and that the Government of Canada should step in and do something.

In 2007, the Alberta Government worked jointly with several environmental groups to create new strategies which would ensure that the oilsands developments were being done in a proper manner, and to create alternatives to a Cap-n-Trade system which could extract moneys from Alberta and re-distribute them to other parts of Canada and the world.  The Carbon Capture and Storage initiative is one of those strategies.

In 2008, the Government of Alberta announced it's new plan, and that plan essentially stopped the imposition of a Cap-n-Trade system by the federal government.  In the fall of 2008, the worldwide economy collapsed, and since then there has been less pressure to implement carbon dioxide limiting taxes which would further damage the not-booming economy in Canada and most of the rest of the world.

Ron talked about how the plan has now been working for almost five years, but he fears that once again concerns about the environmental impact of the oilsands, the pipeline networks, the ocean tankers, and upgraders could de-rail the economic advantages that we have in this part of the world.

Ron was presented with a token of our appreciation by Zen Moisey and was thanked for his interesting presentation by Don McDermid.