Never, ever trust anyone who wants to base the entire economy around a single commodity. Ever.
BC should have learned that lesson when we picked “tourism” a few decades back and suddenly other places were deemed cooler. I mean, fortunately we’d diversified from that somewhat before last year, or we’d be more fucked than Alberta. But I remember how we were basically trained as citizens to be “brand ambassadors” because anything bad might upset Tourism. They were just as aggressive as anything we see from Alberta’s oil stans.
The fact that Alberta went with something so environmentally damaging and non-renewable is just icing on the cake.
I honestly think it was seeing Alberta and remembering the Tourism collapse disaster that sunk Christy Clarke’s “make everything fracking” plan, more than any actual environmental concerns. I know a few people more convinced by “and what happens when the market collapses because China or Russia flood it?” than they were by anything about fracking itself.
I have family in Alberta. Oil fluctuates even slightly and the entire province panics. Everything is tied into the industry somehow. But the lesson isn’t “oil bad”. The lesson is never give any industry that much economic power and leverage, no matter what industry they are.
