Alberta’s Case Watered Down for Torontonians

Via Brian Walsh, Roger Gibbins in the Toronto Star outlines Alberta’s best strategy for the urban liberals.

Gibbins expends considerable effort explaining that “firewalls” and slogans like “the West wants in” work against Alberta’s interests. The former for being too parochial, and the latter for expressing the attitude of the supplicant.

What’s his alternative? Vague pronouncements, it seems:

The best strategy is leadership by example, and the currency of leadership is the currency of new ideas.

The great advantage of national leadership through the power of ideas is that it does not depend on waiting impatiently for regional influence within the federal government, or on the outcome of federal elections.

There is no need to wait, and wait, for Ottawa to act. There is no need for federal funding or federal orchestration.

The West has the creativity and financial capacity to act. All that is needed from Ottawa is room to bring policy innovation into play.

The message is simple: Help where you can, but do not throttle innovation and creativity in the name of national standards, federal leadership or partisan advantage.

Gibbins as President of the Canada West Foundation has spent a lot of time studying urban issues and what cities can do as engines of economic growth. However, his advice for Ottawao to provide “room to bring policy innovation into play” and not to “throttle innovation” sound pretty decentralist to me. It’s also the idea behind the “firewall,” which is meant to create a defence barrier against an overly interventionist national government.

But considering Stephen Harper’s one of the authors of the original Alberta Agenda letter, I guess Gibbins’s editorial amounts to a warning to the Ontario urban liberals not to vote for him.