Not everything in Alberta needs to change or improve. Much deserves to be defended and protected. To work in journalism in this province is to have frequent glimpses of an important side of life that it does right.

Alberta is an open society. Ancestry and inherited wealth mostly take a back seat to talent and determination. Putting on airs, bragging about advantages such as expensive private educations, and swaggering displays of privileges or symbols of rank do not play well. Temperamental prima donnas have little staying power. People who succeed here often repay society for giving them a break, and plainly enjoy doing so. Consider a couple of examples I encountered recently while out on the Alberta Oil beat – Hal Kvisle and Brian Krausert.

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When the staff at Alberta Venture initially conceived what would become Think! A New Idea of Alberta, it went by the working title of “The Tuscany Project.” We wanted Alberta to leverage its prosperity, the thinking went, into lasting greatness as did the northern Italian state that gave birth to the Renaissance in the 15^th century. But after visiting the exhibit of Dutch masters at the Vancouver Art Gallery in June, I’m thinking the analogy with the Netherlands may be still more apt.

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When I was a kid living on Vancouver Island, I begged my parents to take me to Expo 67 in Montreal. I had seen a pictorial in Star Weekly magazine, and the entire site reminded me of the kind of future I hoped to live in – a future filled with flying cars and robot maids. I was particularly enamoured with the U.S. pavilion’s geodesic dome created by Buckminster Fuller, and the Moshie Safdie designed Habitat. Both have become Montreal landmarks.

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Think! A New Idea of Alberta welcomes guest blogger DJ Kelly, a Calgary based blogger and arts administrator. DJ joins the Think! blogger roster for a two-part series on the City of Calgary’s Plan It project. Here, DJ explores the City of Calgary’s track record when it comes to policies like the city’s Plan It project discussed in Part I.

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Plan It lays out what we want to be. But we’ve had plans before. How has the City of Calgary done with these previous plans? They don’t have a good track record with turning previous ambitions into action.

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Think! A New Idea of Alberta welcomes guest blogger DJ Kelly, a Calgary based blogger and arts administrator. DJ joins the Think! blogger roster for a two-part series on the City of Calgary’s Plan It project.

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As a marketer I find myself often telling clients “if you want to be seen as something, then just be that something.” You don’t need to spend a large amount of money to tell people what they should think of your company if you’ve got a good product. On the other hand, if your product is terrible, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem – people won’t buy it.

This appears to be exactly the kind of problem the City of Calgary may be facing in Plan It.

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The reason I like economist Peter Tertzakian is because he’s an Albertan who’ll take a hard look at our dependence on fossil fuels and then come out with stuff like this:

I fully believe technology and innovation will yield new break point innovations and help us move forward. But I have spent too many years grappling with such issues as the dynamics of adopting new energy systems, the hidden shortcomings of erstwhile alternatives, and the scale of our energy needs not to be skeptical when well-meaning people, politicians, and entrepreneurs become excited about the latest “magic bullet.”

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For as long as I’ve lived here, I can’t help but be conscious of the lively personalities that make Alberta the province it is – and I’ve hardly ventured too far aware from either of the two metropolitan centres to see what our other cities and towns have to offer. People make up each province’s culture. Where would Victoria be without the Darth Vader violinist, or New York’s naked cowboy among others?

The upcoming Street Performers Festivals in both Edmonton (July 3 to 12) and Calgary (starting August 1) are sure to bring even more characters to our streets, as if we really need more but variety is always welcome.

Two of the province’s hottest characters right now share one thing in common: the love of spontaneous dance. Alberta residents appear to be infected with some sort of movie musical madness or Saturday Night Fever.

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“Going local” is said to be the new organic. It’s good for the environment, and better for your health. Lay’s potato chips have even launched a new ad campaign called ‘Simply Made. Simply Good.’ to promote their ongoing, strong relationships with local Canadian farmers. Their potatoes are grown in seven provinces across this fine country, and while Alberta is not on the list I still feel a tiny measure of responsibility while eating them.

The campaign got me wondering about how accessible locally-produced food is in Alberta. How far, for example, did today’s snack have to travel to reach my mouth? The results were staggering. For a bowl of yogurt, a nectarine and a glass of chocolate milk (all of which were labelled organic), the travelling distance was roughly 7621km.

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The beach is a beautiful thing. Sand, sun, bracing wind and uplifting vistas. Can I say enough about the beach? How about that beach in Northumberland that was used in a misguided an effort to brand Alberta? Once that beach was outed, the Alberta gang responsible should simply have apologized and moved on, rather than trot out that lame “Alberta’s international face” excuse. But aside from that gaffe, the campaign is pretty slick and attractive. It’s fresh and clean without being overly modern. And I have been around media and communications for long enough that I can appreciate the exquisite embarrassment probably still being felt by the campaign’s planners. At least they can take succor in the other 99 per cent of work they put into the otherwise fine campaign. Maybe a restorative beach holiday is in order for said planners? They won’t have to travel far.

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I’m watching with fascination and a feeling of déjà vu the debate Calgary is having over its Plan It document. When I first moved to Alberta four years ago, it felt as if all people talked about in the public sphere here was the economy; people obsess about retiring the provincial debt or the royalty review or whether or not the Alberta Advantage truly exists. This was quite different from the civic obsession of Vancouver and Toronto, which is all about how to keep a big city livable. Calgary’s and, for that matter, Edmonton’s heroes were money-makers, whereas Toronto’s and Vancouver’s were and are planners, urban theorists, civic politicians, architects and developers.

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