Written on Good Friday.

 

Written on Good Friday.

As a child, He was a refugee that escaped Judah and went to Egypt. In Egypt, his father probably worked on construction until returning home to Nazareth. Here we lose written records until he was old enough to go with His family to Jerusalem and got lost, apparently “teaching” the elders at the temple. Some years later, we discover Him doing miracles and preaching in Galilea. The rest of the story we all know.

The story repeats itself many times in history. People escape their countries to save their lives and some of them become famous in later years in the countries they migrated to. Albert Einstein comes to mind. After the Second World War, German scientists escaped to both Russia and the USA to develop the space program that is still going on. It is the way of the world.

Canadians today understand that immigration is essential for our prosperity. Yet, many others are campaigning against it. I know people who immigrated to Canada or were born to parents who did, and they want our province to go on its own. Their most regular excuse is that the Federal government takes our oil money and gives it to Quebec where people have better social programs than we do. We could do the same, but we give our money to oil companies.

Albertans don’t talk about moving away from native lands, only about freedom from the rest of our country. It’s a cartoonish solution. Alberta will need an army to protect its borders from the Americans and the rest of Canadians. All free countries have one. Yes, we will. Our Premier will “fight Trudeau” or his successor by legislating some bills in Edmonton and force the other provinces to have an energy corridor on their land. The first nations will only be asked after we tell them what they must do and they will agree to it. I find the entire argument hilarious unless I am missing something.

I met a guy, by the Post Office, who is very upset about the homeless people and the unemployed folks on our streets. The TV news interviewed some. Most of them were obviously beyond any hope of working a regular job. They were uneducated addicts with mental health issues. There was one who was educated and worked three low-paying jobs. After a couple of minutes, I realized I would not be able to explain to the gentleman at the Post Office that we can’t improve the economy by trying to force the homeless to work or by shutting off immigration.

What we can do is prevent our province from spending twenty billion taxpayers’ dollars on cleaning orphan oil wells that are the responsibility of those who enriched themselves by selling our oil.

The oil companies are seeing the writing on the wall and slowing down activity unless governments pay them. Now the cash cow is no longer oil but clean energy and storage for it.

We better watch our rhetoric about transfer payments which were invented so all Canadians would share equally in our country’s prosperity. Fortunes change and the last may be first. Recently, there were rich deposits of valuable rare minerals found in the Ring of Fire, about four hundred kilometers north of Thunder Bay. It will fuel the Canadian economy in the future and it is on the land of some First Nations. Those folks stated they are more interested in the well-being of the people than in making returns on investments. Their attitude may change what our society values.

When I started campaigning for the then-new Progressive Conservatives under Peter Lougheed, he made a prophetic statement. He said that the oil will give Alberta a chance to set up for the future before oil revenues run out. We squandered our chances and dismantled what he set up, making a few super rich and the many not so. We developed the province, but now a lot of us are struggling, even though Alberta has plenty of wealth. We don’t have enough doctors and nurses, and many seniors are visiting half-empty food banks. It is not because we are lazy, only because we lived too long under poor management. I am still waiting to get some value from Kenny’s War Room, for example. I will never see returns from some pipelines that took our money either. The only one still being built is doing so because of the Federal government’s generosity. I wouldn’t run a political campaign based on “fighting Trudeau” at this time.

Our so-called Western culture is based on a religious faith that began two thousand years ago. It taught simple truths which appealed to people. It was based on humans viewing society as one body. We celebrated Easter each year to remind us it could be beneficial to sacrifice the self for the benefit of all. After all, we don’t know what happens to the “self” when earthly life is finished. We know that all things are recycled and there is a natural resurrection happening year after year.

I am not any kind of religious leader, but I like to draw conclusions from what I encounter in life. I promote accepting the basics of my religious faith and applying it to life. Do unto others as…..