Alberta’s 50 Most Influential: The List

Attracted by Canada’s biggest health research grant, the $10-million Polaris Award ($20 million with matching funding), Bruce McNaughton arrived in Lethbridge from Arizona last fall on a 10-year mission to decode the pattern of barely measurable electrical impulses between brain cells that scientists like him believe cause a rat to turn left or right in a maze or a child to imprint a memory during sleep. (If you’re confused, don’t worry. This is neither rocket science nor brain surgery; it’s brain science!)

McNaughton’s arrival marks the coming of age of the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, something that was just a dream of a few scientists and administrators at the University of Lethbridge at the start of this decade. So far his time has been spent less on the intricacies of the brain as on the practical matters of renovating space, procuring equipment and hiring four junior faculty members with independent but complementary research specialties from the United States, Japan and Poland, elevating the centre into a world-class brain trust. “By the end of July, we should be fully up and running,” he says with some relief.

A Nova Scotian by birth, McNaughton says he’s glad to be back in Canada: “I like a good, heavy snowfall.” But at 60, he doesn’t hesitate to speak out that the very funding mechanism that brought him here is under threat from budget cuts (future Polaris Awards have been suspended by the financially strapped Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research) and increased government control over research fund allocation as proposed under Bill 27, the pending Alberta Research and Innovation Act.

“Alberta has a small population. We can’t sustain a knowledge- based economy in the 21st century based on the brain resources that we currently have. We have to import it,” McNaughton opines. “More needs to be done to attract both senior people like me but actually more at the lower level, to attract the best foreign graduate students…. Right now foreign graduate students pay a huge penalty for coming to Alberta and the government doesn’t encourage them to stay after they graduate.” – Michael McCullough

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Eric Newell
Climate Funder
Former Syncrude Canada chairman and CEO Eric Newell can never seem to retire. After stepping down as chancellor of the University of Alberta last year, he took on leadership of the institution’s bid to host the 2015 Summer Universiade, the Olympics of college athletics, which lost out to a big-spending bid from Gwangju, South Korea, in May. Even before the curtain fell on that project, though, the provincial government named Newell head of its Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund, which will allocate money collected from industry to purchase emissions credits towards research and projects designed to reduce Alberta’s output of greenhouse gases.

ASSOCIATION
Cal Nichols
Alberta Enterpriser
The man who led the campaign to keep the Edmonton Oilers from leaving town in the mid-1990s is repeating the exercise with the capital’s City Centre Airport, even if Mayor Stephen Mandel wishes he wouldn’t. But as chair of the Alberta Enterprise Group, a business-based lobby to align government policy with public interests, Cal Nichols’ actions are now reaching much further afield. This May, the group organized an Alberta-focused trade forum in Geneva, Switzerland. The keynote speaker? Ed Stelmach.

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Jim Prentice
Federal Future
Prentice has become the point man in Canada’s dealings with the Obama administration over climate legislation and fuel standards that threaten to keep oil derived from the oilsands out of the United States marketplace. But the Calgary MP carries more federal weight than even his portfolio as minister of environment would indicate. Many pundits tout Prentice, as a westerner coming from the old Progressive Conservative (as opposed to Reform) camp, as the man best suited to hold the Conservative Party together should Stephen Harper step down.