“Don’t take anything for granted. Like the fact that others want our natural gas.”
by Michael McCullough
Putting together a year-end issue such as this one forces you to take stock, and what a year it has been! There has been a lot of pain, to investors, to laid-off workers, to property developers, to small businesses, to the provincial government treasury. But you could also say we are wiser. Some things we’ve learned over the past 12 months:
BORING IS GOOD. Imagine putting a banker on the cover. Not a flashy investment banker either, but a greying, genial deposit-taker like Larry Pollock. Pollock’s record of 85 consecutive profitable quarters at Canadian Western Bank (a record unmatched by any of the big six banks and their international rivals), his shunning of asset-backed commercial paper and his bank’s ascendance in the wake of the financial meltdown of a year ago shows that business success can be a pretty basic exercise, though. In 2009, the man is a rock star.
Don’t take anything for granted. Like the fact that others want our natural gas. That this creates jobs, economic activity and royalties for the government. That it gives the province the ability to simultaneously offer low taxes and high levels of government-funded services, something that becomes known as the Alberta Advantage. That the government will remain debt-free. That the Progressive Conservatives will hold the riding of Calgary-Glenmore. Everything in this world ends.
Doors close, windows open. Alberta’s oilsands and coal-fired power industries are under pressure as international action on greenhouse gas emissions mounts. But those industries can be made cleaner (see “King Coal at the Crossroads,”). And even without them, Alberta is rich in energy, whether it be wind, solar or nuclear (“Uranium’s Lingering Glow,”). The most valuable thing we have is our expertise in energy, regardless of the source.
If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Everybody aims to beat the market but by definition only half of us ever can, and then not by much. Years of historically anomalous stock market returns will come back to earth. Ventures that promise higher returns – think real estate schemes like Concrete Equities – will always carry with them greater risk. I won’t even get into Ponzi schemes like that allegedly perpetrated by Calgarians Milowe Brost and Gary Sorenson.
There’s more to life. If there is one lesson to take away from our Health and Wellness Report, it’s that balance is key to success on the job as well as in life. Don’t neglect the things that matter.
POSTSCRIPT: On Oct. 26 Albertaventure.com was one of 18 web publications recognized at the inaugural Canadian Online Publishing Awards in Toronto. Our “Best Communities Online” feature, companion to “Alberta’s 10 Best Communities for Business” (June 2009), was named the winner of the Best Cross-Platform category for consumer and association sites.
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