phenomenal amount of history was packed into the last decade and a half of the Twentieth Century. Alberta "took the lead" in Canada by creating a new populist political movement led by Preston Manning that introduced neo-conservative fiscal policies to Ottawa and convince the old-line parties to abandon appeasement as their reflexive response to Quebec nationalism. The province also set the national standard with the Klein Revolution, a bold and unprecedented attack on public deficits and debt.
~
"He's working out of the office."
--An aide covers for
Premier Donald Getty
who was golfing as the
Principal Group burned.
|
Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers ruled the NHL during the last half of the 1980s, providing a welcome diversion from years of economic stagnation and decline brought on the National Energy Program and gyrating world oil prices. In the 1990s, though the Oilers (and Calgary Flames) faded, the Alberta economy once again surged ahead, outperforming the rest of the country for most of the decade.
Other chapters examine the explosion of new information technologies, the great popular stampede in the equities markets (despite scandals like Bre-X), the collapse of Alberta's financial services sector, the so-called Culture Wars between avant-garde artists and the taxpayers who subsidized them, the rising power of judges armed with Pierre Trudeau's Charter of Rights, and attempts by Indian political leaders and their allies to segregate natives behind a "buckskin curtain" controlled by corrupt chiefs in the name of self-government.
