Live long and prosper?

Albertans are still living it up, but it may be killing them

By Andrew Nikiforuk

Two economic reports issued in April take the pulse of booming Alberta, the place where God would live if only he could afford the gas and electricity bills.

The first came out of the Bank of Montreal, whose accountants estimated that Alberta's economy grew by 6.1% in 2000 and that this happy growth, thanks to high energy prices, would easily better last year's national average of 2.7%. But we all knew that.

The second report came from Mark Anielski, director of green economics at the Pembina Institute. Unlike his peers, Anielski went beyond the usual numbers and asked if all this prosperity was sustainable. Instead of using gross domestic product (GDP) as the measure of success, he added 51 other factors, including personal and environmental indexes, and called them genuine progress indicators; GPIs for short.

The results surprised even Anielski. Is Alberta booming? You bet. Albertans are living longer, and crime is down. But a lot of the progress has had some alarming costs. For starters, disposable income and real weekly wages on average haven't returned to the highs reached way back in 1982. Personal and household debt has exceeded real disposable income across the board. The total of all government taxes paid by Albertans has increased a whopping 494% since 1961. ("That really surprised me," said Anielski.)

Social and environmental indicators also raised some red flags. In terms of real income, the gap between rich and poor has widened by 63%, nearly double the national average. Albertans are increasingly overweight. Suicide is the predominant cause of death among Calgary males between 10 and 49, 17% higher than the national average. But one of the strangest indicators was the divorce rate. Since 1961, the number of dissolving marriages in Alberta has gone up 4.6% a year; almost as fast as its GDP. And now for the really sad news. Although Albertans will likely run out of natural gas and conventional crude oil in 10 years, they consume more resources and just plain stuff to feed their lifestyles and economy; than most other people on earth.

The province's ecological footprint, in terms of trashing forests and fouling the air, is the fourth largest in the world at 10.7 hectares per person. Less than 10% of its land base can be called wild; the rest sports gas wells, pump jacks, roads, seismic lines or pipelines. On a more optimistic note, the oil sands just might keep Albertans living at an unsustainable, divorced and overweight pace for years to come.

Peter Foster, a Financial Post columnist, skimmed the report and concluded: "Today's typical Albertan is a suicidal version of Ralph Klein, overweight and divorced." Though he acknowledged "the perversity of GDP-type thinking"; the general fallacy that all spending is good; Foster wrote that the country didn't need any more such reports. Klein said pretty much the same thing. Anielski, however, welcomes that kind of feedback. "You can't develop better accounting practices overnight," he said. Moreover, Alberta's GPI is the first, but not last, of its kind in Canada. Many businesses now do this kind of accounting, and even the federal government has set aside $9 million to undertake a similar project. If nothing else, Anielski's real-life accounting suggests that GDP, by itself, is one damn selective measure of success.

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