US oil owned our newspapers. the people with the bucks made the news! There was no internet nor was there a Facebook nor a Twitter. e-mailing copies of PDF was the extent of mass communication.

In this ancient climate PET was leaving Alberta after meetings with Peter Lougheed. He was persued down the train platform by a hoard of reporters asking impossible questions. One made a crude remark and PET wheeled around and flipped him the bird. This action was caught on camera and run in the local media as flipping the West the bird.

Then a world recession hit. Albertans has been encouraged to invest heavily in the Tar Sands. They mortgaged homes, businesses machinery, you name it to get capital to invest. And, they lost it all in the world recession. The Conservatives blamed the reduced price on oil and the financial climate as being the fault of the NEP! This resulted in the NEP to be shut down and hundreds of Suicides’ took place across the province and to some extent Canada. This latter took place under Ralph Klein who moved away from Lougheed’s moderate policies to the Republican hard line which has permeated our politics since.