Retirement not likely to quiet Gibbins’ v
In 2003, The Globe and Mail described Gibbins as “the consummate westerner.”
He has certainly spent his career promoting the enduring western Canadian identity and amplifying the collective “voice” of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia within the 145-year-old federation.
He is leaving Canada West for a variety of reasons. Age: he is 65; health: he is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer; obligations: he has a book on politics due to his publisher early in 2013, and priorities: he’s travelling to Europe and Turkey with his wife, Isabel, this summer.
“The foundation’s reputation for objective research and clear thinking has grown under Roger’s remarkable leadership,” Canada West chairman Jim Dinning said when he announced Gibbins would retire and be succeeded by Dylan Jones.
Gibbins is leaving when much of what the foundation — launched as Alberta was beginning to realize its oil-funded economic clout in the early 1970s — had set out to achieve has been accomplished. Not that Gibbins takes credit for what’s occurred or suggests the role for Canada West is complete.
“I think what has happened over the last 14 years is the West has moved from being on the outside to being in a position of national leadership. We really have the capacity to shape the country and the opportunity to do so in the West because we’ve got the population, immigration is coming back, the urban growth is all in the West, there is the proximity of Asian markets,” Gibbins said recently at the foundation’s spartan Beltline offices, with a view of the ever-changing skyline.
“There is just so much happening that, as an internal practice, we stopped any reference to ‘western alienation’ about seven or eight years ago. We said that’s over . . . now it’s how we can participate in the national discussion in a way that is constructive and leadership focused.”
The about-face is coming from a guy who, if he didn’t invent the concept, he certainly popularized the phrase “western alienation” in the political lexicon while a young professor at the University of Calgary in the 1970s.
Not surprisingly, it’s the same “Calgary school” of political thought that inspired Preston Manning and Stephen Harper on the national scene and, more recently, Danielle Smith of Alberta’s opposition Wildrose party.
Gibbins was just out of the prochange, antiwar political environment which enveloped the Stanford University campus in California in the early 1970s when he joined a political science faculty headed by conservative sage Tom Flanagan.
He quickly turned to public opinion surveying with colleague and future Canada West CEO David Elton, to quantify a burgeoning sense of a politically marginalized West that seemed to grow with each shift in the global oil market and Ottawa’s policy response.
Over the next three decades, Gibbins would become a fixture on the national political scene and at the U of C as he rose to become the department head in 1987. A decade later, with the majority of his career behind him in the privileged (freedom of thought, freedom of expression) world of academia, he opted for a new challenge.
In 1998, he joined Canada West Foundation. In some ways, it was a rude awakening.
“It was a lot of people to be responsible for,” he recalled, “I was terrified.”
The CEO of a think-tank that relies on funding at the largesse of several governments and supporters in the private sector also faces more “market tests” with publication of his point of view on a contentious subject than a tenured professor.
“The first week I was on the job I published an article in the Calgary Herald on the Meech Lake accord and one of our substantial funders sent me a note to say that he didn’t agree . . . and pulled the plug on $10,000 in funding,” Gibbins said, adding he was gradually able to bring the donor back on side.
Over the next decade, as the long-held economic promise of the oilsands began to be realized and global demand for natural resources bolstered all four provinces, growth in population and economic clout in the West became an overwhelming political dynamic in Canada.
“In a way this all came to a climax with Harper’s (2006) election,” Gib- bins said, “but I also feel that, when the day comes and another national government comes to power, the voice of the West is not going to be greatly diminished. There is just so much demographic and economic strength in the region.”
Not that it’s time to simply acknowledge the new world order and turn the page.
From fights over government equalization payments to provinces to multi-jurisdictional pipeline battles to the historic hollowing out of the central Canadian manufacturing base that has been the bedrock of the national economy for 50 years, big national challenges remain for Canada in the years im-