Albertans have a beef with battering our reputation
First oil-bashing, now ranching, province is running out of icons
Misunderstood chinooks was a point of payback, a gotcha moment for Albertans smarting in a time when the shine is off black gold.
But when the virtue of our beef is called into question, even by a single restaurant chain, it’s much more than a tempest in a broiler, say those who’ve long observed the heart of western alienation that’s always been Alberta.
Just when Albertans had absorbed their punching bag role as climate killers, one of our sturdiest fall-back strategies, Plan Beef is suddenly as wobbly on its legs as a BSE-stricken heifer, says Roger Gibbins, senior fellow at the Canada West Foundation.
“When things are going well, we could shrug it off, it seems like poor sportsmanship, kicking us when we’re down,” says former Calgarian Gibbins, who’s called West Vancouver home for the past four years.
There was a time when everything about the pre-PETA Calgary Stampede and the oilsands were local boasts and Alberta beef was beyond reproach, even surviving a nasty detour through the mad cow wilderness, he says.
“Now, people are kicking one after the other, Naheed Nenshi was seen as the 21st-century mayor and even his image is not that appealing,” says Gibbins, referring to the mayor’s Uber tongue slippage.
“Ranching in the foothills was one of our brands, one of those romantic visual images... it’s not clear what we have left.”
Alberta PC leader Ric McIver perhaps sums up the latest eruption of provincial defiance — or truculence — in a tweet reading: “Let’s hope every bar and restaurant NOT called Earls has an increase in business. I will not be setting foot in that place!”
The visceral snit Earls’ decision to bypass Canadian beef has sparked among Albertans, including their political elite, has roots that go back at least to the immediate post-war years, says Gibbins.
It was an era of an agrarian inferiority complex, where a small Alberta population not yet launched fully into petro-prosperity lived in the shadow of Toronto’s office towers and cultural superiority.
Seven decades of ascension to an at least locally-invoked “world class” status came with risks that are now coming home to roost, said Gibbins.
“We’re the small town kid playing on the national or international stage and it opens up vulnerabilities,” he says.
Calgary writer Aritha van Herk treads a similar line.
“Albertans are sensitive souls — we’re more like dandelions that pop up bright and yellow and when someone steps on us, we’re crushed,” she says.
“We’re instinctive... we go all-out like the beginning of the chuckwagon races.”
But at the same time, van Herk says Calgarians and Albertans can be forgiven for their impulsive surliness.
It’s been a dismal year for a province bludgeoned by the oil crash, that’s reflected by many in her own realm who couldn’t afford to eat at Earls even if they spurned a fledgling boycott, she says.
“I know so many artists and writers who are food bank-starving,” he says.
“Sometimes people have earned a right to be grouchy and I think we have.”
Nursing a new beef can even be therapeutic after stewing so long over rancid oil prices, says van Herk. “It’s a new adversary,” she says. With the province’s film industry in a funk it might be quite a while before a Hollywood celebrity arrives to stroke Albertans’ ego, or on the flip side, spark more angst by condemning our livelihoods and a wind that makes winters bearable.
In the meantime, Roger Gibbins says Albertans can’t expect any sympathetic airs from neighbours in his vantage point of West Vancouver, not far from Earls corporate headquarters.
“From here, Abbotsford is seen as camping ... we’re an inward-looking community where Alberta is generally seen as bad news,” he says, adding there’s an Earls location down the street from his home.
When asked if it’s likely to feel the sting of a boycott, Gibbins stifles a laugh.