Interview with Dr. Doug Owram, Historian, University of Alberta

Interview with Dr. Doug Owram, historian, University of Alberta
Interview conducted by: Linda Goyette, 2003.

Topics: General discussion related to Edmonton’s place in the West, and western Canadians’ attitudes to regional history.
Edited for clarity. Note: All sentences within square brackets are paraphrased summaries of Dr. Owram’s remarks.]



LG: In your book, Promise of Eden : the Canadian expansionist movement and the image of the West, 1856-1900, you talk about the "imagined" or "invented " West in the 19th century, the way the writers of the period transformed the region’s public image from that of an Arctic wilderness into a fertile garden of agriculture. It was the same land but it began to be perceived entirely differently. My question is: What is the 20th century's equivalent? Are we doing that too in 2003.?


DO: Yes. It gets more complex for a number of reasons as I indicate by the end of the book. By the time you get to the beginning of the 20th century, you begin to have a past as well as a future in the western imagination.
The past is part of finding a conscious regional identity. For various reasons the West has its own identity and it's own purpose and is distinctive and that's probably counter to Ontario dominance and federal presence. The interesting thing [is as] it moves forward in time you have interweaving of the two strands: the 19th century notion of the future as Next Year country and all that. It's still a great land but it becomes transformed from an agriculture image to one that celebrates the "general spirit" whether it's rural or urban. The new image emphasizes innovation, freedom from the old ways of doing things. In Alberta [the "general spirit"] takes on a particularly entrepreneurial, individualistic task. Each province picks its own themes up along the way they expand from an agricultural image to the image of the character of the people somehow being defined by the West. And so the public definition is less about the quality of the resources and more to the quality of the individual living onn the land.

People have risen to the challenge, overcoming this wilderness and making it a settled land and building cities here. Entrepreneurs bring a business spirit and tend to emphasize values [of] the rest of Canada taken to the next level in some way. So that's one part.

The other part is regionalism that shows up just at the end of my book. [The westerner] also has a sense of being held back by external forces, am I right? This is a theme that runs through from the 1880s really to the present, that it's somebody else's fault that you are where you are today. [The perception in the West is that the land is productive, and the people are fundamentally strong and innovative, so negative experiences have to be blamed on something external.] There's a certain degree of truth that Albertans and Westerners are more willing to try something new; it's not a complete a myth. That has a basis in reality. And it is true that westerners have shown in their political experimentation, in some of their business ideas, in the simple necessity of responding to big established forces in eastern Canada, their own ideas. Whether it was the Social Credit or the Alliance or CCF, they were willing to try new things.

Conscious regionalization is an external thing. The sense of grievance is simply reinforced until it becomes quite distinct a psychology of the West. Ottawa’s policy on the CPR, and a whole litany of grievances, rubbed up against each other until central Canada’s [attitude to the West] becomes something personal. So this makes a much more complex myth: We are [innovative], we are looking forward, we are constrained to some extent by our relations to a more powerful centre. [This is not completely untrue, but the public summary of the situation is sometimes vague or overstated.]

[The Depression and the drought of the 1930s complicate this regional self-image.] The Depression creates a moment of failure in the West. Not anybody's fault, weather, climate, of course. You can blame it on the federal government for lack of appropriate responses. Westerners increased their political experiments in a period of prairie populism: with the CCF and Social Credit, but the Depression instilled a note of hardship into the West, which one on side is contradictory. [It contradicts the regional self-image of strength and productivity.] It begins to detach the urban and rural populations [which] are not completely harmonious after the 1930s. Before it was assumed that agriculture would drive the West’s future. That ended with the Depression.

After 1930s the notion of "putting them on the land" was really much more of a questionable activity, especially when all the farms up in Canada were shrinking, and nationally a declining number of people was going into agriculture. It started going downward from 1920s forward. Sometime in 1926 ,the percentage of people in agriculture peaked and the West was no longer a rural nation really. It was becoming an urban nation, especially Alberta. So there's a lingering rural myth of the Depression-era farmers working on the land, and overcoming adversity and hardship, and being done in by urban forces. The development of cities in Canada was much more complex. By the 1940s and 1950s, prairies cities were no longer limited to a role as a service sector for the agricultural community. Neither Edmonton nor Calgary by the 1950s were playing that role. They were becoming major urban centers. So the new West begins to emerge. The new West can play on the old myths because it describes itself in terms of individualism, entrepreneurship, and innovation, that we can build a strong economy on new ideas, deals built on handshakes, and all those mythologies. But actually it's funny that Edmonton starts becoming distinct in the 1940s and


LG: You are talking about the transformation of the city after the Leduc oil strike?

DO: Leduc transforms the province in a number of ways. By this time, you have a Social Credit government that came to power in a utopian movement based on the hardships of the Depression. If you read the correspondence to Premier Aberhart, recently published, you see the desperation of the Depression-era westerner. [Aberhart: Outpourings and replies, edited by David R. Elliott[Historical Society of Alberta, 1991] [Owram recalls a particular letter that describes the meeting points of the CCF and Social Credit at that point.]

LG: Have you ever quoted from her directly in your book?

DO: No I haven't, but I'm thinking of a letter from a person in Saskatchewan in the early 1940s saying: "I don't know why the two parties are separate, you are for the same ideas, you are for the little person, you try to overcome the big financial institutions." And,it's the notion that in the minds of voters, struggling with the Depression, they identify the problem with lack of control over financial and political institutions in central Canada. Social Credit and CCF had a lot in common, they were both anti-establishment parties. Academic dissection, of course, identifies huge differences between the parties, but I think this was a common

To come back to my main point, in 1947, Leduc comes in. [Albertans began to consider the transition from the utopian agricultural West to small 'c' conservative economy with strong oil and gas sector leading the way.] The Social Credit metamorphosed after Aberhart. It became a kind managerial small 'c' conservative government with utopian themes underneath. Their view: People should not be too materialistic they should have good values and rural values and Christian values, and anything else would be an embarrassment of riches. After '47, a [University of Alberta] thesis by Colleen Judge reflects some detail on the spending of the 1940s and 1950s. All the time they were worried about spending too much. They began to transform the province. The lives of citizens began to improve, and the oil economy began to give a sense of wealth to Alberta. In a way it takes Alberta back. Alberta suddenly becomes the promised land again. It is not Saskatchewan, it is not Manitoba - it has money. It rose quickly from the poverty of the Depression years to a significant rise in personal income in the early 1960s, built on an individualist ethos that's emerged over and over from the pioneer spirit.

… I think Alberta has a certain place in the nation. If you look at Toronto and the depth of wealth there, we have just begun. We may be rich now but we need fifty years of this to catch up to Toronto, and people for whatever reason still leave it up to the oil companies.

LG: Could you talk about the impact of the 1935 election, a time when Edmonton defined itself differently than the rest of the province in its voting habits?

DO: It's not over.

LG: Okay, I'd like you to talk about Edmonton's political culture for a bit.

DO: ... If you watch the internal voting pattern, Edmonton has always been either at the beginning or at the end of the swing, Edmonton has always been somewhat of an island from the rest of the province. Even now, it is more likely to vote for liberal candidates, Liberals or New Democrats, as a percentage of the majority vote. It was Edmonton that provided that space. Federally, Edmonton tends to vote liberally more often and like you said in '35, it was resistant to the change. Edmonton, for a host of reasons, now this is something I'd love for you to figure out because I can't: Edmonton has a different political culture. For one thing the university is here...

Edmonton is culturally different from Calgary, no doubt. Personality of Edmonton is somehow different from Calgary. Calgary has mythologized the cowboy. Edmonton has struggled a little bit. Nonetheless there's no doubt Edmonton, in the evolution with the symphony and theatre and the festivals and so forth, has been very comfortable with its own image as a cultural centre.


LG: If you could say Edmonton was like another city in Western Canada, which one would you pick?

DO I'd say it's growing like Winnipeg. That's not quite right too because Winnipeg's character is more rooted, let me take that back. Winnipeg's character is defined by every generation and in some way, by a very conservative social structure. And somewhat like Saskatoon. However Edmonton's been growing and so there's this continual influx in population. It’s still open, it's still changing continuously but somehow culturally persistence. I think a couple of these things shape Edmonton, not Calgary.


The bipolarity of the urban situation in Alberta, the only province in Canada to have two equal size cities battling it out…To some extent that struggle to find its own identity makes Edmonton a better home than Calgary. I think Edmontonians underestimate their own strength in terms of culture. There's that artificial boosterism saying we're the best cultural society in Canada or whatever - we'll do better than Calgary - and that goes back and forth. But in reality, it's a different kind of city, a different kind of structure. Edmonton has much more in common with Ottawa then anything else: big middle class, not a lot of huge wealth, not a lot of flashy wealth, not the big corporate wealth like Calgary. Ottawa was similar until recently. Big civil servants, big government town, big university town - creates a kind of middle class community and as such maybe more attuned to some of the things we've talked about, like the cultural issue as opposed to other issues.

LG: Could you reflect on Edmonton’s relationship with the north.

DO: …Remember Fort Edmonton was the largest [HBC} fort on the prairies. It was the point where the buffalo society, the fur trade society, met. The sense of tradition, the relationship with the north goes right back, it's not just a twentieth century invention, it is an authentic thing. [Mentions the bush pilots of the 1920s and 1930s, and the city’s evolving role as a commercial and social centre for farflung communities in northern Alberta and throughout the Northwest Territories.]



LG Then as soon as Leduc comes in, all the young men get their money, start their businesses here, and go work on the rigs, service the rigs, go north all the time; and to a degree it's still true. How much of the Gateway to the North identity is real?


DO: I think most of it is reality. I think it's authentic. [The local emphasis on Edmonton’s connection to the Klondike gold rush] put a weird twist on it The Klondike connection was purely a marketing scheme. But the fur trade, the bush pilot tradition, were real and helped give Edmonton a distinct character. We are the primary gateway to the north.
…If you look at Winnipeg, it's a long way south compared to Prairie standards. I think Edmonton's closer to key centers like Yellowknife, Fort McMurray, the Peace country – and closer to viable agriculture in northern Alberta. Remember, agriculture is very important until the end of World War II in planning growth. [Edmonton supplied the Peace country…]

Also I think the fur trade... the start of the fur trade was again leading up to Athabasca country. It moved west and north, it wasn't north of Lake Winnipeg.The fur country is north of here , and the Athabasca system goes up into the Mackenzie...

…So Edmonton became the gateway to the north, but it's also because of oil, as you say, and servicing the rigs. Redwater is the big one with all those service industries. Leduc is symbolic but Redwater is the big one

LG Culturally, why isn’t the connection more evident?

DO: Maybe it's because we don't know quite what we are anymore… I think the "gateway to the north" is probably the most authentic myth Edmonton has. …I think first of all, it could be overstated in the sense that the primary drive until the 1950's is the local agriculture. We should not forget the huge influx we've had settled in the region, divided Edmonton with a rural intra-attitude and supplied all that equipment to its basic economy in the early years. We should not forget that the government is not the prime driver of Edmonton.
...It is only after the Depression that you start having the growth of a big city after the oil begins to take hold and you see urbanization take off. We see tremendous growth for Edmonton and Calgary after the 1960s, 70s, 80s, just on and on and on. The only poor policy growth in that whole period that I could think of was the period roughly between the 1993 - 2000 in Edmonton. Because the government cut back in that period, and just starved the city, and went into a flat period with about one percent growth and there was a low five-year period before it took off again.

Only beginning with this generation, that's my generation, are Albertans really growing up in an urban environment. So it is only in the last decade or two that Albertans think of themselves as urban. Everybody else, even if they ended up being in the city, came off a farm, or their family was on a farm, or their brother was on a farm or their cousin was on a farm; or they believed farm was the source of wealth. In a sense, oil was little farms in derricks and wells (laughs). So only in the last twenty-five or thirty years, really since the oil boom of the 70s, when the wealth of Alberta transformed, do you get the notion Alberta is a complex urban society. I really don't think the politics of the province have caught up with that. But I think things are beginning to change, I think people are starting to change. If you look at strategic papers for growth, if you look at the whole discussion about where Alberta is going, there's a recognition that it's not going to be on primary resources - whether agriculture or oil. It might get revenue from some of those products, but more likely it will be in innovation and technology.

Managing that transition is still what the government is wrestling with. Frankly, it's a very defensive rural community that understandably sees its power shrinking, its number shrinking, its way of life gradually eroded…

…I was at a meeting of the young Liberals of Alberta and I was there speaking and Mike Percy was there and Ken Nichols. So Nichols did his 'must preserve rural communities', but I said, 'Sorry, I'm not a politician and I can say whatever I want.' So I said, 'You know, there's not much point in trying to preserve communities where drought diminishes crops for four years. We shouldn't be farming east of Calgary, we shouldn't be farming in some of those industrial areas. Those farms should be wound down and people should get out.'

…So far that idea hasn't been terribly popular with the rural audience, but that’s understandable; they feel challenged. The [Conservative] government has a huge base in rural Alberta, that's the root of their power, and they're not going to let go of this way of life. But in some ways, the Toronto Dominion bank identified the urban economic strength of the Edmonton-Calgary corridor. Building up of that corridor …will provide the future.


LG:What about the North?

DO: The north is like a funnel that is coming into the corridor. [Mentions the rapid development of the oil sands in Fort McMurray]


Do you imagine that new cities, not entirely new cities, but existing ones like Fort McMurray and Red Deer, will continue to grow?

Red Deer will grow. I think what you will see first is an in-filling of an urban corridor. The whole Edmonton-Calgary corridor will basically be like the Toronto, Windsor, Ottawa, Montreal corridor….

… Red Deer will be 150 000 and Edmonton and Calgary will be a million plus. Then you'll see other communities develop along there. Fort McMurray, of course, looks good and it will continue to grow and fluctuate. Tougher calls on some of the other communities. Peace River and Grande Prairie and a lot more of these resource-based towns. It's a tougher call there, I think Edmonton is much more than that. [Discusses diversification of economy, investment in technology sector.] I think Edmonton is now an urban society. I would say it's only been a urban society for a generation, in the sense that it's now big enough and complex enough to have cultural diversity.
Edmonton has come into a new phase in its existence in the last 25 to 30 years -- a phase let down a little bit in the 1990s, stalled for a moment -- but it is getting closer to a million people and therefore will enter a new metropolitan phase of existence. That will create a much richer culture and potential for the future But on the negative side, we will have to contend with an unhealthy environment. Frankly, not merging with St. Albert and Sherwood Park, is the only thing that's saving the city.

… I think Edmonton's character has fundamentally changed since the 1960s and early '70s. I think it's something about the maturing from a community that still thought itself as an agricultural rural society -and resource town. It now thinks of itself as truly urban. And that implies a certain cultural diversity and a certain pride. …Everything from the Winspear to the Shaw that didn't exist in the 1970s, even the Edmonton Oilers; decent restaurants, all those things. This is a personal theory, that at around a million people, things change.