If you ever listen to 630 CHED on a weekday morning, you will hear a noticeable change in tone between 8:50 and 9:10. One minute you're being extolled to buy tickets to the Full House Lottery or advised to avoid Groat Road southbound, and then the top-0f-the-hour news clicks on. In the time it takes to learn about the latest gang troubles, Afghanistan updates, and city hall shindigs, the station transforms from Edmonton's source for news, sports, and weather together to a rurally-oriented Conservative kumbaya singalong. Why the 1 million citizens of Edmonton are entreated to shop at UFA and buy crop insurance is beyond me.
Actually it's not. Between 9 and 11 the program is beamed in from the Corus Radio station in Calgary, complete with commercials. (Why the 1 million citizens of Calgary are entreated to shop at UFA and buy crop insurance is open to question too.) The show's host is so completely entrenched in Alberta conservativism he denies the human contributions to global warming and has a signed poster of Stephen Harper tacked to the ceiling above his bed. I don't make this stuff up. (Actually I do.) Maybe all you folks who come from rural areas can tell me if the ultra-conservative (to me) sentiments frequently displayed on this show are well-received in rural Alberta and Calgary.
Goyette points out that the rivalry between Edmonton and Calgary and the cities' divergent politics are neither recent phenomena nor artificially constructed. She says it started with the trains running through Calgary and got an update when the capital and the university went to Edmonton. I've always thought it had to do with more Americans living in southern Alberta as well as natural jealousy on the part of Calgarians for Edmonton's supremely excellent hockey tradition.
I realize my understanding of the Edmonton-Calgary dynamic is shaped very much by a "history of events" and not a "history of people," as I think Sylvia put it today. After having read Edmonton In Our Own Words, I feel I have a much more nuanced understanding of Edmonton's history, traditions, politics, and people. This is Edmonton telling itself what kind of place it is, and what kind of people have peopled it. I now feel it's only fair for Calgary to have its own say. Does Calgary have a book that fills the same function? Is there a tome that can tell me what shaped Calgary into the conservative-voting, cowboy boot-wearing, head office-luring city it appears to be? Is there a record of what Edmonton's southern sister looks like under all the makeup and paint of stereotype?
Calgary, what's your story?
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i'm not sure about calgary per se, but have you read aritha van herk's "mavericks: an incorrigible history of alberta"? it was pub. in 2001 by U Toronto P (so, before john mccain & co. appropriated that word maverick!) and would give you a wicked, witty sense of the province overall.
ReplyDeleteI had the bizarre experience of reading Goyette's book en route to Calgary. As I drove from city to city, my sense of the rivalry and divergent politics intensified, as did my sense of the "one-sidedness" of the history I now know. I wondered where Calgary's history would overlap with ours, meeting at shared points of Albertan-ness, Canadian-ness, landscape, etc., and where it might differ.
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