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Doug Owram is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
In his time in office, people described Peter Lougheed many ways. Depending on the perspective, he was western Canada’s strongest champion, one of the “blue-eyed sheiks,” the obdurate gadfly or a danger to Canada. One Ontario cabinet minister even declared him “a greater threat to Confederation than Quebec’s René Lévesque.” His position was controversial but his insistence on control of Alberta resources did much to define energy policy for the next generation.
The most dramatic flashpoint in his assertion of western power came in the struggle between Alberta and the federal government over the National Energy Program, or NEP. The NEP came out of a combination of federal need and rising oil prices. Middle Eastern events and growing demand for oil internationally had propelled oil from roughly $3 a barrel in 1971, when Lougheed took office as Alberta’s premier, to $35 by the early 1980s.
For a federal government struggling with budget deficits, inflation and tepid economic growth, the temptation of Alberta oil revenue proved irresistible. In 1980, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau announced a series of taxation measures on oil. It seemed a natural solution to what many thought of as a national resource.
It was not that simple.
In the subsequent months the federal government would be forced to compromise, Alberta and its premier would assert a new presence on the national stage and the Liberal party’s already weak presence in western Canada would be fixed in stone. Behind this was a combination of what the historian Donald Creighton once termed a mixture of character and circumstance.
The circumstance was the rise of a new postwar West. A region based on small towns, agriculture and farm-gate politics was changing rapidly. The new West was urban rather than rural, increasingly secular rather than evangelical and ready to assert itself.
The discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947 had accelerated the changes, increasing the wealth and power of the region while shifting the centre of growth westward to Alberta. Growing population and growing wealth made that province in particular increasingly restive with the reality that national governments were usually decided in central Canada with subsequent policies shaped accordingly.
The second ingredient — character — came in Peter Lougheed’s family history, personal capability and approach to politics. The Lougheed vision of Canada came through a distinctly western prism. His family had been part of the early elite of Alberta and could even trace roots back to native heritage. The family also had lived through another aspect of the West as a region — boom and bust.
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