The one commodity selling well these days? Fear

If you're out to peddle fear these days, you'll find a ready market. Optimism, the antidote to fear, is about as hard to find nowadays as a job in the Alberta oilpatch.

Fear, anger and cynicism are toxic to governments trying to fill a postive mandate. Thus, they can paralyze entire nations.

Even outside of our economic downturn, you don't have to look far for things to be frustrated, angry and cynical about. It's easy enough to say we can't trust government — or investment bankers or global corporations and in some places even the local police. How about counting on your next paycheque?

Personally, I'm glad the U.S. primary season is finally set to begin. After so many months of the bombast, bullying and BS in the run-up to these elections, I'm looking forward to seeing voters pass judgement.

I'm glad because we're seeing a resurgence of the negative politics that so dominates the United States creeping back into Canada.

Doesn't it seem like a lifetime ago that Donald Trump used to be the set-up for a punchline? Doesn't it seem long ago that we rejected our own negative-styled prime minister, in favour of a leader with a more positive view of our potential?

But really, how long did it take before we changed course, and “sunny ways” became a punchline?

Here are three examples of how the negative politics of fear can paralyze government, if we let it.

First: our reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis. Canadians widely endorsed bringing in 25,000 refugees to Canada. We still do. But we missed arbitrary deadlines on the speed at which we intended to do it.

Is this a catastrophic failure? The people pushing negative politics would have us believe so. But an optimist would celebrate that even if late, we will reach our goal, and that thousands of families will find safety and freedom, to help build a better, more inclusive Canada.

Second: Alberta's review of energy royalties. No doubt, releasing the review's report this was a tough moment for the provincial NDP, which held for so long that Albertans were not getting fair return on our non-renewable resources. But the independent review suggested otherwise, so there will be no appreciable change in royalties for the next 10 years.

You could look negatively at this in two ways. One way would hold that current market conditions overshadowed the long-term view of what appears to be a rather low rent on our energy deposits. But if you supported calling a review, you can't cry foul if you didn't get the result you thought you deserved.

A second view is the negative politics of the Alberta opposition. “They were wrong all along, we were right all along,” was the immediate message of the Wildrose. By inference, the current government are a bunch of boneheads.

But in both examples, government did something the people widely agreed needed to be done. Both times, outcomes were not entirely as expected. Both times, government admitted the reality of things and moved forward.

How, exactly, is that bad government?

A third example: the emergence of Albertans First movement. Founder George Clark was in Red Deer recently, to gather support for plebiscites against both Bill 6 and the provincial carbon tax.

His talk took a strange turn when he argued against expanding wind power in Alberta — on environmental grounds. He pointed to scientific studies of bird mortality at wind farms.

I did find one good study by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists and Bird Studies Canada that seem to back his position, that a giant windmill would likely kill perhaps 10 birds a year. That same study concluded “population effects are unlikely,” since less than 0.2 per cent of population is lost due to collisions with windmills. That's less than mortality due to collisions with wires, towers, windows or cars — and far less than mortality due to our household cats.

He said oil and gas companies that have “bent over backwards” to protect natural habitat. Really? Would that be by clear-cutting seismic lines all over the province, driving heavy trucks through trout streams, all the chemical and oil spills that occur, and the poisoning of farmers' water wells?

Clark says we should fight to save birds, but not farm workers and children on farm families with Bill 6, or to have people realize the full cost of fossil fuels through a carbon tax?

Strange. But we don't want to be negative, do we?

The Alberta and federal governments did not cause the collapse of the oil and gas industries. Their reactions to current realities have not made things worse; indeed, they've had no time to have any effect at all yet.

So don't buy the fear. Or at least, we should look honestly at what's causing our frustration, anger and cynicism.