Oil and friends

Premier Ed Stelmach has finally announced his decision about oil and gas royalty payments, jacking up royalties by about $1.5 billion per year, total. I'm no economist, so it's really hard for me to predict what effect this will have on the oil industry and on job prospects in Alberta. While I don't want to see people lose jobs, it probably wouldn't be bad for Alberta if our economic growth was slower. As it is, we may be the richest province in Canada, but it's an expensive place to live. I've heard before that Alberta has the highest rate of depression in Canada--more evidence that money doesn't buy happiness.

One piece of evidence the premier may have found the right balance: people on both sides are angry.

On Saturday I went to visit two friends who moved to Forestburg, Alberta a while back. They went to my church while they lived in Edmonton. So a few of us from church went to visit them. They have a funny dog named Rolo who was scared of my other friends' baby at first. Actually, the dog was scared of all of us at first, but she got less fearful of most of us. Except Curtis. (If you'd seen how he treated Rolo, you'd understand.)

Our Forestburg friends took us to the school where they work and we played a sport called "pilo-polo" or something like that. Their description went something like this: "It's kind of like floor hockey, but you play with a ball. And there are nets." At this point I was wondering what the difference is. "You hit the ball with these foam bats." Then I was starting to see the difference. And it turned out the ball was larger and softer than typical floor hockey balls. It was a tiring, challenging game, maybe because I'm kind of out of shape, but it was fun and I scored two goals. One of them was even for my team!