Positive Nationalism for Canada

BGEN. ANDRUNYK:

Members and friends of The Empire Club of Canada: Today we welcome to our club for the second time Mr. S. Robert Blair, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Nova, an Alberta Corporation, who in the city of Calgary is affectionately known as Boss-a-Nova.

When Mr. Blair first spoke to this club on January 27, 1977 he was the President of Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company. That company's name was changed on August 6, 1980 to Nova, an Alberta Corporation, a name that better reflects the many facets of its endeavour and that allows flexibility to adapt to even more growth and change.

Nova has undergone a phenomenal transformation since the founding of the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company in 1954. Originally charged with building and operating natural gas transmission facilities within Alberta, in less than three decades it has grown from eight employees to nearly three thousand. A Canadian-owned company with more than 60,000 shareholders from all parts of the country and all walks of life, its assets have increased from $400 Million in 1970 to over $3.6 billion in 1980.

The architect and the driving force behind this remarkable success story is our guest speaker today. Bob Blair, the son of a petroleum engineer, went into the oil and gas industry following graduation from Queen's University with a degree in chemical engineering. After eight years in field engineering and construction management of gas and oil pipelines and refineries, he joined Alberta and Southern Gas Company, becoming its President and General Manager in 1966. In December 1969 he became the Executive Vice President of the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company and was appointed the President less than a year later.

In his book Bob Blair's Pipeline, Francois Bregha describes Bob Blair as a man of unique vision. He is a self-proclaimed nationalist who has dedicated himself to the creation of Canadian-owned and western-based industries, a pursuit that has brought him into conflict with both the eastern business establishment and some of Canada's largest foreign-owned oil companies.

A recent Financial Post article attributes his success to his strong leadership qualities, his willingness to take risks and his ability to motivate his fellow workers to bring out excellence and initiative all around him.

But whatever you hear and read about Bob Blair the characteristics that always come to the fore are his optimism and unshakeable belief in Canada's great future and his deep personal commitment to a united Canada. You may remember that when he spoke to this club in 1977 he said, "I am not first a western Canadian but first a citizen of a nation that includes western Canada and Ontario and Quebec." In Nova's annual report of 1980 he wrote, "Despite the strains presently felt in Canada I cannot conceive of a divided country. I cannot conceive of a Canada surviving without Quebec and I also cannot see it surviving without its west where destiny has allotted much of Canada's future production strength. Many western residents may be fed up with Canada just now, but I never heard them imagine a secure alternative." Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving an especially warm welcome to the President and Chief Executive Officer of Nova, an Alberta Corporation, Mr. Sidney Robert Blair, an officer of the Order of Canada.

MR. BLAIR:

Ladies and gentlemen: By a factor of ten times, it would have been easier to me on accepting this engagement to have prepared for you a report on our company's projects and production. Safe indeed would have been the course of speaking on the blossoming new petrochemical production base in Alberta or the prospective enhanced oil recovery boom for Saskatchewan. With slightly more risk of controversy, the subject matter could also have been the future completion of the cross-Canada natural gas pipeline network and the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation System which is to cross three western provinces, the Yukon, and later the Northwest Territories. For all those projects I could have been leaning cheerfully on this lecture stand telling you, Empire Club audience, as my compatriots, about the progress being made, reporting with real pride on the vigour and competitive accomplishments with which many companies have suddenly, over the last half dozen years, given impetus to the new era of energy industry development in our northern half of this North American continent.

Safer than my topic even would have been to remark on inflation and the economic situation. However, out of my own feeling of conscience I elected instead to expose my personal view on a much more delicate subject, "nationalism." I say "out of conscience" because this seems to me to be such a vitally important subject that it is more responsible to open it up for discussion than to stay in the safer world of projects and production. As a business manager I must and do accomplish certain completion and production objectives with my colleagues. If we didn't develop and achieve those objectives, our Boards and our shareholders would and should put the opportunity before other managers. But while fulfilling managerial assignments, we surely also have as individuals as much feeling and caring on the condition of our public constituency as anyone--each in our own way as much as any political person. Among my own public preoccupations is the question of nationalism, its pitfalls and its virtues, because my sense of history has impelled the conviction that Canada needs a new and particularly positive nationalism.

The virtue in a positive nationalism therefore became my subject for today. The sub-text should be "Canada has to be among the happiest countries on earth, so it should act like that." Let's look outward before turning in to look at ourselves.

We are part of the Western world of socially and industrially developed, or (as in our case) partlydeveloped, countries. This world is quite coherent and orderly in 1981 and can convey huge advantages of trade, and technical and cultural exchange upon its participants. We were created within this Western world in our own huge and still sparsely populated territory principally through the mentorship or protection at one time or another of three older nations: Britain, France and the United States. I have just listed three of the most fervently nationalistic nations ever and will get back to that subject shortly.

The role of this Western, relatively developed group is starting to include more and more the provision of assistance to the future development and partial nourishment of the South. That role is at present somewhat beyond the competence of the Western developed countries and beyond their willingness to act generously. But from the most informative studies the need for such a Western and Northern role is becoming progressively more clear and will tax the capacity of the Western countries fully during the next few generations.

In this setting, the Western community of countries will need all of the strength and balance that its members can assemble together. Such balance includes variety and implies the existence of several strong Western nations, each with vigour and leadership. The United States will at times have domestic problems or national moods that impair its availability as a leader. The European Economic Community members have an erratic economic base to work from. Few of the developed countries have any hope of avoiding the national deficit problem of national energy supply deficiency which may interfere with their international obligations. Cultural and political variety in international response is and will be a fact of life for everybody. The point to this comment about the world is that the Western developed countries require all the strength and balance they can assemble, and that must include Canada as a strengthened nation.

The next point in my thesis is that positive nationalism is a virtue in that it is a necessary prerequisite to our putting Canada forward as a real nation. I do not think we are a real nation as yet. A real nation exists when, from time to time, the great majority of its population will put certain principles and national objectives ahead of domestic rivalry, ahead of local ambitions and local problems, and act in concert to carry out a national will that certain things be done or that particular situations be avoided. Within such a real nation there should be free and open criticism and occasional redirection of the national will. But where the national will is established in each generation its spirit becomes a fact to be recognized by leaders in every sector. Political leaders of various parties then sense a national will which they cannot ridicule or opt away from without serious peril to their political future, much as they may wish to bend it to their own view.

Business leaders, labour officials, professionals and public interest associations continue to do their own thing in many ways. But where they represent their nation or speak for their sector of the country in international communication, they must have regard for the national will as part of their individual responsibility. Or, if denying the converse makes this clear, citizens must generally desist from getting reassurance from the sympathy of "more enlightened "jurisdictions by scampering around to other nations with complaints that they are not having their way in Canada these days. That kind of activity would only be sensible if there were a total vacuum of national will in Canada. If there is indeed a partial vacuum, it is we who should be filling it ourselves. No one. else can be expected to do it with our interests at heart.

Is there indeed a vacuum now in respect of national will for Canada? It appears to some that that is the case. Most big companies in this country seem more concerned with their problems with our governments than in speaking out as "our" companies in the sense that American companies, for instance, are "our" companies to the United States. Going through New York in the last day or two I was struck once again by how vigorously Mobil or Texaco or Exxon position themselves first as "our American companies" to the Congress, to the states and the public. America's problems are their problems, America's trade objectives have their support. Whoever may damn Yankees gets their corporate knuckles right in the teeth as the first round of response. I wish we received more of that in Canada.

Then how about the smaller companies at home? Their partisanship for Canada seems stronger, sometimes more vigorous, than our governments', but they have to take care not to come across as just "protectionist." That can be an ugly word here, just as "nationalism" is an ugly word in some usages. Having built our history on our resources and market being relatively open to investors from everywhere, either directly or through local subsidiaries, we have inherited a very sophisticated and advanced respect for the mobility of capital and for the purest principles of international freedom of trade and professional standards. Sensitivity about the lost efficiency of protectionism is a highly polished attitude in this country. I suspect that few officials anywhere will blanch more quickly or apologetically when accused of protectionism than a Canadian public official. It has been part of career conditioning. Small business faces that fact. However, the older developed countries from whom we have been taught about the evils of protectionism have long since developed their own ways of wedding sophisticated principles with practical measures to look after their own companies to a certain level.

Everyone present in this audience who has been involved in international trade or investment knows what I am referring to now. Sure, lots of jurisdictions are open or partly open so long as their own companies are not hurt too broadly, but when many of their smaller organizations begin to get squeezed, the national will takes over and one way or another that national will prevails over the finest theories of international mobility.

Can the national spirit develop from the provincial governments? Maybe it will if they find enough common ground with one another. It would be great if it could because the provincial governments are close to their electorates and have great powers in Canada. However, the development of elements of the national will does not now seem to have much priority with them and perhaps will not for a long time to come, as a practical choice. What we must now address is the federal political process which has to be centrally involved in the nurturing of the will of a real nation. It does have other obligations and it has some structural problems of its own, but it is entirely available to take the words of the public into account.

So, to wrap up this theme, I will put forward the following roughly worded proposition for one kind of positive nationalism for Canada. It is surely time for us to show the world that we can become a real nation with identified Canadian purposes being more important than winning points off each other in regional disputes. Being the kind of people we are, this must come out of compromise and accommodation. Canada's population is too intelligent, proud and suspicious of autocratic management to concede to strong leadership unless that leadership is mindful of our history and the conventions of compromise which have been developed here.

But, being the kind of people that we are, which has too often been a quarrelsome kind of people, we will need more respect for each other and the setting back of old rivalries in order that what we will agree upon can be given the status of the national will.

Let's just start thinking like that, giving our support to each other rather than the back of our hands, cheering for those who campaign for the creation of a real nation which will enjoy majority support across the country. Let's above all turn our faces to each other to make the best of this country--turn away from any other nation as our natural or historic mentor. Eighty per cent of the land we claim as Canadian is still hardly populated except for the native residents who we say are Canadians. Let's solve this problem before a fracturing process makes some kind of United Nations trusteeship the logical solution to the management of this land.

I hope that I am with you in spirit today in saying these things to the Empire Club. You have an old name as a club relating to the past. You should keep the name intact for the new People's Empire of Canada. I remember this audience and I know a good deal of its quality. Although these things I have been talking about are not as easy to say as some other things, I feel the urgency and need here for a real nation such as I have clumsily but very earnestly tried to describe to you today.

The thanks of the club were expressed to Mr. Blair by Arthur Langley, a Past President of The Empire Club of Canada.