By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

I stood inside the doors of the SW Calgary Costco store, enjoying my $1.50 extra long hot dog and large Coke, watching a sea of people happily moving up and down crowded isles pushing loaded shopping carts toward the checkout and I could not help but think of a quote from PM Carney’s book, ‘Value(s) Building a Better World for All.’

“Social Capital, the process of mutual sympathies, needs to be nurtured for economic capital to grow. Trust, integrity and fairness are critical to effective market functioning.”

Social Capital, an Economist’s term for good will, is at the heart of mutual benefit. People of all backgrounds and ethnicity, 9,000 a day, lined up and politely passed the check out. They had smiles on their faces, talked to strangers and made room for each other in the crowded lanes giving way or stepping aside with a gracious acknowledgement. The whole conglomeration worked its way out the automatic doors to a crowded over-full parking lot where we had waited in line to get a spot.

We made the journey over the Great Divide to where Calgary, a city of 1.6 million people (two million if you include the nearby satellite communities), rises up out of vacant buffalo plains into a fortress of heaven reaching towers surrounded by subdivisions engulphed by inter-city highways and overpasses.

Google Maps in hand, we navigated to a tidy over 55 community near Mount Royal College where we stay with a friend who over the next two days happily guided us to nearby locations to purchase items on our list.

Being a bit bushed, no provincial sales tax, low retail prices and one dollar and fifteen cent a litre gasoline enticed us on a snowy day to embark on what has become a semi-annual pilgrimage to the land of happy shoppers and blue, blue skies.

Do I dare say it? Social Capital: trust, integrity and good will is good for all.

Looking back over the ‘Divide’, I couldn’t help but think British Columbian’s have lost faith in good will. The guy at the automotive counter at Canadian Tire was kind of sour, I had to ask for help with a couple of heavy batteries.

Fumbling leaders passed legislation that opened doors to an expanding Aboriginal Relations legal industry that questions the integrity of private ownership and discourages final outcomes, the notion that good will and integrity is at the basis of everyone’s success eaten away by socialist menopause. Some will suggest that if I don’t like it, I should leave or that I delve deeper into the pit of regret and blame, into the sins of the past, into our malaise.

Recently, during a discussion with an Economist, who recently moved from our Lower Mainland to Calgary, he half-jokingly suggested that there are too many Pooh-Poohers in B.C. Modern Economists deal in facts and detail but also in values.

He suggested Pooh Poohers have four things in common:

• they conduct absolutely no research into the theory they Pooh Pooh;
• in the face of hard evidence they deny, deny, deny;
• they denigrate the proponent of alternative theory usually through accusations of conspiracy;
• and they propose no reasonable alternative other than the conventional wisdom of the day.

Pooh Poohing is something of which I can safely say we have all been guilty. However, when it becomes a cultural trait there is reason to worry.

While enjoying my extra long hot dog and large Coke I meditated on the notion that the market is a social construct and when supported by positive institutions and a supportive culture it improves the lives of ordinary people.

From the friendly and gracious clerk at a Calgary Canadian Tire volunteering to load a heavy item into our vehicle to the young family approaching the till at Costco with a heaping cart of groceries letting us go ahead with our small load, Social Capital enlivens and propagates the miracle of good will and happiness.

Returning home to British Columbia, recrossing the Great Divide, I am left with a choice: embrace the cynicism of envy, argument and socialist menopause, dare I say it, communism, or work collaboratively to support each other, favour the idea that good will, trust and integrity benefit all.

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley based writer and poet

Article Share