I never thought I’d see the day when the words “national,” “energy” and “strategy” would be strung together and promoted by the Alberta government. For 30 years, Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Program (NEP) had been recurrently trotted out by Alberta premiers and Calgary’s oilpatch, strung up, and ritualistically pummelled.
Gordon Laxer is the Co-Director of Parkland Institute, a non-corporate, research network at the University of Alberta. Parkland is a highly visible institute in Alberta’s heartland, that the Globe and Mail once called Alberta’s ‘unofficial opposition’. Gordon is Parkland’s founding Director. He was The Director from 1996 to June 2011.
He is a Political Economy professor and has published over 34 journal articles and book chapters. Gordon is author or editor of five books, including Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada, which received the 1992 John Porter Award from the Canadian Sociology Association for best book written about Canada. Gordon was the Principal Investigator of a 6-year, $1.9 million research project: Neoliberal Globalism and its Challengers: Reclaiming the Commons in the Semi-periphery, the comparative Study of Canada, Australia, Mexico and Norway.
