Observations from Alberta: How to Make America Great Again

By Patricia Salber MD, MBA (@docweighsin)

If Trump or anyone with power in our government wanted to Make America Great Again, they would send a delegation to Alberta and copy everything they are doing.

I recently returned from ten days in Alberta, Canada visiting the small town of Stettler where my hardy and adventurous relatives settled in the early 1900s. People from all over the world came to the area in droves, attracted by cheap land grants offered by the Canadian Pacific Railroad that was hoping to create new towns (and presumably customers) on the vast and largely unpopulated prairie.

The contrast between what I saw in Alberta and what we are currently experiencing in the U.S. is stark, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Even though I live in the beautiful, but somewhat ostentatiously upscale county of Marin in Northern California, the road to my house has only been paved once in the 30+ years my husband and I have lived there — and even then, for some inexplicable reason, the city failed to pave the part of the road that connects my street to the main thoroughfare of our town. It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say that the potholes get so big in the winter that you could take a bath in them. In Alberta, all of the streets we drove on were smoothly paved with nary a…