The official Opposition in Ottawa has been complaining lately that since Prime Minister Jean Chretien was elected, he has paid more visits to southern holiday destinations than he has to Western Canada.
Well, the Canadian Alliance can relax. Not only is Chretien coming west next month, but he's bringing about 6,000 of his friends with him.
Apart from Chretien, there will be hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world, legions of protestors and some 5,000 Canadian troops.
Somewhere safely away from the fences, the clubs and the tear gas will be eight guys sitting around a table wondering what to have for lunch. Welcome to the G-8 summit, where the leaders of the industrialized world will plot the course of the world economy for the coming year.
Despite all the negative attention these get-togethers draw now, Chretien apparently has no security worries. Just this week, he was reassuring the Italians that Kananaskis is a virtually impregnable fortress, protected "from the back by mountains, from the front by a river, from the south by an Indian village and from the north by 500 bears."
Ah, the sights and smells of nature. Military vehicles, mess tents and latrines. Tear gas, barricades and rubber bullets.
Low impact camping this is not. I think of it more like The Brawl In The Brush.
Choosing Kananaskis as the site for yet another showdown with the forces of anti-globalization has to rate as one of the more ill-advised decisions Chretien has made in the area of Canadian foreign relations.
As a spectacular recreation area just two hours from an international airport, Kananaskis is already under severe pressure from tourism and development interests. Moving a world-scale political, media and military circus into the midst of it is hardly a symbol of responsible environmental stewardship.
If you take a look at the G-8's track record, you have to wonder why they bother at all. These annual meetings of the world's leaders began in 1975 following the big oil price scares of the early '70s.
The idea was to bring some sense of order to the international economy by co-ordinating economic policies, thereby keeping wild swings in economic cycles under control.
The hope was that these talks could help avert international economic crises, but it really hasn't worked.
In the last 10 years alone, there have been a series of crises, including the near collapse of the British pound in 1992, the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95, and the Asian and Russian financial crises of 1997-98. Just recently we have seen the Argentinean economy melting down, a reminder that no one can really accurately predict where or when the next emergency is going to appear.
Almost every year, the G-8 pledges action on a range of issues, including global climate change, international terrorism, world trade and nuclear disarmament.
The U.S. of course, has refused to sign on to the Kyoto Accord, moved into an extremely protectionist trade posture and continues to refuse to sign a comprehensive test ban treaty. As usual at these meetings, there is the U.S., and then there is everybody else.
If there is any lasting value to the G-8 meetings, then surely some less confrontational approach could be used.
In the age of satellite communications and video conferencing, there's no good reason why the world's leaders couldn't discuss the international economy from home and arrive at the same result.
Failing that, the G-8 could simply change the schedule and the locations of their meetings to make them less appealing to protestors.
For example, was there a worse location to hold a WTO meeting than Seattle, within easy reach of every disgruntled university student and protest group on the West Coast?
It's hard to see the hardship in visiting Kananaskis in June. Most working stiffs would love the opportunity, so why wouldn't the protestors want to party on in the mountains?
No, if Chretien were really serious about security, he would have conducted the G-8 somewhere a little less inviting, say, Yellowknife in February.
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