Jim Prentice was son of an NHL player, summer student coal miner, lawyer, federal cabinet minister and, briefly, bank vice-president and premier of Alberta.
If you wanted to write a novel about a quintessentially Canadian man, Jim Prentice would be a great character.
However, I would not cast him as an author. Adept at expressing himself face-to-face, he's not as good in print: too pedantic, too complicated, too subtle.
Prentice's book, Triple Crown, about Canada's energy future has been released four months after his death in a small plane crash returning from a golfing day with friends at Kelowna, B.C.
This should be a controversial and helpful book in the public debate over Canada's energy resources and environmental record. However, with its author's voice silent it is doomed to wallow like a sailing ship immobilized in the Sargasso Sea.
To succeed, Triple Crown needs the voice of its author in the usual promotional tour for a major book; the interviews, the speeches, talking to book reviewers. As the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson wrote: "O for the sound of a voice that is still!"
In the book Prentice said, "This book is about Canada's energy future - a future that once seemed bright, limitless and impossibly prosperous but which today is uncertain and clouded on many fronts."
The book is about the choices that are needed "to convert Canada's vast energy resources into a secure, prosperous and environmentally responsible future.
"Does Canada want to be a leader or a follower in the transformation that is now sweeping the global energy marketplace? It is really a question of whether we have the courage to pursue global leadership."
Canada is, wrote Prentice, a potential energy superpower. But it has been amateurish in pursuit of that possibility. It's energy file is a compilation of setback after setback. There has been an absence of national leadership.
Prentice was no mouthpiece for the energy industry in Alberta. As the lawyer for the Hunter Creek Coalition of farmers and ranchers in the early 1990s, he whipped Amoco Canada when it wanted to drill on the Whaleback west of the Cowboy Trail.
He also sued Exxon-Mobil on behalf of residents in Lynnwood a Calgary community built on the site of an Imperial Oil refinery that was insufficiently cleaned up when decommissioned and torn down.
In Triple Crown, Prentice used current events - Energy East, Quebec hydro electricity, the continental energy debate, Keystone XL pipeline, the Atlantic basin, climate change and Pacific Coast First Nation views on Asian exports, pipelines and crude oil and LNG tankers - as the canvas upon which he painted Canada's energy future.
Triple Crown is advocacy but the advocate is dead.
Jim Prentice's widow Karen, his writing assistant Jean-SÈbastien Rioux, his editor Jim Gilford, his literary agent Michael Levine and his publisher Harper Collins are to be admired for completing, producing and releasing this book posthumously.
But it is without the impact on public policy that it would have had if Prentice were here to personify and promote its ideas.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
