Fort McMurray and Alberta have over the years before this week's appalling inferno

reached into the lives and improved the fortunes of hundreds and thousands of

Canadians in every province. That deserves underlining at of a shock and misery of the cod collapse, Fort McMurray was like a rescue center.

New Finlanders in droves left house and home and went west, and as was the Albertan Fort

Macway and people are hurting all are welcome. Some of these

were real friends of mine and I know at their most difficult moments how much the

Alberta welcome meant to them. It told me something. If you want to

know, really know what it means to be a true neighbor ready to help in hard times. Go

to Alberta. It's the pra Code, and in our best times, it's the Canadian Code too.

Every citizen is your neighbor.

So here's the real karma in the Fort Mac tragedy and it's not karma at all.

Albertans were good to all of us back then.

Let us be good and better to them now.

There can be nothing higher or more immediate on our national agenda as citizens

or government than generating a perfect storm of goodwill and assistance for the people

of Fort McMurray as they shoulder the multiple burdens, personal,

economic and psychological of this woeful calamity. Every decent heart in this

country has been torn by the staggering pictures coming out of that province.

An entire city essentially wiped out in days.

The terrible wind-shifting walls of wildfire.

88,000 people slow fleeing on the highway out,

the terror and trauma of whole lifetimes

...