Last week, along Stoney Trail in Calgary's northwest, where housing developments with names like Panorama Hills, Royal Oak and Mount Pleasant spread outwards as haphazardly as the arms of an octopus, a silver late-model Lexus sedan passed on the left.
The car's front bumper had been pushed in and was threatening to fall off at any moment.
This is Calgary when oil is worth $45 a barrel and the loonie is worth just 75 cents against the American dollar, where drivers can have a luxury automobile but can no longer afford to take it to an autobody place after a fender bender.
The afternoon before, at a Calgary Costco, a man ran out of the store, packing styrofoam containers filled with meat as if they were firewood. A female employee gave up the pursuit quickly, returning to the store to get help and inform a manager while shoppers watched the man dart through the parking lot on his way to the busy street.
He disappeared behind some trees for a moment and then emerged empty-handed, dashing across four lanes of traffic to the other side of the street. A concerned shopper followed, keeping a careful distance away, pointing the man out to police officers who showed up minutes later. The meat, stashed in the shade against the base of a tree, was returned to relieved Costco staff.
Increasingly, those big signs at the city limits, welcoming visitors to Calgary and encouraging them to "be part of the energy" seem like a cruel reminder to that better time in the recent past, when the price of oil was high, the loonie was soaring and the Alberta economy was bursting with money and jobs.
The jobs are gone, the money has dried up and the beleaguered residents just shrug their shoulders when the provincial government revises its budget forecast for a deficit of
$10.9 billion for this fiscal year alone. The Financial Post reports that the province's official unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent is the highest Alberta has seen in 22 years. Worse, the provincial economy continues to contract - 3.7 per cent in 2015 and an expected 2.7 per cent this year - at rates not seen even during the nightmare of the National Energy Program in the early 1980s.
"I get frustrated when I read 'thousands of jobs lost,'" Dan Allan, president of the Canadian Society for Unconventional Resources, told the newspaper. "It's not thousands. It's tens of thousands. We trivialize it and it's disturbing because this is a story that needs focus and attention by everybody."
The body count is 40,000 to 60,000 professionals, with degrees in science, engineering and commerce, no longer bringing in the handsome cheques those highly-skilled jobs warranted.
On the surface, it would seem like many of these professionals would be able to find other work, their education and experience giving them a leg up over other unemployed Albertans. As the Post story tragically illustrated, the opposite is happening. Employers are turning their backs on these individuals, unwilling to invest in staff who they think would run back to their old jobs as soon as the oil sector rebounds. Even worse, stories are emerging of these professionals being turned away at the door because they worked in that dirty industry and that they are somehow to blame for the collapse of oil prices and Alberta's current troubles.
Meanwhile, the rebound, when it finally comes, will be hampered by the exodus of the most talented and sought-after of these professionals, who are leaving Alberta in droves for other provinces and other sectors of the economy, as well as the lack of young people attending school for the expertise the resource development sector will need to thrive in the years and decades ahead.
More than a few Canadians might see this as just desserts for greedy energy companies and cocky Albertans.
Except hundreds of thousands of households, not just in Alberta but also across Canada, including Prince George, have been directly or indirectly dependent on oil sector employment to feed their families and pay their mortgages. The cost is high, not just in dollars but in the human suffering that comes with losing a job, defaulting on a mortgage and having to steal meat to feed a family (or a drug habit).
The Lexus is still on the road but it's unlikely that front bumper will be fixed anytime soon.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
