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lberta is in trouble.
Sure, having all the oil in the world is great. Right up until the price of oil drops like a cartoon anvil straight down onto the head of your economy.
Now, realtors in Calgary have plenty of work — trying to unload mansions of rich people desperate to get their cash in hand and get out of Dodge.
The provincial government there is having conniption fits about the prospect of a recession.
A lot of transplanted Newfies, British Columbians, and others who have flocked to the oil patch are considering a return ticket.
Maybe Alberta’s oil economy will bounce back. Maybe the price of oil will shoot up again next month and we’ll all be whining about paying $1.50 a litre again, and guys in Fort MacMurray can return to fretting about which skidoo goes best with their new truck.
Or maybe not. We’ve been here before, after all. Remember the 1980s, when the first party ended, and Alberta led the nation in foreclosures and bankruptcies.
For years, we’ve looked east over the Rockies with envy.
Since the 1990s, Alberta has been on a tear, and it looked like oil was the way to go, hence our current government’s continued enthusiasm for that related hydrocarbon, liquified natural gas.
Here in B.C., a lot of our identity also relies on the big extractive resources that make for fun Discovery Channel reality shows — fishing, logging, and mining.
Logging employed 18,700 people in 2013, down from 27,000 just 10 years before. And believe it or not, that industry has bounced back a bit since the recession.
Mining, oil, and gas employs 29,500 people, and it is increasing, but it’s still a tiny fraction of the B.C. workforce.
By comparison, 15,200 people work in publishing in this province.
We hear a lot about how we need to support mining, about how it’s a priority for the government.
Yet when was the last time you heard anything from Victoria about book publishing? Or about performing arts (19,300 people employed) or furniture stores (10,900) or sporting goods, hobby, and book stores (13,600) or food manufacturing (23,700)?
A full 258,000 people work in retail in B.C., one way or another, selling everything from cans of pop to heavy equipment.
To be fair, there are some reasons to support those charismatic extractive industries — they tend to have a lot of subsidiary industries that feed off them.
Extractive industries are like the pointy end of an inverted pyramid, with big chunks of the rest of the economy balanced on their shoulders.
The thing about an inverted pyramid? It’s unstable. And if that narrow little base goes, everything above it takes a tumble, too.
To be fair, the B.C. government loves to talk up small business and diversified business generally. But the minute someone talks about oil or forestry, you can see heads swivel in the legislature, even though health care and manufacturing outweigh those extractive industries by a wide margin.
I think we need to focus on the exact opposite of those high-profile industries.
Let’s aim squarely for building a pyramid the right way up.
Let’s build an economy based around pointless, even silly jobs.
The fluffy, goofy industries, like making video games and movies, tourism, and health and wellness, are less vulnerable to sudden shifts in the price of oil or minerals, to free trade deals and foreign wars.
They’ll never be as sexy as logging and mining, but they’re a better long-term bet.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance
