The North American economic base since 1945 of roads, automobiles and oil is the economy that made Alberta rich because of its petroleum reserves.
The computer chip has made these industries more efficient, but North American wealth still comes from manufacturing, construction and resource production.
Calgary’s eminence as Canada’s oil capital is based on 100 years of petroleum history that started with night skies red from the glow of flares at the wells of Turner Valley, 70 kilometres to the south.
An economic decline, the current one now in its fifth year, is the other side of petroleum history.
Calgary’s city council is wrestling with a gap of at least $60 million between annual tax revenues and city expenditures in 2019, and the shuttering of businesses that can't pay very hefty annual tax increases.
Calgary’s downtown office towers are a quarter empty.
During the oil and gas recession of the early 1980s, then mayor Ralph Klein said of the princely office buildings, “At least they can’t repossess them and take them away.”
But these towers can make a ghost town.
Charles Hetherington, who made his place in Canada’s petroleum history as the president of Panarctic Oil and its discovery of 76 trillion cubic feet of gas in the eastern Arctic, grew up in Norman, Okla., once a booming town in a booming oil state.
When Hetherington got his chemical engineering degree at the University of Oklahoma in the 1930s, Oklahoma was skipping the Depression because of oil exploration and production.
However, in the 1950s when Hetherington was one of the builders of western Canadian oil and gas fields as a pipeliner in British Columbia, the oil boom peaked in Oklahoma and the state was producing more than was being discovered.
Oil companies were abandoning their office buildings in Tulsa, once the oil capital of the United States.
Hetherington’s hometown of Norman, Tulsa’s bedroom community, was changing to a no-growth town, economically dependent on its university campus and small research and development enclave.
Hetherington had good relationships with the ink-stained wretches of journalism, particularly those of us willing to fly for several hours from Calgary to Melville Island in the eastern Arctic two or three times each season to visit Panarctic’s oil and gas exploration fields.
One evening over dinner in the camp, in a scene stolen from a Joseph Conrad novel about British men of the sea reminiscing, Hetherington recalled the good days in the oil economy of Oklahoma.
“Calgary has the potential to become an oil ghost town like Norman,” he said.
Two more Calgary oil booms followed. The city’s population grew from 430,000 to 1.3 million.
Now it is becoming a resource ghost town.
Even if a pipeline or two are built, the boom years are over – the jobs, the money, the roads full of trucks are gone.
It is guesswork to predict if there will be another boom.
If there is, just recovering will take some time.
The growth momentum is gone. The economy is wallowing.
It will be years until there will be tenants enough to fill those downtown Calgary office towers.
Calgary is learning, slowly that ghost towns are the opposite of boom towns.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business author, journalist and editor.
