You can hardly get through a business meeting in Alberta without the conversation turning to whether the current economic downturn is the worst in the past 20 years, the worst in a 50-ish person’s whole career or the worst in our entire lives. Such an outlook seemed overwrought a year ago. Today, sadly, it’s reasonable.

The phrases “lower for longer” and “bathtub-shaped recovery” have moved from being brand new terms for describing the likely behaviour of commodity prices to eye-rollers. The dour grimaces and scowls on people walking around downtown Calgary these days made me think of a grotesque twist on the old tune “Funky Town,” retitled as “Grumpy Town.”

More bad economic news has accumulated in the past year and a half than I can even list, let alone describe. This ranges from tens of billions of dollars in cancelled or deferred new projects to government policies guaranteed to deepen the downturn. Numbers are flung around with abandon: 65,000 oilpatch and related jobs disappeared in 2015. No, it’s 100,000. No, wait, 125,000. A drive past the oilfield services industry’s main hub of Nisku, just south of Edmonton, reveals vast industrial yards filled with thousands of idled cranes, trucks and other pieces of equipment. Alberta, the jobs factory, is a rusting hulk, her windows smashed and weeds pushing through the concrete.

The social effects are similar. Property crime is skyrocketing. Senior technical personnel are retiring early or coming to the end of their year’s employment insurance payouts. Dual-income couples in which one spouse escaped the initial cuts are seeing the axe fall on the second. Entrepreneurs who in the past were involved in three or four cycles of company formation, asset acquisition, drilling, growth and monetization are just plain giving up. The loss of talent, drive and experience is incalculable.

But is this the worst downturn ever? Thinking about past disasters evokes Tolstoy’s famous observation in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Similarly, each economic downturn is awful in its own way.

The global financial meltdown in late 2008 caused near-panic among young Albertans who’d never known anything but plenty, but it ended quickly. In 1998-99, we in Alberta lived through a tough cyclical downturn, but the province came roaring back and into a seemingly endless boom. A dozen years before that, brutally low oil prices drove Alberta into a deep funk as Central Canada boomed.

That, in turn, was just a couple of years after the worst of them all: our early ’80s depression caused by the twin triggers of former prime minister Trudeau the Elder’s National Energy Program and the collapse in world oil prices. Investment in the oil business collapsed, drilling rigs were moved to Texas, unemployment spent years in the double digits, as did interest rates. Tens of thousands of Albertans lost their businesses, their savings and their homes. It took 15 years for residential housing to regain the value of the peak boom years.

We’re not there yet. Alberta’s economy will recover eventually. But it will come out of this a very different business culture.

More of George’s writing can be found at www.drjandmrk.com.

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