Rex Murphy on Calgary: 'Where are the city's allies?'

Editor's note May 9, 2024: As part of our Calgary at a Crossroads project in 2016, we asked Rex Murphy to write about our city during a troubled economic period. Murphy had spent a lot of time in and around our city over the years. He died this week at the age of 77. Here's what he had to say.

It is impossible to know a place, fully, without living in it. So what Calgarians are feeling now, the direction and tone of their thoughts, during this collapse of the oil economy, is best and only completely known to — Calgarians.

Nonetheless there are many who do not live in Calgary, and may still make reasonable assumptions of how those who do live there must be thinking and feeling during this shock and downturn.

Very many Canadians, from every province, have either visited Calgary, or have found themselves working there. And of that lucky class it is needless to point out that a very great number of them came from Newfoundland.

Newfoundlanders have, I think, a very good notion, of what it must feel like now in Calgary when an economy, on which so much has depended, has been massively jolted (a) because we have so often experienced it, and (b) because so many of us found relief for our economic distress from the days of Calgary's prosperity.

Newfoundland's economy (and much more besides, but I'll leave collateral matters for another time) was hit savagely in the early 1990s. The great traditional fishery collapsed. The inshore fishery was devastated. Thirty-one-thousand fishermen received the news, in a single day, that for some years to come there would be no fishing. None at all. Thirty-one-thousand were abruptly told to stop their work, forsake their incomes, and if possible look elsewhere for employment.

Let me be quick in the telling.

Very, very many of them, of all ages, men and women, turned at the bleak moment to the mainland, and in particular to the Alberta oil field and all the industries and businesses allied with it.

At one of the hardest moments since our Confederation with Canada, Newfoundlanders found some relief in the economy of another province. Suddenly, Calgary (and Edmonton, Red Deer, Fort McMurray) were names as familiar on Newfoundland lips as St. John's or Corner Brook.

In other words, at a time of Newfoundland's need, Calgary and Alberta offered more than welcome. It offered jobs. Jobs by the thousands.

Thus, at this time, when it is Calgary that is getting the hit and the province as a whole, I know — I do not think, I know — that many Newfoundlanders wonder why your city is not receiving a wider, deeper wave of interest, or concern, during its crisis.

You helped us during our bad spell, and citizens of other provinces too, is the thought. Why there is not now, that the dynamic is reversed, a harvest of equal return?

For I sense, in some quarters at least, that there is not. That maybe Calgary, or the West , having — such is the line — had it so good for so long, having been on top of the game, could take a little knockdown, that because it's "out there" in the petrostate, that maybe, you know, a little "cooling off" is not so bad.

You won't hear or feel that sentiment when it's the auto industry, or any other for that matter. But downtime in the oil industry … well, that's always different. Aren't they dirty jobs, anyway?