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Alberta Freezes Government Salaries As Canada’s Oil Patch Enters Second Year Of Recession

January 14, 2016

Alberta Freezes Government Salaries As Canada’s Oil Patch Enters Second Year Of Recession

On Wednesday, we documented the astonishing prices beleaguered Canadians are now forced to pay for groceries thanks to the plunging loonie.

Oil’s inexorable decline has the Canadian dollar in a veritable tailspin and because Canada imports the vast majority of its fresh food, prices on everything from cucumbers to cauliflower are on the rise, tightening the screws an already weary shoppers.

Soaring food prices are but the latest slap in the face for Canadians and especially for Albertans who have been hit the hardest by 13 months of crude carnage. Resources account for a third of provincial revenue and with oil and gas investment expected to have fallen over 30% in 2015, Alberta’s economy has is expected to contract  for the foreseeable future.

The economic malaise has had a number of nasty side effects including soaring property crime in Calgary, rising food bank usage, and sharply higher suicide rates.

With the outlook for oil prices not expected to improve in the near-term, ATB now says the province faces two long years of recession. “The pain is going to be concentrated in the first half of the year. But we don’t really see any ending in sight to a downturn at least until the end of the year. So we are calling for another contraction,” ATB’s Chief Economist Todd Hirsch says in The Alberta Economic Outlook Q1 2016 report.

“This low price environment continues to discourage new investment and spending and has weighed down employment — not only in the oilpatch, but throughout most sectors of the province,” Hirsch continues. “This downturn is longer in duration certainly than 2009 was which was a very quick downturn but very short-lived. This one is going to linger on longer.“

Indeed. Here are some charts from the report which underscore the magnitude of the sharp reversal in fortunes.

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