Suicide, Crime, Unemployment And Poverty All Soar As The Economic Crisis In Alberta Accelerates
By Michael Snyder
EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
December 23rd, 2015
The nightmare that is currently unfolding up in Canada will soon be coming to the United States. When the price of oil first started crashing, most Americans and most Canadians applauded. Most people thought that lower gas prices would be really good for the economy. Well, it turns out that the exact opposite is true. Just like in the United States, the energy industry has been the primary engine for the growth of good paying jobs in Canada since the last recession. Up in Alberta, there was such a need for oil patch workers that even someone that had just recently graduated from high school could find an oil patch job that paid six figures during the boom times. Now the “boom” is turning into a “bust”, and huge numbers of those good paying jobs are being lost. As a result, suicide, crime, unemployment and poverty are all skyrocketing, and the mainstream media is telling us that “the worst is yet to come“.
It saddens me to watch what is happening to Alberta, because I have family up there. Whenever I have visited Alberta, I have been very impressed by how clean and orderly the communities are and by how very polite most people seem to be. As Americans, there is much that we could learn from our neighbors to the north.
But now that the oil bubble has burst, things are changing up in Alberta very rapidly. The following comes from a recent Bloomberg article…
Crime is rising, home prices are falling and food banks are overwhelmed in Calgary as job losses spread. And the worst isn’t yet over in the heart of Canada’s oil patch.
Some of the city’s largest employers are poised to cut more jobs in 2016 as they reduce spending for a second straight year, adding to an estimated 40,000 oil and natural gas positions lost across the nation since the crude price rout began 18 months ago.
“We all know someone who has lost a job,” Naheed Nenshi, the city’s mayor, said in a speech this month, lamenting the “funeral”-like atmosphere in the business community.
When we start digging into some of the hard numbers, things get even bleaker. Just check out these statistics…
-A total of more than 63,000 jobs were lost in Alberta during the first eight months of 2015 alone.
-Over the past 12 months, the official unemployment rate in Calgary has shot up from 4.6 percent to 6.9 percent.
-Home sales in Calgary have plummeted 21 percent so far in 2015.
-Just since September, the number of school lunches for poor children provided by Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids has risen by 16 percent.
-Food bank use in the province of Alberta overall has jumped by a whopping 23 percent according to the most recent numbers.
-In Calgary, the number of commercial break-ins has nearly doubled over the past year.
-The number of bank robberies in Calgary has increased by 65 percent in 2015.
-The number of home invasions in Calgary has risen by 52 percent in 2015.
The Rest…HERE
