“I can’t believe workers these days,” fumes Gamal, owner of the Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. location at which I pick up coffee on the way to the office.

“Hardly anybody wants to work,” he says. “I can barely afford wages high enough to attract applicants. Their personal habits are terrible. If I clamp down, they just walk out the door and down the street to the next job. We need a good recession.”

If Gamal expresses himself more forcefully than most, this is a common sentiment in Calgary. To which I can only add the age-old aphorism: be careful what you wish for.

All over Alberta, people are feeling the pressure and stress of an economic boom that’s been rolling for almost a decade. Managers tear out their hair because of employees’ entitlement mentality. Employees demand fat salaries and long holidays, refuse to work a millisecond’s overtime and leave bosses to handle crunch periods alone.

The effects of the boom chase you everywhere. Alberta’s once gloriously empty rural highways resemble urban rush hours. Many people have chased the boom to Calgary — and they want to make the most of it.

Many are saying: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take the edge off the boom, maybe through careful planning and adjustments to taxes and energy royalties?” Here’s another aphorism that’s not quite so old: by the time something becomes conventional wisdom, it’s probably wrong — or, at least, moot. Alberta’s boom may be easing on its own.

Soft natural gas prices have cut the number of wells being drilled, spilling over into lower service costs and — egad! — fewer jobs in certain specialties. Sky-high oil prices have triggered forced delays to massive oilsands projects and cancellation of a multibillion-dollar upgrader. House prices in at least one upscale community outside Calgary are dropping.

This could all be a blip — or the first turn. It must also be noted that Alberta is a huge exporter, not just of oil and natural gas, but also of manufactured goods, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry. Weakening demand in the U.S. could really hurt.

So, Alberta’s boom doesn’t seem to need anyone reining it in. People have to revisit their thinking. In a broader sense, isn’t the very idea of deliberately decelerating a boom until everyone’s economic oatmeal is not too hot and not too cold but just right simply neo-Keynesian mush? Advocates of a tougher royalty regime think they’re being altruistic: we could take that nasty little edge off the boom while preserving our core economic growth.

People ought to know better. You can’t bottle a boom and save it for later. Isn’t anyone old enough to remember the debacles of the planned “mixed” economies in the 1970s and 1980s — the misguided ideas we abandoned after painful lessons? In China, 40 years of Maoist policies delivered starvation and stagnation. Fifteen years of an admittedly weird form of capitalism have brought skyscrapers and TVs to most households.

The planning impulse reflects a deep human need. In business, every problem is a management problem with management solutions. And can there be a weirder oxymoron than “risk management”? But as the meltdown of the U.S. subprime mortgage sector shows, risk management not only fails but can cause failure.

“Boom management” is equally bizarre. You don’t plan an economic boom — you ride it. Attempting to manage a boom back down is planned failure. And that’s perverse. IE



George Koch is a freelance writer in Calgary. His writing can be found at www.drjandmrk.-
com.