Item from Ian: Look out, Victoria!

I think that trend is reversing. Calgary’s economy has been binned along with oil prices. Houses there have decreased in value by 30% since 2014. Vacancy rates increased 400% in just the last year with a corresponding drop in rents of 20%. Unemployment reached 7% and Calgary alone shed 7,000 jobs since December. You will note that the bombastic rhetoric from Alberta has ceased. For now.
There were well-paid oil industry execs, drillers and others who have bought up property all over the west (funny how not a lot of them want to stick with Calgary). Thousands of well head and pipeline workers regularly blew over $200K a year with little to show for it now. One engineer I am related to used to take three vacations a year, often two to tropical overseas locations in winter. But a great deal of the unemployed are urban service industry workers who are paid a fraction of the petroleum industry-level salaries.
People here in Vancouver complain about high housing prices — and that’s completely legit. But when compared to Alberta, it’s also a sign of well-diversified overall provincial economy with a hot spot over the big city. This is a very hard lesson for Alberta, but it’s not like they haven’t been warned by well-meaning and experienced business leaders and a well-respected ex-premier over the decades about putting all their eggs in one basket, and subsidizing their provincial budgets with royalty revenue instead of banking it and supporting its programs with ordinary taxes like everywhere else.