When the crew trucks stop arriving, a certain silence descends upon an oil field. No pumpers checking the wells, no boots on gravel, no engines idling at dawn. Only sensors, silently transmitting data to a Calgary office where a desk worker observes numbers moving across a screen.
The industry and the politicians who support it have been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the silence that has been permeating Alberta for more than ten years.
At the height of oil sands development, employment in Alberta’s oil and gas industry reached a peak of about 171,000 jobs in December 2013. That figure had fallen to about 137,000 by the beginning of 2024. The numbers are unsettling: during that time, production has almost doubled, from 1.9 million barrels per day to 3.7 million. Fewer people are needed to extract more oil. That is a tactic, not a coincidence.
Businesses will tell you that this is efficiency. Investors will refer to it as discipline. However, the word that springs to mind for those who worked in the industry for twenty years before being abruptly laid off is quite different.
In October 2019, Lora Dunford, a chemical technologist with twenty years of experience, was let go. Even before the pink slip appeared, she was aware that something had changed. She later declared, “I’m tired of the instability,” following her enrollment in a retraining program. “It’s hard.” No press release from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers ever quite captures the weariness in that wording.
Because service jobs are concentrated in rural Alberta, where alternative employment isn’t exactly plentiful, the service sector has suffered the most. By early 2024, there were only about 46,000 jobs in the service sector, down from a peak of 78,000 in September 2014. There is no longer a need for pumpers who used to drive the fields to check wells. These days, remote sensors do it, sending data to technical staff members who never leave the office via the cloud. This could be considered a step forward. Another way to look at it is as the silent eradication of a means of subsistence.
According to a 2020 forecast by EY and Petroleum Labour Market Information, Canada may lose an additional 30 to 50 percent of its oil and gas workforce by 2040, or between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs, as businesses continue to use automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to reduce costs and appease investors. Executives aren’t hiring new staff because they are under pressure to generate ever-higher returns. “The Alberta oil and gas job machine is broken,” stated Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labor. They are developing new software. For a province that has based a large portion of its political identity on the notion that the energy sector is an engine of employment, this assessment is harsh and uncomfortable. The topic of oil and gas as a source of employment has been discussed by Premier Danielle Smith and her predecessors. Relentlessly, the data continues to present an alternative narrative.
Observing the provincial government lag behind the realities faced by its own employees can be somewhat frustrating. In late 2022, the AFL released a report outlining specific opportunities in seven sectors; it was essentially a road map for diversifying Alberta’s energy economy and generating long-term jobs. It was mostly disregarded. Some of the slack is being made up by retraining initiatives like EDGE UP, a federally funded program that pairs displaced oil and gas professionals with digital technology skills. The first cohort is anticipated to consist of about 90 individuals. It’s a beginning. It’s still unclear if it’s sufficient.
When Ryan Morrison applied in 2015, he was a senior geologist without a full-time job. That’s almost ten years of precarity in a province that continues to demand what the industry offers. He claimed that he signed up because he was tired of waiting rather than because he had a lot of options. “I can’t just sit back and wait for the industry to come back.”
Quiet, intimate, and perhaps more honest than anything coming out of Edmonton, it’s difficult not to interpret that as a verdict.
