Oil’s Well that ends well?

Born in Edmonton in 1911, Marshall McLuhan gained worldwide recognition in the 1960s and 70s as a leading scholar of communications at the University of Toronto.  Perhaps most famously, he understood that technology was about to change unrecognizably the way we interacted with one and other (‘the medium is the message’) and that this would dissolve all sorts of international boundaries (‘the global village’).

Rapid advances in mass communications over the past thirty years have certainly borne out his theory of a global village, but it has also – at least in part – given rise to another form of circuitry: the globalized economy.  Anyone who has been trying to make sense of falling oil prices recently, whether they’re a pundit or work in the industry, knows that it requires a great deal of international detective work. Was it OPEC overproduction? The rise of American shale gas? Political unrest in Russia? A slowdown in demand? Venezuelan inflation?

Most likely it’s a combination of all of these factors – and more. And many Canadians will feel like it’s a great thing. Filling up your car is cheap. Energy is cheap. The household bills are down and everyone’s happy. But just as there are winners, there are also losers. If you work in the oil and gas sector or the industries it supports, this is bad news indeed. The Federal Budget has been delayed and the Bank of Canada has dropped the interest rate…precautionary, Poloz tells us. So, we’re really all in this together.

This, then, brings us back to Alberta, where the economy has boomed for many years on the high price of oil. What are they supposed to do now? Even if you don’t work directly for an energy company, your job or company might be closely linked to its plummeting fortunes. So do you jump ship? Do you wait it out? Hope for political intervention?

Coming face to face with the prospect of either immediate or eventual unemployment, most people would do well to look hard at what hard skills they have, where they are best applied, where the future looks brightest. But what the oil crisis demonstrates to us is that this is something you should be thinking about from time to time whatever industry you work in. The global village we inhabit has given rise to many opportunities for many people, but its interconnectedness has an in-built precariousness to it as well.

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