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Regional: The year that was
Commentary by Jeff Burgar
for South Peace News
Living in a small town in rural Alberta helps explain the thinking that events “out there in the world’’ don’t really impact on us.
Maybe it’s our frontier thinking, or perhaps some sense of rural Canadian independence and inner strength. After all, if we can laugh off -40, be entertained for hours on end dangling a fishhook through an icehole, get up at 5:00 A.M to feed the cattle, take the kids to a hockey tournament 120 miles away, or drive 400 miles to run a sled up the side of a mountain, well, what the heck is the big deal about some bank going broke halfway across the world?
So it was, in the fall and early winter of 2008, we watched the world’s financial system come to a screeching halt. Many of us felt smugly, those people living in skyscrapers in New York might not find milk on the shelves in a week or so. But here in good ol’ HP and district, we will be just fine thank you.
It didn’t quite sink in that Tolko shuttered, Buchanan cutting shifts, oil at $38 a barrel and natural gas prices dropping like a stone was bound to have some kind of effect on us.
And indeed, there was an effect. People lost jobs. Business slowed to a crawl. Projects big and small were put on hold. The effects of the crisis still ripples through all our communities. Fortunately, most of us just aren’t the “partying ‘til it’s all gone’’ kind of people. Most of us put money away for rainy days when we can, live within our means, and hunker down when times get tough. There was a lot of that “hunkering down’’going on in 2009. We’re used to it now.
So, on the opening of a brand new year, what does the future hold?
The easy answer is, just more of the same.
As we entered 2009, nobody really knew what would be the complete impact of the financial crisis. The auto industry was in collapse. American homes were being foreclosed at record rates. Commercial credit was frozen. Big business and little business couldn’t borrow and even banks refused to loan money to each other. Governments around the world argued over stimulus packages to save the day. Disaster was imminent. There was real fear the world’s entire economic system could completely collapse.
Today, we sense we are sitting at or near bottom. We aren’t peering into the darkness of an unimaginably deep abyss. We are at a bottom. It’s bad, but nowhere near as bad as our fears.
We’re comfortable enough now to ask, how long will it be this way, and how fast will we start moving back up the cliff?
The safest answers, and probably typical of our good ol’ High Prairie and District roots: For quite a long time, and very, very slowly!
In the beginning of 2009, we predicted most of us will make the best of it, no matter what. And sometimes, “best of it’’ isn’t all that great. The prediction held true. This is also how almost all of us will deal with 2010.
With that, our best wishes to all of you, and our hopes for an increasingly brighter future.
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