Alberta Dopers: Are you better off.....

In My Humble Opinion
1

Seems like a lot of people around here in my B.C. town disappear for two weeks or so and come back regularly with huge pay checks. Alberta is booming. Even my young nephew with no skills secured a welding apprenticeship in Alberta starting at $20 per hour with benefits and bonuses including transportation to and back from Alberta to our home town (two weeks in and one week home).

I hear fast food employees are getting $14.00 per hour.

So my question is: Are you better off now than you were let’s say 4 years ago?

PS: I know I am because my business services the yachts that Alberta residents keep here on Vancouver Island.

2

It’s a tough call. On the one hand, there is lots of gossip on the street about how you can make a pile of money in Alberta, and some folks indeed do. But it seems to me that the vast majority of Albertans consist of people who have had the same office/factory/whatever job for years, with the same pay increases anybody else in the country gets. Most people seem to prefer the safety of the job they’ve held for years, even if it doesn’t turn them into millionaires; and many people don’t want to have to leave the comfort of Calgary, Red Deer, and Lethbridge for the somewhat rougher and more expensive boom towns in the north.

There are people who do make a lot of money, but it tends to be under conditions most folks don’t want to work under. Your two-week example is a good one: great perhaps for young single mobile guys, but not necessarily good for an older woman with a child who is in school. Or, as another example, outdoor work in January, when it’s minus-20 with a wind chill that makes it seem even colder. These are extreme, but they’re typical. There are also a great number of well-paying jobs requiring skills and experience many people don’t have: welding, electrical, pipelining, etc. but they pay well to attract folks from other places to Alberta, since most of our regular pool of such skilled workers are already employed. But the uneducated and unskilled high school dropout, Albertan or not, is unqualified for such work, and won’t be getting rich quick from those skilled jobs any time soon. (Though he or she could learn them.)

But for the most part, I’d have to say that people are doing pretty much as well as they ever have. Gas prices rise, and Albertans gripe and wonder how they will afford gas. Grocery prices rise, and most Albertans gripe about the cost of food. People wonder how they will afford luxiries. Nobody is sitting there saying, “Let prices rise; I’m rich!” Overall, I’d guess that most Albertans are no better off than any other Canadians.

3

What Spoons said.

4

Let prices rise. As I consume very little and invest a lot, I am (relatively) rich(er)! Let’s go $3/l gas!

5

Well, 4 years ago, I was living in my parents’ basement, and worked in a fish plant for about $9.00/hour, 6 days a week, pulling in an average $1500/month. I couldn’t really afford to get an apartment of my own.

Now, I’m in GP, averaging about $5000/month, and Sat^Gal and I bought a house in Clairmont. At the moment, I’m considering going into the oilfield jobs, and try to build up some savings.

… but yeah, I’m way better off now than I was back home…

S^G

6

I’m certainly not better off. I don’t have an oilfield job, or even a respectable and consistent office job. I have to pay $1000 a month for an awful basement apartment in Calgary where every night I get to smell some asshole burning trash in his fireplace and I can’t seem to build up any savings whatsoever no matter how much I cut back on non-essentials. (Hooray for beans and rice.) I certainly don’t have a $20 an hour welding apprenticeship or anything close, and I can’t afford to pay for any kind of schooling to make myself appear to be a more acceptable candidate for a decent job.

I’m one of those people who was dumb enough to learn how to do all sorts of computer-related things on his own time, rather than go to school for it and get a paper saying so. Nobody has any interest in whether or not I can perform the job, it seems: all that matters is that I didn’t pay to learn how.

Calgary sucks.

7

This is an important point. I’ve noticed that Calgary (for example, though it could be possible in the rest of Alberta as well) is full of people who heard about the money to be made, and came here to get it, but found themselves unqualified for any good jobs here. “Unqualified,” that is, in the eyes of those who advertise the jobs, because they require a diploma, certificate, etc. proving that the person learned the job at school or is otherwise qualified to do it. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve safely driven a forklift for 20 years; unless you have your forklift ticket from an accredited and recognized school, you’re not working in Calgary as a forklift operator. The same applies to pretty much any trade or skill; or, as Baffle notes, other fields, including computers.

Still, this isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a boom economy, where the demand is for warm bodies that can do the job no matter what a piece of paper says, or who can learn it quickly. The end result is that a lot of people get a severe reality check and end up disappointed.

8

I think they don’t realize that networking is the primary way that a large portion of people get jobs here in Calgary. If you don’t have a network, you’ll not have access to the better jobs available regardless of your education level. It is just the way it is here, from my experience at least.

9

I dunno, I’m not hitting it rich in Saskatchewan, but at least I know I don’t have any possibility of being paralyzed working on the oil fields like my brother’s friend did.

10

My son worked in the oil field. He made upwards of $8,000 to $10,000 a month. Unfortunately he was killed on the job September 16, 2006. So yes you can make very good money, but you can end up paying with your life.

11

I’m very sorry to hear that and hope you are getting through this period as well as can be expected.

12

Yeah, I was making $6.45 an hour as a security guard in the 80’s and remember rumbling with a guy as I tried to arrest him for breaking into a food fair outlet. I could have been killed for ~1200 a month. Luckily, I wasn’t. Things can happen in any profession. Commuting to work downtown carries risks that, frankly, scare the crap out of me. I’m happier flying across the world and working in Yemen. It feels safer to me.
In any case, sorry for your loss, btw.

13

I agree with Spoons, for most people the boom has little or no impact. I know a few white collar people who work for oil & gas companies, and besides the fact nobody is getting laid off, their income is more or less the same.

As for working in the fields, I have a few friends who do that too, and although the cash is good - most of them live a lifestyle when they come home that really doesn’t lend to a great change in their finances. Those guys party hard when they are back in town.

Calgary overall, has changed though. For those who are renting, it is hard to find a place, and those who want to buy, the cost has skyrocketted.

What is not better, is the culture of the city. Lots of people have moved into the city, and Calgary which once prided itself upon having a small town feel with a city population, is now really a city. And we are having the crime, gang, traffic, etc issues of a city.

It doesn’t seem like there are many locals (people who have grown up here), and many people who move here don’t really like this city, and don’t care about its history, culture, old buildings, local arts scenes, or much else about this city. When buildings with historical significance are torn down to build another over price condo, nobody cares. When local artists put on shows, or local bands play, nobody cares.

When you ride transit here all you have to do is listen to other people’s conversations. Everyone is from elsewhere, and they all plan to move back. If they are asked if they like the city, they answer that they don’t. They are just here for the money. They have no “investment” in this city, except as a temporary place to hang their hat until they can bring the cash they milk out of the boom back to Weyburn, Dartmouth, or Windsor.

Add to this, that there is also a transient criminal in the city. I am sure many of these people moved here to find work, but either didn’t have the skills, or lost their job. There is a high number of former rig workers who now are crack & meth users who were booted and have resorted to crime to feed their habits.

I, for one, don’t care for, about the boom. I love my city, and I rather have a softer job market, and less of the transient element in this city.

14

I remember reading about this a few years ago. This area is the only one in the country to match income levels in the US while still maintaining services Canadians claim as benefits to them.
Calgary-Edmonton Corridor

USA Today

15

Let’s be realistic - everybody loves to bitch about the places they live in. But Alberta is doing significantly better than the rest of Canada, and it would be pretty rude of us to complain about how tough we have it. Taxes are lower than anywhere else in Canada. Incomes are higher than anywhere else. Most of our government services are much better than in other provinces. Our health care has pretty good metrics compared to other provinces. We have the lowest unemployment rate not just in Canada, but probably anywhere in North America. We have the tax base to fund a lot of projects that don’t get done in other provinces.

Alberta was the only province in Canada to show job gains on the last jobs report. We have a net influx of population from cross-Canada immigration.

We certainly have challenges. The economic growth has been so rapid that the infrastructure is straining under the load. As in any adjusting economy, some people get left behind. It’s not the old richer/vs poorer divide now - the damage is more random than that. Some skills that were previously low-paying skyrocketed in value and price. My brother is a Journeyman tradesman, and he makes twice the income I do as a software developer.

Likewise, the rather chaotic housing market helped some low income people tremendously, and destroyed some wealthy people. We were lucky to buy a house just before the bubble hit, and our house has tripled in value and we’ve earned enough on paper from our house in the past 5 years to pay for half our retirement. On the other hand, if you bought at the peak you’re starting to sweat a little now, as home prices have retrenched by about 15%, and may go down further.

But through it all, the bottom line is that we’re filthy rich, and that includes the government. We all benefit from the lack of a sales tax and low provincial income taxes. We benefit from the four lane roads connecting all the cities and many major towns. We can afford to experiment with a 7000MW wind power industry. Life’s pretty damned good in Alberta. And if you say it’s not, I’ll bet there are some people in Quebec and Newfoundland who would like to discuss it.

16

That’s a pretty rosy picture you’re painting there, Sam. I wasn’t in Calgary for the last boom, but I sure as hell have been here for all of this one, and there are huge downsides to our booming economy. Maybe Edmonton isn’t feeling the pangs as hard as Calgary is, but I’d love to get out of Calgary. As others have said, there are any number of downsides to living here now that weren’t here 10 years ago. I feel like I live in a city of 500,000 that has 1,000,000 people crammed into it. There’s a huge psychological cost to living here.

It is an employee’s market in Calgary, but someone needs to tell the employers that - they’re still playing all the shitty old games from the 80’s and 90’s. If you haven’t bought a house here yet, you’re not likely to be able to do so any time soon if you aren’t a high-income family, especially with rents as high as they are. Maybe healthcare is working better in Edmonton, but here in Calgary, we have three hospitals for 1 million people (plus a kids’ hospital, but that doesn’t help the rest of us). We also have property values that have tripled in the last five years, and property tax increases that have gone along with it. That doesn’t kill working people, but older folks on fixed incomes who’ve seen their close-in properties skyrocket are feeling a major pinch for taxes.

Plus we have a city infrastructure planning department who, I swear, are trying their very best to make traffic worse in the city. Not just with road closings for construction (why they had to do construction on every bridge over Deerfoot at the same time this summer, I can’t tell you), but by restricting traffic on the smaller arteries that people actually use. And then there’s the city transit - gets you to and from downtown fairly efficiently, but God help you if you’re going anywhere except to and from downtown.

Calgary is getting more and more expensive to live in, and I don’t see a lot of benefits to being here. Possibly being in Alberta is great, it’s just being in Calgary that sucks (the whole Heritage Fund thing and low taxes are really great).

17

Calgary has two seasons: winter and construction.

OK, now that we’ve dispensed with the old joke, we can move on to the serious stuff. I think these are among the challenges that Sam mentioned when he spoke if “the infrastructure straining under the load.” Mind, a lot of it was also bad planning; you cannot build roads and bridges and fail to maintain them, which is my guess as to what happened in Calgary. True, the boom means there is money to pay for such repairs, but at the cost of months of delayed traffic and frustrated commuters.

City transit is little help, as you note, featherlou. You’re right–it will get you downtown and back fairly well, but the problems getting elsewhere in the city are not limited to Calgary–this was a problem when I lived in southern Ontario as well. Still, Calgary could (if it sucks up its pride for a moment) take a lesson from Toronto and Montreal, and do its best to make public transit as attractive an alternative as possible: more frequent service that goes the shortest route between places, rather than infrequent service that meanders through neighbourhoods and ends up somewhere you would have been at an hour ago if you had only taken the car.

But planning is key, and that doesn’t seem to have been done. Neighbourhoods are planned without any regard for schools, public transit, police and fire stations, and so on. The LRT is supposed to be expanded eventually up Harvest Hills Blvd, but nobody quite knows how it’s going to get there. Shouldn’t the City be buying up easements on the planned route now, before such rights become more expensive, as they undoubtedly will in the future? The Deerfoot interchanges need a great deal of improvement to handle increased volumes of traffic safely, but the PTB prefer to repave the Deerfoot instead–presumeably so you can sit in comfort while CPS sorts out yet another accident caused by two cars trying to exit and enter in the same few meters of on/off ramp. But rather than addressing these issues, the City seems to be more concerned with such important issues as littering bylaws and homeowners’ lawn care.

To bring this back to the OP, we’re better off in the sense that we do have lower income taxes and no sales tax and such. But as you can guess, we have our own set of challenges.

18

It’s hard for me to tell, but I would say that I’m not better off because of the boom, but because I went to school.

Four years ago I was in college, I was working retail (for eight dollars an hour, fourteen is not as common as you might think though maybe more common than it might otherwise be) and just making ends meet. Now I have an office job working 8-4:30 (or 5, depending on the day), I have a car (I took transit for a long time, my commute is now more like half an hour where before it was approx an hour and a half, 3-4 hours if it snowed or there was an accident), and some months I am still just making ends meet, but I’ve been putting away a (very) little money in the hopes I might one day have enough for a downpayment on a house and paying off my student loans.

So yeah, the boom hasn’t really given me a boost. My brother on the other hand has gotten one. He’s almost 22, has a decent number of ‘toys’ (two trucks, one is a beater for hunting though, atv’s, and a plot of land he plans to build on starting next year). He also works practically seven days a week installing sprinkler systems everywhere from BC to Saskatchewan and Calgary to Fort McMurray.

19

Personally, yes, we are much better off then we were four or five years ago. That had a bit to do with luck though.

We bought our first townhouse in 2002, and by the time we sold it in 2005, the market was booming and we made about $100K on it. That was a bit of luck and a bit of the market.

The hubby (boyfriend then) worked in the oil field at the time. He was gone for 16 days, home for 5. If he worked through his days off, I didn’t see him for about 5 weeks. He took home about $6K a month in the peak season, much less during down times. It goes in annual cycles, they can’t work during certain times of the year.

Between us both we made about $80K a year take home, on average.

We built our second house with the intentions to flip it within a year. The market in that area almost crashed and our house was for sale for 7 months. It finally sold (pure luck), bringing us about $90K profit. None of the houses in that neighborhood have sold since we sold ours, and that was almost a year ago now.

The hubby finally left the oil field, partly to do what he really wanted to (firefighter) and partly because his time away was totally ruining our relationship. I’m warning you, if you are in a relationship, you WILL face problems if one of you works in the oil field. So many divorces and cheating husbands, it’s horrible. All the alcoholism, drugs and hookers. Ugh.

Anyhow, I got a number of raises in the last year and we’re back to what we were earning before the hubby became a firefighter (and took a 50% pay cut). We’re comfortable, but living in the city is expensive. I take transit, but if I drive to work, it’s minimum $20 to park.

My last electricity and gas bill was $400 (and it’s summer!) and our cell phones are $160. It’s expensive here.

I’ve also become very disenchanted with Calgary in recent years. I don’t know if it’s the influx of new residents or what, but many people are rude, pushy, assholes, and I miss the old Calgary. We’re considering moving away in the next 5 years or so and it couldn’t come sooner, to be honest.

20

Maybe that’s what I’m experiencing - not only the rude, pushy assholes, but me becoming one, too, because they’re turning me into one.

Spoons, the planning really does seem to suck beyond all normal expectation - new roads get built and opened here at well over 100% capacity the day they open. Roads that people are using as alternate routes because the main routes are too crowded get shut down or partially closed (called “traffic calming”). My husband has a theory that the Calgary planners want to keep Calgarians in their cars as long as possible to use more gas, and I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t right.