Stampede is back. So is the politicking
Behind the din or rides & rodeo lurk oil prices
The Calgary Stampede is underway, and yes, it does feel good to type those words, even from the northern end of Highway 2. Last year’s Covid-driven cancellation of the event felt like the culmination of a bleak period of oil price woes, high unemployment and accumulating public debt for Alberta. This year the festival is back more or less as it was. No, the economy’s not, and the public treasury’s not, and yes, COVID may haunt the whole thing like a bad smell, and there won’t be much international tourist traffic ... but the commercial capital of the province seems good and ready to Stampede.
Hotel managers in the city are rejoicing at 50 per cent occupancy rates that would ordinarily be, well, double that. And the concert venue Nashville North, a core element of the Stampede for the younger folk, has been filled to its (restricted) capacity. The experiment of requiring Nashville North attendees to show proof of vaccination or pass a rapid COVID test before entering seems to be working efficiently, whether or not it is worthwhile. The city of Calgary is down to just 278 active COVID cases, and is having almost literally no new COVID hospitalizations. About half the population of the province has been double-vaccinated.
Albertans from outside Calgary like to heckle the Stampede.
Edmontonians know that Calgary’s cowboy image is mostly an awkward late-imperial contrivance, and the people of the smaller communities in the hinterland have more earnest and serious fairs and rodeos of their own. Inside Calgary, Stampede week is nothing but a nuisance to a great many people, ranging from paramedics to dog owners who dislike fireworks.
But it is hard in some ways not to envy the enduring marriage between Calgary and the Stampede, and most Calgarians eventually come to appreciate the half-nonsensical thing with all its contradictions. 2021 might even be a special year for Stampede dissenters. With subtle restrictions and COVID fears still so visible, some of the sweaty berserk energy that typifies the festival in good times will have been bled out of it.
People can just go mill around in a crowd for the first time in a long time, and never again in our lifetimes is this likely to feel quite the way it does in 2021. (The next big opportunity to do this in Edmonton won’t arrive until July 23 at the earliest; the city pre-emptively cancelled its own annual K-days festival in June, but the contractor that runs the K-days midway is shrewdly plowing ahead all the same.)
Here’s what’s odd about this year’s Stampede season. Traditionally, all Albertans have obsessively kept one eye on a single economic parameter that is a master element in their lives: the price of crude oil. As I write this, the benchmark spot price of West Texas Intermediate is US$74. This would normally mean an extra-feverish Stampede for Calgary’s traders, lawyers and other oil-involved businessmen. And it does produce a rising tide for Alberta’s red-soaked budget; this year’s incorporated a forecast WTI price of just US$46. Even six months of prices at the current level (I pause here to knock wood) would knock a few billion dollars off the eventual deficit.
Nobody, however, is crowing about this. A high oil price and a revived Stampede might be expected to be
a bonanza for the governing United Conservatives, but in fact the immediate psychological link between oil prices and Alberta’s characteristic mood seems to have been broken. Job numbers in the province are still lagging, and there may be no reason to expect them to respond to a short period of global oil scarcity.
For capital investment to revive and bring real heat to Alberta’s labour markets, we would need years of US$75 oil, not months. And there’s not much room left, especially after COVID, to use the extra public revenue on big showpiece schemes. The cash may be devoured in public-sector wage bargaining before it can even be used to pay off the exploding credit card balance.
Alberta’s UCP is sticking pretty relentlessly to the traditional Peter Lougheed strategy that kept Conservatives in office in Alberta for 44 straight years: behave, as far as possible, as though the Opposition does not exist. Not only is this not an offensive strategy: it is barely even a defensive one when it comes to UCP errors and publicity troubles.
Jason Kenney certainly has his social media proxies out battling for him on the internet battlefield, but they don’t create nearly as much ideological din as the federal Conservatives do. If the party’s braintrust has a plan to actively represent the New Democrats as being militant advocates of high public-sector salaries and not much else, it is not in evidence.
The New Democrats themselves, unchallenged as the alternative government and looking strong in polls, toyed with a critique of Alberta’s relatively aggressive Covid-reopening schedule in the run-up to Stampede. They seem, however, to have quickly concluded this critique wouldn’t work in Calgary, which will remain the focus of Alberta electioneering for the foreseeable future.
NDP Leader Rachel Notley has decided she cannot afford not to Stampede, or to let her MLAS denounce the whole thing as dangerous madness: she is spending time in Calgary, but mostly to hold bemasked outdoor chats with small clusters of voters. I can’t help suspecting that these timid bull sessions attract mostly people who are already big fans of Rachel Notley, but for all one knows, this might have been the right way for an Alberta politician to Stampede all along.
CALGARIANS ... COME TO APPRECIATE THE HALF-NONSENSICAL
THING. — COLBY COSH