The NEP refugee
Dick Cooksley packed his bags and left Alberta in the early 1980s as then prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government implemented the oilpatch- crippling National Energy Program. Between 1980 and 1985, average housing prices in Calgary and Edmonton collapsed 25 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively. He lost his house and his company. “We were going like gangbusters. Our company, MCC Developments, had a value of $18 million and only half of it was leveraged or financed, so we figured we could weather anything. As it turned out, though, it didn’t matter whether you had a corner store or what kind of business — the market just seemed like it was frozen.
“In our case, my business partners and I thought, ‘We’ll be OK. We’ll cover this and we can ride this out.’ Well, the banks started calling everybody’s notes and that meant we had to come up with money that wasn’t there.
“To be practical, my wife and I thought we’d sell the house to put off the bankruptcy. The housing market started collapsing at the same time. In order to sell the house without going into foreclosure, I ended up letting it go. We lost everything, and of course the market never did recover in the short term — it took years.
“I think that our mortgage rate was somewhere around 18 per cent. We were lucky to sell it with the interest rate and the condition in Alberta. We walked away with nothing. Not a cent. If it wasn’t for the grace of God, we might have done something desperate. I was driving a Mercedes at the time. That went.
“I thought, ‘If I have to start all over again, I’m going to go somewhere I can sail and ski.’ We drove out to the coast in an old Ford station wagon. When you come out to Vancouver Island, it’s not because you want to be vice-president of General Motors or some such thing. You end up opening a doughnut shop, an antique shop or selling real estate. So I sold real estate.
We eventually recovered, but of course nowhere near where we were back when we were in Alberta.”
WALKED AWAY WITH NOTHING
Dick Cooksley