From boom town to bust in five short years

The once-thriving metropolis of Estevan boasts all the modern amenities of a larger city with a small-town feel.   

They’ve got your McDonald’s, your Wal-Mart, even your two-screen movie theatre. 

“It’s gonna close down,” said my nephew, a four-year Estevan resident. To think a small-town theatre could ever turn a profit, much less during a pandemic, strikes me as optimistic. Covid-19 may be the final blow. 

In so many ways, the pandemic is Estevan’s kick to the gut while they were still down. The self-proclaimed Energy City can’t live for long off $40/barrel oil. It’s been struggling since the oil crash of 2014. 

My nephew would know. He came to Canada earlier that year to take a one-year program in machining, a sure-fire way to gain employment and immigrate to Canada. In this red-hot economy, he was told, there would be no problem finding a job. Machinists were in high demand, with some paid up to $50/hour.  

But as he started school and oil prices tumbled, the mood suddenly changed. By his last day of class, his instructors offered little hope on the employment front. Try looking outside the big cities, they suggested. 

And so he did. He found a small machining shop in the heart of Saskatchewan’s oil and gas industry. 

By that time, one could actually find a place to live in this once overcrowded city of 11,000. No longer were workers sleeping on shop floors, as the stories go. Things had returned to “normal.” No more crazy traffic, no more housing shortages, no more drugs (we can always hope). 

While driving through Estevan and North Dakota in 2011, I marveled at the bustle – the endless number of trucks, oil rigs and commerce taking advantage of the Bakken oil formation. New methods of oil extraction made North Dakota the second largest producer of oil in the U.S., and Estevan was quickly becoming the new Lloydminster (with a PST, mind you). The pace of life at the time was unnerving. 

There was immense wealth to be made during the decade-long oil boom, with many young men having far too much money to know what to do with. But today, amidst an unrelenting pandemic, these regions are facing a reckoning, with consequences we can only hope will not be as dire as in the U.S. We’ve only to look at the Rust Belt states to see how the loss of an industry can suck the life out of communities. 

Hopefully it won’t be that bad. Maybe the post-pandemic economy will see a resurgence in oil prices. Maybe there will be opportunities in green energy, although no one really knows what that means. 

As for my nephew, he’s not waiting around. Like his friends before him – what I call the Estevan diaspora – he'll be moving away soon.  

His views on the city’s future are less than optimistic. “When the power plants close, Estevan is done,” he told me matter-of-factly. 

A short walk from his place, one can see the grey plumes spew from the city’s most reliable employer: a coal-fired power plant. “The smoke used to be much darker, people say.” 

But “clean coal” can only take us so far. We’re told the era of fossil fuels is over – that it has to be over soon. In places like Estevan, the costs will be steep.

Conspiracy theorists having heyday

“You have to dig deeper,” counselled my friend’s boss. If you want to truly understand how the world works, you have to dig deeper. Past the mainstream media. To get to the truth.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon, which propose among other things that Democrats are running a global child sex-trafficking ring, are no longer fringe groups. These are major donors of disinformation, and they let you in with the secret promise of knowing the truth.

Behind all the government and media misinformation (they’re co-conspirators, after all), one can get to the bottom of things. You just have to dig a bit deeper.

I have to admit, I’ve gone through times in my life where I’ve been tempted to dig deeper myself. Fifteen years ago I read a 600-page book on how American leaders conspired with the terrorists of 9/11 and that the end of oil (and civilization) was imminent. It was incredibly believable.

Around that same time I watched a “mockumentary” on how the moon landing was staged by the U.S. government. The show left me scratching my head until the last minute, when the show’s host confirmed it was all made up.

It showed me how even a devout believer in NASA’s space program could be deceived. The most outrageous flat-earth theories can be made believable. And when these theories support our overarching worldview, so much the better.

Conspiracy theories have always had legs, but what they didn’t have in the past was vast inter-connected communities made possibly by the Internet. Unlike 15 years ago, when I had to actually read a book to delve into a good conspiracy theory, now we can find what we want with the click of a button.

These are well developed sites. Some of them, like the anti-vaccination website I recently came across, are quite subtle. They don’t explicitly talk about their cause. They have an air of believability, supported by what sound to be intelligent people. And they likely are. 

Conspiracy theory adherents are often well educated. Even geniuses can be delusional.

Tom Nichols, in his book: The Death of Expertise, offers examples of prominent, Nobel Prize winners who go on to purport theories that turned out to be utter nonsense. Even Albert Einstein was not immune, but we tend to not talk about the theories he proposed later in life, namely because they were debunked. This phenomenon has become so common among Nobel Prize winners that it even has a name: the Nobel Disease.

Most of us aren’t as smart as Einstein, although at times we may like to think we are. As individuals who have access to vast amounts of information, we can easily convince ourselves that we are smarter than the experts.

Social media platforms like YouTube/Google, Twitter and Facebook encourage this tendency, where disinformation actually spreads faster and more broadly than real information. Conspiracy theories are much more fascinating than real news, after all, and these platforms tend to accelerate what humans tend to do most naturally: spread rumours and disinformation.

The creators of these sites didn't intend to promote false information, as conveyed in Netflix's new documentary, The Social Dilemma. It wasn’t they’re primary goal. All they wanted was to gain a viewer’s attention for as long as possible, and then monetize it. It just turned out that disinformation made the most money. 

This was a real revelation to me. As a person who doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media sites and who still consumes “mainstream media,” I had trouble understanding what was going on around me.

Anti-mask rallies in Saskatoon? Parents refusing to vaccinate their kids against terrible diseases? Covid-19 is a hoax? Now it all makes sense.

These people have, in their minds, done their due diligence. They’ve taken the advice of their online peers and dug deeper. And it’s scary what they’ve found.