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.