I just gave a talk with a few dozen slides on oil demand, supply, prices, Alberta's budget and any number of related topics. I think this is the one that best tells the story of Alberta's oil and gas sector right now and looking ahead 3-5 years.

Alberta, for more than a decade, was an oil sands project construction and staffing economy. IMO that's why we looked relatively diversified: building and staffing new oil sands project means housing, construction, finance, engineering, design, food service, etc.

Yes, we derived substantial provincial revenues from royalties, but that was always thought to be the start of the wave. The real windfall would come later. At some point, we shifted to a view that we would continue seeing more new project construction year-over-year.

Sustaining growth in oil sand project construction means you're not only betting on production growth, but on the second derivative - the growth of growth. Instead, we've seen a collapse in growth, to effectively zero, and that's what's really hitting hard in Alberta.