Sometimes what you need is a good old-fashioned slap in the face.
In the 1987 movie Moonstruck, a great scene had Cher slap Nicolas Cage square in the face - twice. "Snap out of it!" Loretta hollered in her Brooklyn drawl, as Ronny regained his lost senses.
Fast-forward to 2008, and Alberta is getting a similar smack, a big bucket of cold water dumped on a white-hot economy that had caused a collective loss of good sense.
Perhaps Alberta could be forgiven for the temporary insanity that started around 2005. Consider what we've been through.
House prices were skyrocketing, and real estate was being snapped up online, sight unseen, for above list price. People were bribed with iPods and other crazy perks to work at doughnut shops. Bentley dealerships couldn't keep up with demand. The Bank of Canada came up with a new category of economic indicator - "Canada excluding Alberta" - because Wild Rose Country was skewing the national averages.
As a result, Alberta built up a delusional superhero persona, a false sense of invincibility that permeated the mood and expectations of ordinary citizens.
Reality is crashing in. Oil and gas prices have snapped back to something closer to their historic norms (though they're still higher). Houses sit on the market for weeks, not hours. Some high-end condo projects in Calgary have been put on hold. Even a couple of oil-sands projects have been scaled back.
Now, that 50-year-old bungalow purchased 10 years ago for $150,000 won't actually sell for its list price of $800,000. You can almost hear the owner: "What? You expect me to give it away?"
Alberta is still in great shape going into this global economic slowdown. But it has weaknesses, too, and some of those weaknesses are starting to show.
For one thing, Alberta is still a commodities-based economy, and commodity prices have always been extremely cyclical. Up and down and up and down. This isn't new, nor is the current slump in energy prices unexpected. Younger players in the industry may be thinking the end is nigh, but the veterans roll their eyes. They've seen this all before - it's just what commodity prices do.
Also, Alberta's work force is notoriously fickle. Interprovincial population ebbs and flows with the economy as regularly as the ocean tide. At the moment, the inflow of workers from other provinces is still on an upswing, but that's only because conditions in most other provinces are even worse. The trick that Alberta needs to learn is to create the kind of great communities that keep people in the province even during challenging times.
A cohort of young Albertans under 25 has never known unemployment above 5 per cent. That can't be healthy. What happens to one's work ethic when all you've ever experienced is people begging you to work for them? If the labour market in Alberta softens a bit over the next few years, and workers actually have to look for work, all the better.
Alberta is still a small province. The GDP per capita is huge and continues to grow, but its population isn't much higher than that of a big New York City borough. More than a dozen cities in China are more populous than all of Alberta. We are a price-taker in global markets. When competing for global talent, we're midgets up against the giants.
Alberta is a great province and has a great future, and its economy remains the envy of much of the world. But the market turmoil of 2008 has given Alberta a good slap in the face. "Snap out of it," the market says, "you're no superhero." Albertans are hoping that simple smack is the worst the market has planned.
Todd Hirsch is a Calgary-based senior economist at ATB Financial. The opinions are his own.