Only the most out of touch person actually thought Calgary was still an oil and gas town. I could be wrong but I believe our largest empty or near empty towers belonged to Husky and Nexen (or whatever they were before vacating). If you've been paying attention Calgary hasn't been an oil and gas town in awhile (8+ years?). It also hasn't moved on, nothing is black and white, and searching for answers you can write in stone is a fools game.
That's really not true, though. It's true that we're not still an oil and gas town. People who live in Calgary and are involved with industry know that Calgary isn't still an oil and gas town. But people who already live in Calgary and are involved with industry aren't the ones that a national editorial is trying to reach. The point is that people outside Calgary don't necessarily know that.
The Canada West foundation
did a study surveying 18-45 year olds with postsecondary education in Alberta, as well as Toronto and Vancouver. Here's one of the stats I found the most interesting, looking at Toronto/Vancouver residents who were more and less familiar with Alberta:
Four in five of them don't think we have a diverse economy. And two in three Albertans!
They broke the people they surveyed into a subgroup of those who were the most likely to move -- the ones we are most likely to be able to attract -- and then broke that subset of movers into seven segments. Here's how these people describe Alberta when given a blank slate:
Oil and Gas was the single largest thing mentioned; conservative second and intolerant fourth. (I wonder if the recent election might be one reason for the timing of this editorial.)
If we're just an oil and gas town, then we don't need to convince skilled young people to come, because -- like it or not -- you have to come here to extract our oil, and oil is a global commodity. But if we're more than that, then we need to attract a skilled, educated workforce to compete with all of the other places they can live. And to do that, they need to know that we're not just an oil and gas town.