What Calgary’s boom-and-bust workforce taught the rest of Canada about workplace mental health

Calgary’s business cycle provides a number of insightful lessons for other Canadian cities

FEW CITIES IN Canada understand economic whiplash like Calgary. When oil is high the city hires fast, builds towers, and pays salaries that turn heads in every other province. When the price drops, the layoffs arrive in waves that empty whole floors of downtown office space at once. Workers in that city have learned something the rest of the country is now catching up to, and it is a lesson the team at Curio Counselling, a Calgary practice that has sat across from clients through more than one downturn, sees play out in real time: the deepest damage from a bad economy is rarely just financial. It lands on people’s mental health, it lingers long after the markets recover, and the employers who ignore it pay for it twice. London has its own version of this story, and the parallel is worth drawing.

This is not a soft topic for HR to file under wellness. It is a business risk that Calgary has stress-tested for two decades, and the findings transfer to any city whose fortunes rise and fall with a single industry.

A city that runs on confidence

Calgary’s economy is built on energy, and energy is built on confidence. When global oil prices climb, capital floods in, projects break ground, and the labour market tightens until companies are paying signing bonuses for roles that barely existed a year earlier. The mood in the city lifts with the commodity. People buy houses at the top of their budget, take on the truck and the mortgage, and assume the good years will hold because they usually have, at least for a while.

Then the cycle turns. The 2014 to 2016 oil price collapse erased tens of thousands of jobs across Alberta, and Calgary’s downtown office vacancy rate climbed to levels that made national headlines. The 2020 shock layered a pandemic on top of an energy slump. Each time, the same pattern followed. The financial loss was immediate and visible. The psychological loss was slower, quieter, and in many cases more lasting.

London readers will recognize the shape of this even if the commodity is different. A regional economy that leaned heavily on manufacturing learned its own hard lessons when those plants downsized and closed. The diversification into health sciences, insurance, technology, and education did not happen by accident. It happened because the city felt what overdependence costs. Calgary is now running the same play, courting tech and renewables to soften the next downturn. The economic strategy gets plenty of coverage. The human cost of getting there gets far less.

The downturn nobody budgets for

When a company plans for a downturn, it models revenue, headcount, and runway. It does not model the anxiety of the people who survive the cuts, and that is the part that quietly drags performance for years.

Calgary therapists describe a recognizable arc after each major layoff cycle. The people who lose their jobs carry the obvious burden, the financial fear, the blow to identity, the strain on relationships at home. Less obvious, and often more corrosive over time, is what happens to the people who keep their jobs. Survivor guilt is real. So is the dread of being next, the pressure to absorb the work of departed colleagues, and the slow erosion of trust in an employer who, whatever the necessity, just demonstrated that loyalty runs one direction. Productivity does not bounce back the moment oil recovers. The nervous system does not check the commodity price.

This is the cost that never appears on a spreadsheet. An organization can rebuild its headcount in a year and spend the next three operating with a workforce that is quietly burned out, risk-averse, and watching the door. In a city that has been through this repeatedly, the accumulated wear shows up as a population that has learned to brace, and bracing is exhausting.

Why economic stress is different

Ordinary work stress has an end point. The big project ships, the quarter closes, the deadline passes, and the body gets to stand down. Economic stress does not work that way. It is open-ended, outside the individual’s control, and tied to forces no employee can influence. That combination, high stakes plus zero control plus no clear end, is close to a textbook recipe for chronic anxiety.

The physiology matters here. Under a short, sharp stressor the body floods with cortisol and adrenaline, then recovers. Under a long, ambiguous threat it never fully powers down. People in that state sleep badly, concentrate poorly, and make more cautious or more erratic decisions than they would on a steady day. They read a routine reorg announcement as a coded warning. They polish their resume instead of solving the problem in front of them. None of it is irrational. It is a predictable response to an environment that keeps signalling danger.

Calgary’s workforce has lived inside that signal for years at a stretch. The healthiest employers there figured out that you cannot fix the oil price, but you can change how much of that uncertainty lands on your people, and that the difference is enormous.

The lesson that travels

Here is why this matters in London, or Hamilton, or Windsor, or any city whose economy concentrates in a handful of sectors. The specific industry is interchangeable. The dynamic is not. When a regional economy depends on something volatile, its workers inherit that volatility in their bodies, and the employers who treat mental health as a discretionary perk during the good years have nothing to offer when the bad years arrive.

Calgary’s better employers learned to build the support infrastructure while business was strong, not after the downturn hit. That timing is the whole game. Standing up a mental health benefit in the middle of a layoff cycle reads as damage control, and employees see through it. Having it already in place, already normalized, already used by people who are doing fine, means it is there and trusted when the pressure spikes. London businesses diversifying out of their own legacy industries have a window to do the same thing now, before the next shock, rather than scrambling during one.

What forward-looking employers actually do

The companies that handle economic stress well share a few habits, and none of them are expensive relative to the cost of a disengaged workforce.

They communicate early and honestly. Much of the anxiety in a downturn comes from the vacuum where information should be. Employees fill silence with worst-case scenarios. Leaders who say what they know, admit what they do not, and stop pretending everything is fine buy themselves enormous goodwill and lower the ambient fear.

They protect the survivors, not just the departed. Severance and outplacement for people who leave is table stakes. The harder, smarter work is supporting the people who stay, who are often quietly drowning under doubled workloads and unspoken guilt. That means redistributing work realistically, not just absorbing it, and checking in on the people who look fine.

They make professional support easy and stigma-free. The strongest cultures treat counselling the way they treat any other form of maintenance on a valuable asset. It is something capable people do to stay capable, not an admission of weakness. When that framing is genuine, employees use the support earlier, when it works best.

They train managers to notice and respond. A frontline manager is usually the first to see someone slipping. Most have no idea what to say. A few hours of training on how to spot distress, ask a direct and kind question, and point someone toward real help turns managers from bystanders into an early-warning system.

When the workplace is not enough

Workplace measures handle a great deal, but they have a ceiling. There is a point where economic stress stops being a hard season and becomes a clinical condition, when the anxiety persists regardless of news, disrupts sleep and appetite for weeks, triggers panic symptoms, or starts shrinking a person’s life as they avoid anything that might remind them of the threat.

At that stage the most valuable thing an employer can offer is a clear, unembarrassing path to professional help. Structured approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy give people concrete tools to interrupt the spirals that economic uncertainty feeds, and trauma-informed care matters for the many workers, first responders and frontline staff among them, whose stress predates any single layoff. Calgary practices that offer anxiety therapy built their capacity precisely because demand in a boom-bust city is constant, and the line between a rough patch and a treatable condition is one few people can judge on their own. The principle holds anywhere. When the 0+support exists and people know how to reach it, nproblems get addressed while they are still small.

The real return

Calgary did not learn this because its employers are unusually enlightened. It learned it because the city ran the experiment the hard way, repeatedly, and watched what happened to companies that treated mental health as expendable when budgets tightened. They lost their best people, rebuilt slowly, and discovered that a workforce running on fear is a workforce running below capacity.

The return on doing it differently is not sentimental. Employees who feel supported through uncertainty stay, focus, and recover faster when conditions improve. They become the steady core a company needs to rebuild on. The ones left to white-knuckle a downturn alone either leave or stay and quietly check out, and both cost more than the support ever would have.

Every city eventually meets its downturn. London has met a few and built something more resilient on the other side. The economic lesson, diversify, is well understood. The human lesson is the one still waiting to be fully absorbed, and Calgary has spent twenty years spelling it out. The workforce is the asset that carries a business through the bad years. Whether it arrives on the other side intact depends on choices employers make long before the markets turn.+s