There is a phrase that travels through this province like weather. You hear it at the coffee counter, at the worksite gate, in the comment sections that never sleep. People want the good old days back. They say it with a certainty that invites no follow-up, and most of the time, no follow-up comes. The phrase lands, heads nod, and everyone moves on as though something has been settled.
But nothing has been settled. Because nobody ever asks the obvious question. Which good old days. Which year on the calendar are we pointing at. What, exactly, are we trying to walk back into.
It is worth asking, and worth asking honestly, because the phrase has started doing two jobs at once, and only one of them is worth defending.
Which Good Old Days
Press someone hard enough and you tend to get one of two answers.
The first answer is about people. It is the version that means a time when fewer faces were familiar, when the province looked a certain way and felt smaller, when the table had fewer chairs around it. And if that is what you mean, then say it. Say it plainly, in full sentences, where the rest of us can hear it. Because the people you are talking to, the moderates and the newcomers and the neighbours who built a life here the same way your grandparents did, are listening for exactly what you are getting at. They deserve to know whether you are asking for a stronger province or just a smaller one.
Here is the trouble with that version. It does not survive being said out loud. A province does not get stronger by shrinking the circle of who belongs in it. Alberta was built by people who arrived from somewhere else with nothing but a willingness to work, and the ones who came last are no different from the ones who came first. If your good old days require fewer of them, then you are not describing a better Alberta. You are describing a smaller one, and you owe everyone the honesty of admitting that is the trade you are proposing. Stop hinting at it. Say the whole sentence, or drop the half of it you keep leaving hanging.
The second answer is the one worth your time. And it has almost nothing to do with who lives here.
The Bargain Nobody Names
When most people say they want the good old days, what they are actually describing is a bargain. A deal that used to exist between effort and reward, and that has come apart in plain sight.
The deal was simple, and for a long stretch it held. You worked, and the work was enough. One income could carry a mortgage. A high school diploma and a strong back could land you a job that paid for a house, a truck, a family, and a future. You could see a doctor without rationing the visit. You could leave the garage open and the keys in the ignition. The street raised your kids alongside you. Effort went in one end and a life came out the other, and the exchange rate between the two felt fair.
That is the thing people miss. Not a decade. A deal.
The Deal Is Genuinely Broken
And the deal is genuinely broken. This is not nostalgia talking. It is arithmetic.
A home in this province used to cost something close to what a working family could carry. The international benchmark for affordable housing sits at three times a household’s annual income or lower. Calgary now sits at 4.3 times, parked firmly in the category the analysts politely call seriously unaffordable. That figure landed this month, in a report released June 11, and it confirms what anyone shopping for a first home already felt in their gut. The math that used to work does not work anymore. A young couple doing everything right, both of them employed, both of them careful, now stares at a number that their parents never had to stare at. The effort is the same. The reward moved.
Multiply that across a life and you understand the grief. The grocery bill that climbs faster than the paycheque. The trade that once guaranteed a middle-class living and now guarantees a renewal you cannot quite cover. The doctor who is no longer there. The catalytic converter sawed off a truck in a driveway it would once have sat in safely. None of this is imaginary. None of it is a feeling that needs to be lectured away. It is the lived experience of a bargain that someone stopped honouring, out of the headlines, and the people who notice are not being unreasonable. They are paying attention.
So when they say the good old days, give them the credit of hearing what they mean. They mean the deal. They mean the proposition that hard work should buy a life, and that the price of that life should bear some relationship to the wage that pays for it. That is not backward-looking sentiment. That is a demand for fairness, and it is the most reasonable demand a working person can make.
A Feeling Is Not a Plan
But here is where honesty has to cut in both directions, including toward our own side. Because a feeling is not a plan. You cannot legislate your way back to 1985, and you should not want to. The good old days, taken literally, are gone, and a great deal of what was lost alongside them deserved to go. The answer is not a time machine. The answer is to name the bargain out loud and then go rebuild it.
That is the harder, more honest version of the phrase, and it is the one this province should insist on. Stop pointing at the past. Point at the deal. If the complaint is that a single income no longer carries a home, then the work is to fix what made homes cost nine times a salary instead of three. If the complaint is that effort no longer pays, then the work is to clear the obstacles between effort and reward, the taxes and the red tape and the policy choices made far from here by people who never had to live with the result. That is a fight worth having. It is forward-looking, it is winnable, and it does not require anyone to long for a smaller province.
Ask the Question
So the next time the phrase comes around the coffee counter, ask the question. What do you mean. Not as a trap, but as a standard. Make the person say the whole sentence. If they mean the deal, the bargain between work and a life, then they are right, and they deserve allies who will fight for it in the present tense rather than mourn it in the past one. And if they mean something else, something smaller, then the question will have done its work of dragging the half-spoken thing into the open where it can be answered.
That is what the moderates and the newcomers are waiting for, by the way. They are not trying to win an argument. They are trying to understand what you are actually saying. Finish the sentence and you might be surprised how many of them are standing on your side of the broken deal.
Alberta has never been a place that asked to go backward. It was built by people walking toward something. The good old days were never really a date on the calendar. They were a promise that the work would be worth it. That promise can be made again. But only by people honest enough to say what they are actually asking for, and serious enough to go and build it.
