Alberta Oil Culture Turns Industry Into Identity

October 21, 2026 | Alberta, Canada

Alberta is one big oil and gas company town

By Bob Weber, freelance journalist

Alberta’s voice is the voice of oil. Oil has fuelled Alberta’s rise in Canada and given force to its demands. Oil is why Alberta can use national unity as a bargaining chip to wring concessions for its favoured industry, bending prime ministers to its will.

But oil is not Alberta. While industry interests often put the province at odds with other parts of the country – think pipelines or other infrastructure that affects neighbouring jurisdictions without benefitting them – Wild Rose Country doesn’t think or feel that much differently than the rest of Canada. A University of Alberta-led team has been conducting extensive polling, focus groups and other research on that question since 2019. Common Ground’s conclusion: “Over the past few years, our research team engaged thousands of Albertans, revealing a stark contrast between their diverse identities and the province’s perceived ‘Wild West’ image rooted in notions of populism and individualism. Despite this stereotype, Albertans’ actual political preferences lean centrist and progressive, particularly on social issues like health care and inclusion.”

John Santos, chief data scientist for Calgary-based Janet Brown Opinion Research, says his polling shows 82 per cent of Albertans asked agree more should be done to reduce male-female wage gaps. Three-quarters of them agree there’s too much income inequality. Given a 10-point left-right political scale, Santos says Albertans put themselves, on average, between 5.5 and 5.8.

Albertans also agree with Canadian support for environmental protection and renewable energy. In a 2022 paper, political scientist Lori Thorlakson found wide support for energy transition. “If you’re coming from another part of the country, you probably wouldn’t guess that a majority of Alberta supports the energy transition – not only supporting a move toward more renewables but also a move away from fossil fuels,” she says. That includes people who work in oil and gas. “Engineers in these industries often were very interested in and optimistic about new technologies.”

So why do Albertans line up behind an industry and the politics it favours, even when it conflicts with their own beliefs? Thorlakson’s research offers a clue: “It’s not necessarily employment in the industry that predicts support,” she said, “but the extent to which a person identifies emotionally with the industry.”

That emotional identification seems key. It would be hard to overstate the presence of oil and gas, especially in the countryside. It’s common for the sons and daughters of rural Alberta to work a few years in the ‘patch before taking over the farm. “All of us are one degree away from the oil and gas industry,” says Paul McLauchlin, longtime reeve of Ponoka County in central Alberta and former president of Rural Municipalities Alberta. McLauchlin has gas wells on his own land. “You’d be hard pressed to find a single rural Albertan that isn’t somehow linked to, fed by or involved with (the industry).”

Those links go deep. “If you read the history of the building of the Alberta oil industry, folks went straight from ranches, straight from farms, straight onto the rigs. They, in that sense, preserved their place high place in Alberta society as being the breadwinners,” says Jared Wesley, a University of Alberta professor and head of the Common Ground project. It shows up in pop culture, says McLauchlin.

He points out the popular TV shows Yellowstone – about ranchers – and Landman – about the oil industry – were made by the same team. “That shows the direct line culturally – that sort of Wild West, free-dealing, hard-working view of the world,” he says.

Farmers and drillers both take risks and produce commodities the price of which they don’t control. “You’re at the will of everybody else, but you still work really hard and sometimes you don’t make it and sometimes you do. That culture, oil and gas, is really tied exactly to the culture of being a rural Albertan.”

Those cultural links may be natural, but they’re also carefully nurtured. Wesley has long argued that the reality of who Albertans actually are has been obscured by an image drilled into us: blue-collar, hard-working, rural and male.

His team went into schools and asked students to draw a picture of an average Albertan. In Grade 3, three per cent of students drew an oil worker. By Grade 12, fully one-quarter of them did –although only six per cent of Albertans work directly in oil and gas. Far from that image, Common Ground says census data suggests the average Albertan is a single mom in Calgary making under $50,000 a year.

“We’ve talked a lot with teachers and curriculum developers to figure out if there’s something in the curriculum and nothing immediately pops out,” Wesley says. “It seems to be about broader socialization than it is about school socialization.”

Governments have played a role, says Wesley. “For a lot of conservative governments in Alberta’s history, it’s been about projecting an image of being dominated by oil and gas – a wild west culture that is hyper masculine, that is more about homogeneity of the community – ethnically, culturally and increasingly religiously. It is really a success story from a government marketing point of view. They have done a really good job of marketing Alberta as being the image of an oil and gas society, not just an oil and gas economy. Alberta is one big company town.”

For example, in 2022, the governing United Conservatives declared rodeo Alberta’s official sport – an activity which, except for the Calgary Stampede, occurs mostly in small towns and in which a tiny percentage of Albertans actually participate. The province has many times more pickleball players than bronc riders. “The UCP government is making a concerted effort more than any other government in Alberta’s history to reinforce Alberta’s image as an oil and gas society,” Wesley says.

Santos argues identification between industry and government is rooted in Alberta’s economic past. “It’s this Alberta mindset of government as a business, that government isn’t meant to handle redistribution of resources or engage in acts of governance. The purpose of government was to manage the business of producing the dominant commodity. In (past) days it was grain. Arguably, it’s even more applicable to oil and gas.”

Now, the industry behind those self-images faces questions.

“We perceive calls for energy transition or attacks on the fossil fuel industry as a threat to our identity,” Thorlakson says. But Albertans are very aware of the side on which their bread is buttered. We rally ‘round the flag when the industry is attacked. “It’s taken personally,” says Thorlakson. “It’s seen as someone saying that our way of life is somehow wrong.”

That support is socially enforced. “People definitely feel like they can’t speak ill of the oil and gas industry in this province,” Wesley says.

That defensiveness exacerbates an innate Albertan truculence. There isn’t a province in Canada that doesn’t beef with the feds, but Alberta may do it better than anyone. “Embedded in Alberta’s political culture and the province’s view of itself is a chip on the shoulder,” says Wesley. “I think there’s a bit of martyrdom that’s built into the Alberta political DNA.”

The reference to martyrdom is apt.

Oil has become the centre pole of a tent sheltering cultural, political and economic values. In the official narrative, to shake that pole is to threaten all that huddles beneath it. Oil in Alberta has become something like a state religion. In the classic science fiction novel Dune, author Frank Herbert warned of what happens with state religions:

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in the blind rush until it’s too late.”

Alberta Oil Culture Turns Industry Into Identity

October 21, 2026 | Alberta, Canada

Alberta is one big oil and gas company town

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