The mood in Alberta as we lurch into 2016 can probably be summed up as “Secretly hoping for a lot more tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran.” The benchmark oil price is at a 10-year low, and with global inventories of the stuff bursting and the Chinese economy sagging, a little geopolitical conflict between OPEC neighbours is just what the doctor ordered.

I hate to admit to this, mind you. Confessing that troubles for the world mean opportunity for Alberta makes us seem like soulless monsters, even if we pretend to have the proper feelings. Life is just so much easier here with West Texas Intermediate up around $100.

For more than a decade I’ve taken paycheques mostly from employers outside the province. But the effects on my personal welfare of high oil prices would probably still turn out positive, if they could be added up. Higher oil means my extended family fares better. It means my Canadian dollars command more foreign goods. It keeps the value of my sliver of Edmonton property afloat. Having cash-rich local companies nearby even increases my bargaining power a little. Oil prices underpin the local magazine business; they lurk behind creative and scholarly projects, behind TV newsrooms and small publishers.

It’s the paradox of Alberta: the diversity of economic activity and the labour market is ever-increasing, yet no matter what game you get into, you almost inevitably have a toe in the oil business. Want to be a sculptor? Corporate boardroom and building budgets are crucial. Dream of coaching hockey? There’s a reason our Junior A league features an “Oilers” and an “Oil Barons,” who compete for the Gas Drive Cup.

There has been a lot of paradox-mongering in year-end pieces about Alberta. The election of a New Democratic government in May seemed to have signalled the province’s sudden shedding of a “conservative” identity that various pundits are now trying to explain away. Demographic trends were eating away at the traditional conservative political brands all along, and Alberta’s social “conservativeness” was always exaggerated. But the fast turnaround in Alberta electoral politics was prompted, above all, by the moral self-destruction of a political machine. The Wildrose Party was caught in a leadership crisis at the wrong moment, and the New Democrats were in a position to gather the smithereens.

That NDP government begins 2016 in bad odour with the Alberta countryside over its bungled rollout of new labour regulations for agriculture. The effect of Bill 6 will endure for a long time. But it will also be a little easier to bear by the time the next scheduled election rolls around in 2019. Another re-drawing of the boundaries is due to get underway shortly, and with that will come slightly increased urban voting power.

The New Democrats obliterated the opposition in Edmonton, where government, students, and unionized workers give them a structural advantage. So the “Whither Conservative Alberta?” thinkpieces tend to revolve around Calgary: it will be Alberta’s key election battleground for the foreseeable future.

A lot of these articles point to Calgary’s young populace and urban accoutrements — gentrifying neighbourhoods, cool cultural scenes, all the Richard Florida yadda-yadda — and bellow “See? Not so conservative after all!” This is beside the point. Calgary is still an oil town in a deep sense, and will remain oil-influenced after we are all getting around by means of nuclear-powered Segway.

The parts of Texas and Oklahoma that were squeezed dry long ago are like this, after all. Oil is an all-or-nothing power game played for vast stakes. It breeds excess, an appetite for risk, and libertinism. Calgary bears the DNA of swashbuckling engineers and degenerate deal-makers. It is not a coincidence that the personification of post-Conservative Calgary, Mayor Naheed Nenshi, passed through the University of Calgary business school, Harvard, and McKinsey. Don’t let the charming demeanour fool you: he can swim with any neoliberal shark.

In her campaign speeches, and in the early ones she gave as premier, Rachel Notley showed a keen consciousness of the Calgary mindset. She will have to follow through as she plans a new future for Alberta’s treasury. She has enjoyed leeway to indulge in a little bit of symbolic soak-the-rich. And there is a widespread expectation, cultivated with the help of former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, that Alberta will have to use its still-pretty-decent asset position to dive into a great deal more debt in the medium term.

But Notley’s opposition is in an odd state of suspended animation. There is uncertainty over whether the Wildrose Party’s rescuer, Brian Jean, can be the long-term answer as the head of alternative Alberta government. Jean is still the subject of some suspicion about his soundness: no one seems sure that politics is genuinely his consuming passion. The schism within the Wildrose Party between the social conservative shock troops and the libertarian Danielle Smith crowd has merely been papered over. Jean’s outreach to Progressive Conservative refugees may make that underlying strain more severe rather than less.

The PCs, aware of this, are playing for time, but they need to find leaders not tainted by association with the Redford regime. Their traditional fundraising sources are gone. The PC Association has closed its regional offices and has essentially no paid staff. There is no party left as such. But there is a brand, and plenty of shrewd, experienced workers who identify with it, if they can hold out long enough to conjure a political program and locate a figure for those workers to rally behind.

I expect 2016 in Alberta to be a year of trial balloons. The op-ed pages are worth keeping an eye on: you ought to have noticed the note-perfect Calgarian political manifesto that Brett Wilson of Dragon’s Den fame placed with the CBC about a week ago. It is also worth observing that Calgary MP Jason Kenney seems to be a mite sluggish about mobilizing for the federal Conservative leadership, as he was once universally expected to do once Stephen Harper was out of the way. For Kenney, becoming the white knight of Alberta politics — which he already dominated from outside the legislature as a much younger man — may be more realistic than trying to become prime minister under the glare of an Ottawa spotlight.