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IN HARDISTY, ALBERTA, PEOPLE get things done.

People like Lori Goodrich—who in the fall of 2009 “got wind,” as she put it, that Canadian Pacific Railway would demolish its derelict train station at the edge of town. Word gets around fast in a town of seven hundred people. Goodrich, an amateur historian, was more alarmed than most. The CPR had made Hardisty: in 1904, the railway chose a location near the Battle River as the site of a freight depot where equipment and horses could be loaded onto cars on the new Edmonton–Saskatchewan branch line. People poured in, and in 1911 the town, named for Richard Hardisty, a Hudson’s Bay fur trader who negotiated with Louis Riel and became Alberta’s first senator, was incorporated. “The population then was probably bigger than it is now,” Goodrich told me. Hardisty became a rail–farm hub and a commercial connection to the wider world; the station was a monument to that history. “It was the last one of this design left in Alberta,” she said. “It was the oldest building in Hardisty, and it was rundown. Terrible. We took it upon ourselves to save it.”

Goodrich recruited several family members and they went to work. They bought the station for a dollar, had it lifted and trucked a half kilometre to a new location near the town’s main intersection, and then spent most weekends over the next couple of years sprucing it up. “We left the original walls, but we gutted it.” They made one room available for a local wellness program and rented another for conferences. Oil companies used it for meetings. Tea, coffee, and smoothies were served, and the station became a going concern. But in 2012 the labour of love became a burden when Goodrich’s brother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and they sold the station to a local entrepreneur. Clayton Hinkey agreed to maintain the building “as close to the original as possible” as he transformed it into a sports bar called the Leaf, which catered mainly to workers in Hardisty’s oil and gas industry.

Lori Goodrich had the open, outgoing demeanour typical of the local do-gooder. Her gold jewellery reflected her sunny disposition as the cool light of the early afternoon seeped through the windows of the Leaf. The place was buzzing, even in the post-lunch lull. A sign outside advertised for servers, cooks, and kitchen staff. Despite the recent drop in oil prices—we met in September 2016, when oil was just over forty dollars a barrel—the town was busy. “Overall, Hardisty never really gets dead or slow,” Goodrich’s nephew, Jeff Golka, told me. “It just keeps humming along. There’s enough industry here now.” New motels had opened, as had a new restaurant on Main Street, and the hardware store had a new owner who was expanding the place. “There are so many major companies here,” Golka said, “there’s always something going on.” Golka’s optimism was an occupational necessity: he was the local real estate agent, with a big sign out by the provincial highway. But Hardisty did tend to ride out short-term busts in the oil sector. The big oil sands projects were long-term ventures, built to recoup their investment over decades. “When prices decline to unprofitable levels on a short-term basis, they still produce with an expectation that profitability will return on a long-term basis,” said Ben Brunnen, an economist with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The product had to keep moving, and when it moved, it moved through Hardisty.

“Calgary has had the highest hit in staffing and downturns, because that’s where they start, at the corporate level,” Anita Miller, the mayor, told me. “Here, luckily, most of these companies have hardly had any layoffs.” Companies like Gibson Energy were still building new storage tanks. “There definitely isn’t as much construction,” Miller said. “Our town isn’t as busy. But the hotels and restaurants are still getting good business. That’s how they make their living, from all the transient workers who are here building a tank or connecting a tank.”

The real danger was long-term decline. Boom-bust cycles were a fact of life in Alberta’s oil sector, but if prices never rebounded, then the construction of new oil sands projects would slow down, and eventually, so would Hardisty. Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, warned in 2015 that the price crash signalled “there was no longer an economic context for the huge expansion planned for oil sands production.” Goodrich was seeing indicators: car dealers, used to customers trading for new trucks every couple of years, were calling their regulars to come in and make a deal. Her husband, Ed, an oil field consultant, had steady work for fifteen years, but for nine months in 2015 he found himself at home with nothing to do. After a few weeks’ work, he was off again for another long stretch. “This is going to go on for a long time before we ever see the industry turn around to where it’s boom times again,” Goodrich said.

There was one thing that would have helped, one bit of potential good news that Goodrich had been convinced would give Hardisty, and Alberta, a boost. She’d wanted federal and provincial leaders to adopt some of the town’s can-do spirit, the same spirit that had saved the train station, and get a new oil pipeline approved. Construction would boost the local economy and get Alberta’s oil to lucrative foreign markets. “People started gearing up for that, as you can see—all the motels and everything that started up here a couple of years ago,” Goodrich said. But the new line, Keystone XL, never arrived. Existential shivers went down the town’s spine. Some experts said that if oil was facing a long-term decline, it was all the more urgent that Alberta get its oil out of the ground quickly and shipped to the coast for the higher world price—before demand dropped off for good.

Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper, a 1600-kilometre pipeline from Hardisty to the port of Superior, Wisconsin, had been approved with little controversy in 2009. But now, pipelines—just a conduit for the product, in the view of the people of Hardisty—had become an easy target for environmental activists, and weren’t being authorized as readily as they had been. “It’s all politics,” Goodrich said with a rueful little shake of her head. “Unfortunately, the provincial and federal leaders right now don’t get it.” Even people in the industry didn’t understand at first, she said. “They’re getting it now.”