“But the best hope,” wrote Jacqueline Thorpe on the front page of The Financial Post section of The National Post, in a regular column entitled “The Big Picture,” “rests on at least a stabilization of oil prices.” The headline of this entry, appearing the past weekend, was “Teetering on the brink of global recession.”

It’s an astonishing statement, and so we see that in the space of just 18 months or less, the Canadian corporate sector’s communications organ, CanWest, or “corporavda” if you will, which owns The National Post, has gone from paternalistic “sh-sh”s and “don’t worry”s all the way to thoroughly freaked out alarmism. Thorpe’s mental breakdown last weekend has become by no means an oddity. Her’s is but the theme at the corporate press lately.

“Hope for stabilized oil prices” is odd advice to the colonial-minded middle managers of Canada’s wholly foreign owned corporate sector who read The National Post before the foreign head office calls for its daily chit-chat. To advise the nation’s decision makers that hope is their only choice now is to advise them to close their eyes, block their ears and stop whatever thinking they might have considered doing. The ride is going to get too frightening to behold.

The rapidly rising price of oil has certainly emerged as the key feature of the 21st Century. The Globe and Mail reported the same day on a poll showing the price of oil has now replaced all other concerns at the top of mind of Canadians in general. Rising oil prices promise to be the driver of history in our time. Any eyes not clouded by agendas, fear or subservience can quickly ascertain that oil prices will keep leaping up between short periods of steadying or occasionally dropping prices.

A debate about whether peak oil production has arrived or if it’s all just a ploy by Big Oil, is increasingly irrelevant. Whether by design or happenstance, oil prices will not stabilize or be stabilized at any level. If it’s by design of Big Oil or by the reality of production capacity leaves us equally unable to intervene in the trajectory.

So when the nation’s leading financial media is reduced to advising the sycophants of The Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers to hope for stabilization of oil prices to avoid a serious global recession, it may as well throw in advice to buy lottery tickets for a retirement plan.

It’s a fair question to ask why the advice columnists in the financial pages are not instead explaining why global recession is unavoidable (oil prices will keep rising is the simplest way of driving the message home), and how they might best operate their ships in the coming headwinds of the storm.

A big part of managing large national and internationally interconnected firms is pressuring and advising government ministries and influencing public opinion in line with that advice. Government policy-making especially in key economic ministries like industry and finance are now very much the purview of corporate boardrooms. The last three Canadian finance ministers both Liberal and Conservative made their first official appearances upon presuming office in the New York financial district, rather than before Canadian citizens.

If the advice government ministers are receiving is to hope for stabilized oil prices instead of planning to manage global recessionary conditions, the aims of their policies will inevitably be thwarted, or worse, completely irrelevant.

The reason neither policy makers in government both on the bureaucratic and elected side, nor executives in corporate boardrooms, nor pundits in the financial press, can bring themselves to accept that certainly rising oil prices will certainly bring global recession is because they have spent decades telling each other within the closed confines of their social circles that recession is irredeemably bad and that it opens the door to an evil worse than war: depression.

These are assumptions at the core of all corporate and economic thought that have remained undisturbed by any queries at least since the famous depression of the 1930s. It would be heresy in the halls of ministries, boardrooms and editorial offices to even think about the received wisdom concerning the undeniability of the badness that is recession or depression.

But now is surely the time, before over-the-top fear produces rash counter-productive policies, to wonder whether recession or even depression are really so bad. After all, it wasn’t so long ago government forestry managers, harvesting companies and the public at large had no reason to doubt forest fires were unquestionably bad things, and look at how far that opinion has swung once the question was first posed.

While there has always been an argument available in favour of recession and depression, however dubious, an entirely different set of circumstances has arisen that makes the argument, whatever it is, far more powerful: the environment cannot absorb any more increases in human production of Co2, and in fact seems to require a drastic decline in human-produced Co2 to stabilize climate change. So dependent is all modern economic activity on energy, and so necessary is Co2 production in the expending of energy, that it is by now certain that the only chance we have of seeing the climate stabilized is through a significant decline in economic activity. That is, a long-term, perhaps even a constant economic depression, may be the only way a stabilized climate is restored.

Recession and its bad cousin Depression have very bad names. There has been 70 years or more of propaganda terrorizing the public about the prospect of a repeat of what is said to be the worst calamity to have ever befallen them—The Great Depression of the 1930s. But on examination, we find that most of the horrors of that time were due to corporate and state reaction to economic depression, not the conditions of depression in and of itself, and that the economic conditions by themselves, if one asks those who lived through it, coincided with a period of enriched community and individual experience producing what they report as general happiness.

People recall farming their back yards with neighbours, sharing food and lodging with passing strangers, and enjoying community dances, making simple music, and relaxing at home with games and books. That is not to say there wasn’t a lot of unemployment and poor conditions for those trapped in it. But using the same measuring techniques today that were used in the 1930s reveals unemployment then was not much higher that it has been at times in the last ten years. Certainly homelessness and desperation today is easily comparable to anything seen in 1932. Had there been ordinary unemployment insurance, welfare, subsidized housing and social programs in the 1930s to mitigate the worst conditions for those most badly affected, there is little doubt there would be today any of the horror the public associates with economic depression. Even in the absence of all these efforts, it still wasn’t nearly as bad as seven decades of corporavda has made it out to be.

We know, for example, that during the German occupation of France in the 1940s, when French industry was largely shut down, trees on the Champs Élysées that hadn’t blossomed before took full bloom in the cleaner air. It would be interesting to learn whether similar signs of rebirth were also evident when industry in North America was greatly reduced during The Great Depression.

Economic recession and depression in and of itself really only hurts the high rollers. But those high rollers own the corporate media and they have a huge interest in convincing Canadians depression is the worst thing imaginable, because that’s what it is for them.

Especially given environmental reality, it may in fact be, for the rest of us anyway, the best thing imaginable. Our policy makers ought to be planning for it and finding ways to manage it and sustain it, rather than being advised to cross their fingers and hope it isn’t going to come, or believe, even, there is anything they can do to derail it. The public isn’t necessarily convinced it’s the worst thing that needs to be avoided at all costs.