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How much does Alberta matter? Well, as with any good native Albertan (full disclosure – born and raised), my knee-jerk tendency is to say “way more than the rest of you bastards combined.” But in the current Canadian economy, that’s alarmingly close to accurate. Alberta contributed one-third of Canada’s economic growth last year, and is by far the fastest-growing province in the country again this year. Since the beginning of 2013, nearly half the jobs created in the country were in Alberta. . . . The oil sector has not only been leading the way in Canada’s export recovery, it has also been the big driver in business capital investment in the country. That means the sector has been leading the way in the two key areas that the Bank of Canada has repeatedly identified as critical to sustaining Canada’s recovery. Lower prices could stifle energy’s contribution on both fronts; they are not only an automatic drag on the value of exports, they are also a notorious capital-spending killer.

Canadians have been worrying more and more about a housing bubble. In that context, it’s worth examining whether the fall in oil prices will be what finally causes the bubble to burst.

If you look at the chart below, you can see why they’re worried. These are two composite indexes that track house prices across the country: the U.S. and the Canadian. Don’t look at the absolute level, because these two indexes have different start years; the U.S. index starts five years earlier, so naturally, it’s higher. (Prices are reflected in terms of a multiple of the index year.) What you see in this chart is that U.S. home prices rose, and then corrected; Canada’s, meanwhile, are still rising.

Of course, Canada is rich with all that oil money. But their price-to-rent ratio, which can be a good measure of how bubbly the market is, is higher than ours, and has been for several years:

(The OECD data only goes through the end of 2014, but as you can see from this interactive graphic from the Economist, their price-to-rent ratio remains elevated compared with ours.)

So how big is the risk? Is Canada due to get our home-price collapse, on tape delay?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. First of all, when you look at the composite index of Canadian home prices, they don’t seem to be all that tightly correlated with the price of oil.