It’s grim up north… and getting grimmer. Amid soaring suicide rates, Canada’s once-booming oil patch is rapidly accelerating its downward trajectory.“Canadians should be concerned in times like these,” warned Tim McMillan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, noting that the oil and gas sector will see 100,000 job losses by the end of this year. Even if oil prices rise early and fast next year, Financial Post reports, it may take a while for Canadian oil-sands to rebound as the industry has mothballed a number of long-term projects.

Over the past year, we have extensively chronicled the tragic story of Alberta – Canada’s once booming oilpatch – disintegrate slowly at first, then very fast, into an economic and financial wasteland:

And, in one of the latest articles of this sad series describing the Alberta”bloodbath”, we said that the worst casualty of Canada’s recession has been the local commercial real estate market, where office vacancies are about to surpass the aftermath of the (first) great financial crisis.

But, it turns out the biggest casualty of Canada’s recession, which unless oil rebounds strongly soon will follow Brazil into an all out depression, are people themselves. As CBC reports the suicide rate in Alberta has increased dramatically in the wake of mounting job losses across the province.

Sadly, as The Financial Post reports, the situation looks set to get worse… as policy uncertainty has exacerbated the pain of low prices…