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The anatomy of
an oil boom
Thousands have flocked to Fort McMurray
to work in the oil sands, but will
they put down roots?
text and photos by MATTHEW D.H. GRAY
Tommy Jardine, 61, is about to arrive
in a new city for a new job.
Tommy is from Miramichi, New
Brunswick, where he lives with his
wife on the homestead his grandfather
built in 1920 after emigrating
from Boston.
For 30 years, Tommy worked in
an iron ore mine in northern New
Brunswick until it closed in 2000.
To support himself and his wife, he
has spent his summers working in
construction and his winters plowing
snow. Today, he will land in Fort
McMurray, Alberta. He’s boarded a
bus at the airport, along with a dozen
other men, which will take him to
an oil sands worker’s camp where he
will live and work for the next four
weeks. He doesn’t yet know what his
job will entail.
“When the mills and mines closed,
a lot of families sold their homes and
left town,” Tommy explains through
his thick northern New Brunswick
accent. “A bunch of the younger guys
have gone to work in the Alberta oil
patch. We keep losing industry, and
they’re gonna have to leave. People
are hurting.”
Miramichi was hard-hit by the recent
recession, but the local economy
had been in decline since the 1970s.
The search for employment has driven
Miramichi-dwellers elsewhere,
10 the VARSItY magazine
and many of them are choosing Fort
McMurray. A 2011 survey found that
more than a quarter of travellers
leaving from the nearby Bathurst
airport were headed there. The total
income earned by migrant workers
from New Brunswick alone in the
oil sands boom is estimated to be between
$230 and $350 million.
“When the boom word comes up,
there’s an opposite cycle that says
‘bust,’” says Melissa Blake, the mayor
of Wood Buffalo, the regional municipality
into which Fort McMurray
was amalgamated in 1995. Sitting in
her newly renovated office on the
seventh floor of the municipal government
building overlooking downtown
Fort McMurray, she explains,
“The difference that I see between a
boomtown and sustainable growth
is that we’ve been experiencing
this growth since about 1996, and it
doesn’t look to end in the future.”
The municipality’s population
growth projections are based on this
assumption of sustained long-term
growth, a forecast of increases in oil
sands output. By 2030, the population
is projected to more than double
to 225,000, over 85 per cent of which
will reside in Fort McMurray.
The cost of housing in Fort McMurray
is astronomically high. Almost
every parcel of available land has
been developed, and the outskirts of
the city are densely packed by cheaply
built pre-fabricated homes, lowrise
apartments, and motels. Cars are
the preferred mode of transport in
Fort McMurray, and it shows. Public
transit, recently expanded, sees little
use. Most of the city’s population
lives several kilometres from downtown
in communities branching off
from the arterial Highway 63.
At all hours of the day, the highway,
which runs through downtown
Fort McMurray, is abuzz with dirtcaked
buses and trucks carrying
workers and equipment to and from
the oil sands. Driving along the highway,
you can see the signs of industry,
with sales offices for manufacturers
of heavy equipment lining either
side.
Further north, before reaching the
main extraction and processing sites,
the smell of gasoline and sulphur
permeate the air. Depending on wind
patterns, the smell can blow into the
city, some 30 kilometres to the south.
The scale of industrial change is
difficult to assess until the highway
splits in two, when the boreal forest
gives way to the barren, windswept
landscape of the tailings ponds. The
skyline is illuminated by a four kilometre-wide
Suncor processing facility
with a gas flare tower topped by a
Housing costs in
Fort McMurray, AB...
(population 65,565)
$1,406
Bachelor (monthly rent)
$1,694
One BR (monthly rent)
$2,049
Two BR (monthly rent)
$479
Bachelor (monthly rent)
$591
One BR (monthly rent)
$715
Two BR (monthly rent)
$729,092
Single family (to buy)
$387,244
Multiple family (to buy)
$436,993
Mobile home + land (to buy)
...compared to Moncton, NB
(population 69,074)
$201,200
Single family (to buy)
$157,700
Multiple family (to buy)
Sources: CMHC, Fort McMurray Real Estate Board, Royal LePage