A NEWFOUNDLAND pastor recently told me that their province has developed a direct pipeline to Fort McMurray, Alta. But it doesn’t ship oil; it ships young people.
That’s tough on rural Newfoundland communities, watching their greatest natural resource being siphoned off. But ironically, it has also turned out to be very hard on Fort McMurray.
Melissa Blake, Fort McMurray’s beleaguered mayor, has been often in the press lately pointing out that her town can’t begin to satisfy the oil companies’ voracious appetite for people, water, homes, roads and institutions.
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She says that to house and care for the overwhelming influx of workers, just for the near future, requires more than $1 billion in new infrastructure. That’s financially impossible.
In the short term, the town’s tax rates would have to quadruple. And there is a catch-22: the workers needed are being sucked into oilsands extraction but any workers “borrowed” from another province to build new infrastructure would only increase the stress on it. One result has been a homeless rate of six percent, three times higher than that in oft-maligned Toronto.
I’ve spent the bulk of my life in Alberta and most of my family are still there. I love the province. But I’m deeply distressed by this oil boom .
The oil sands are a non-renewable treasure. Carefully managed, at present extraction rates, that oil could support the people of Alberta for four centuries and make a long-term contribution to the world economy.
But current proposals recommend increasing production over the next two decades to five or 10 times the present level. The social and economic destruction that would result is hard to imagine.
What makes me most angry is that the province is willing to plunder a treasure my great-grandchildren have the right to enjoy just to line the pockets of oil companies and some Albertans of my generation.
Not all Albertans though. Not those who depend on the northern water table and natural gas that is rapidly being depleted to extract the oil from sand. Not young students looking for housing in Calgary, Edmonton or Fort McMurray.
They are much worse off than before the boom because housing costs have far outstripped the growth in wages at the low end of the spectrum.
Not the sick and injured who may wait for double-digit hours in overcrowded emergency rooms. Not the commuters on the two-lane death trap into Fort McMurray who have to dodge duelling monster trucks.
The opportunistic nature of this boom isn’t hard to understand. Oil companies and Alberta decision-makers know that energy substitutes for oil are on the horizon. High prices may not last forever. So they want to get the gold out before it turns to lead.
I just hope we’ll have something to hand on to our children besides a ruined northern landscape, polluted rivers and empty coffers.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
