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Canadians flock to oil boomtown

By WASHINGTON POST
Published January 7, 2007

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta - The plane from Calgary touched down as a cold dawn cracked the sky, and Rob Smaldon, a compact man wearing a baseball cap, sighed. "Ah, back in paradise," he said. He was joking.

Smaldon was feeling blue. As he does every 16th day, he had just left his wife and two young children in Olds, Alberta, 400 miles to the south. He would work for the next 13 days straight before going home to see them for another three days. Then he would leave again.

Smaldon, 43, a heavy equipment operator, was one of an army of workers drawn to this oil boomtown by fat paychecks and abundant jobs. So many have come to Fort McMurray in recent years that towns in the rest of Canada have voiced alarm.

"Everybody's going out there for the money. We're losing some of our best, brightest and most experienced people," said Beaver Paul, an economic development expert nearly 3,000 miles away in New Brunswick, one of the Atlantic provinces hit hard by the exodus to Alberta's giant oil sands fields.

Alberta's oil sands reserves are the world's second-largest, behind Saudi Arabia's, and have helped make Canada the biggest oil supplier to the United States. That export has reaped billions of dollars for the oil companies and filled government coffers with tax money. With revenue from oil cooked out of tarry black sand, once-poor Alberta has paid off its debt, embarked on a spending spree and still had enough left over last year to send each of its residents a $400 check.

Without counting the 10,000 to 20,000 men in mine camps on any given day, Fort McMurray has doubled in size in a decade to 65,000 official residents.

Building and running the giant machines that carve the earth and extract the oil requires a huge work force. Nearly 100,000 new workers have streamed into Alberta each of the past two years, and plans for new oil sands projects are likely to keep them coming.

Many arrive in Fort McMurray, a work-weary place crawling with muddy pickup trucks and plastered with "help wanted" signs. Those who have committed to stay, moving their families into tight new suburbs, warily regard the waves of single workers who come for a few months or a few years, living in camps or jammed into shared rooms. But all are here for the same reason: big money.

"We're just chasing the bucks," said Richard McNabb, 50, a master electrician who lives in a 1962 Edmonton city bus in a mobile home park outside the town and makes $65 an hour and gets an extra $3,000 a month living allowance. "I'm looking for a goal of putting 250,000 (Canadian) dollars in the bank," he said, about $215,000 in U.S. money. "I'm almost there."

[Last modified January 7, 2007, 00:45:46]