When Jerry and Elva Bussieres moved to Fort McMurray, it was a tiny wilderness outpost. Now it looks poised to become the world’s next great oil city
When Jerry Bussieres came to Fort McMurray as a 17-year-old, when his railway worker dad was posted to the remote northern community. It was 1952, and the town was a tiny wilderness outpost dominated by forestry and fishing. Most of the area’s roads were dirt, and there was just one public school in the community. The government ran a small experimental plant to process the bitumen that lay under the forest surrounding the community and seeped from the sides of cliffs into the Athabasca River. Bussieres got a job as a city worker in 1960 and conducted a census that year. The population was 1,109.
In 1968, everything changed. The Great Canadian Oil Sands company (now Suncor Energy) opened a strip mine north of town and started digging up the oilsands. In 1973, Syncrude opened a second mine. The population climbed to 35,000 people, hundreds of whom lived in tents in a city park during the summer. After an economic downturn in the 1980s put the city’s growth on hold, a more favourable provincial tax rate and a rise in oil prices touched off a new round of oilsands extraction. Suncor and Syncrude expanded, more than 10 new companies set up shop nearby, and tens of thousands of workers flooded into Fort McMurray.
“We had some booms all right,” Bussieres recalls of the town’s early history. “But nothing like this.”
The city, over 200 kilometres from the closest large town, is poised to become the third-largest urban area in the province. By some estimates, the population could reach half a million. And the significance of the oilsands — which most analysts agree will become the most important source of oil in North America and the cash cow of Alberta’s economy — means the growth won’t stop anytime soon.
No one anticipated how fast Fort Mac would grow. There isn’t enough housing for everyone, the local hospital is overcrowded and the highway to the oilsands isn’t large enough to accommodate all the traffic.
However, a new crop of civic leaders are pledging to do things differently. They want to catch up to the population growth, and use the opportunity to turn Fort McMurray into the Dubai of Canada. They want to make the city a great northern metropolis awash with oil money and filled with world-class shops and restaurants.
However, not everyone thinks this is realistic. The city is broke. And even if it did have the money to build, Fort Mac’s government is so far behind on infrastructure, it might never catch up.
THE DUBAI OF THE NORTH
Dubai is a model oil town. In just 50 years, black gold transformed the city from a port of 20,000 people noted for its pearling industry to a modern metropolis of 1.2 million. New money helped build soaring skyscrapers, a university and museums. And when the oil left, the money stayed. Dubai only produces about 240,000 barrels of oil per day (compared to one million that flow from the oilsands), but the city is still growing.
The area used the oil boom to diversify the economy. Dubai is a major trading base, banking centre and a hot spot for property development.
By contrast, Fort McMurray still looks like a frontier town. Downtown is dominated by strip malls interspersed with ’60s bungalows. At the Oil Can, a hotel saloon at the city’s main intersection, live country music reigns, and Wrangler-wearing dancers swill Molson next to walls decorated with antlers and old polaroids of locals. From anywhere in town, it’s just a 20-minute walk to the forest.
Fort McMurray’s infrastructure problems are well-known. Before the boom, the local hospital and city hall had two empty floors, and the water treatment plant was used to just over half its capacity. Now, both buildings are crunched for space and the plant had to be upgraded because it wasn’t large enough to service the entire town.
Space is tight, and skyrocketing real estate prices have forced people to share cramped accommodations. Independent businesses have been forced out and replaced by big box stores and fast food chains.
“The way we did business 25 years ago, we don’t do it that way now,” says Vaughn Jessome, who owns the Garden Café, a 24-hour diner, where he’s worked since 1981. He’s one of the lucky ones — he’s been able to keep the business afloat by doing much of the grunt work in the kitchen himself. The café’s staff, which was once 60 people, is now half that. “You have to do what you used to be able to get other people to do.”
The city government, however, is determined to turn things around.
“There’s an increasing awareness of the global demand [for oil] and what that will mean for the region,” says Melissa Blake, Fort McMurray’s mayor since 2004. “It’s exciting.”
The city is expecting the population to reach 250,000 in 15 years (up from the roughly 80,000 in the city and surrounding region today). To plan for the growth, the government has pumped money into a new wastewater treatment plant and is building an enormous recreation centre in a riverside park. It’s also planning to build more retail space to give small businesses a fighting chance. Blake also wants to build a convention centre and a community centre for the city’s ethno-cultural groups.
The city has obtained 4,000 acres of crown land in the area to develop suburbs. When completed, the new neighbourhoods will house 40,000 people. In the downtown, developers hope to replace many of the small buildings with apartment blocks.
“The world has taken notice of Fort McMurray, and it would behoove them to put a signature building in their downtown core to create a skyline,” says Maurice Yusep, a vice-president with Bond Street Properties, an Edmonton developer planning to build two condo towers, one 31 floors, the other 26. When finished in four years’ time, they will be the tallest buildings in town.
The province has also come to the table with $820 million to twin highway 63, which leads into town from the south and to the oilsands in the north. The government has also built three new health clinics. Guy Boutilier, the excitable local MLA, spent years pushing his colleagues in the Progressive Conservatives to put more money into the area. He thinks the government can do even more.
“A rail system between the city and the [oilsands] plants makes environmental sense and transportation sense,” says Boutilier, bouncing in his chair as I struggle to get a word in edgewise. He believes the city will reach a population of half a million, and says the government is onboard with helping the area develop. “They have an appreciation today, and so does the premier.”
Most importantly, the city needs to develop industries other than the oilsands.
“It’s largely focusing on economic development and diversification,” says Mike Allen, who sits on city council and owns Campbell’s Music. “Who’s to say oil will always be so important?” Allen wants to see a manufacturing industry that could build the pieces needed for construction, as well as oilsands equipment. With more housing, he says, workers would be encouraged to bring their families, who could work in the health care and education sectors.
“It’s a desire to see [Fort McMurray] flourish on something other than just the oil industry,” he says.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH
Barkerville, B.C. is a ghost town. For most of the year, its 50 historic houses stand empty on two dirt streets. The only thing that keeps the town from being swallowed by the surrounding forests are the tourists who come to see the well-preserved historic site.
Barkerville used to be Western Canada’s biggest town. Lured by gold in northern B.C.’s Cariboo mountains, 50 kilometres east of Quesnel, prospectors founded the town in 1862. Barkerville grew into the biggest settlement north of San Francisco and west of Chicago. Schools and a highway followed the prospectors, along with their families.
By the turn of the 20th century, however, the population started to drop off. Other towns opened mines and grew their populations. Gold mining was no longer as profitable as shipping, and the towns of the lower mainland overtook Barkerville in size. By 1958, the few remaining inhabitants were relocated and the town declared a historic site.
This is the alternative scenario for Fort McMurray. The oilsands cover an area the size of New Brunswick, and other area towns could see their populations grow if new plants are built closer to them than the city. The rise in alternative energy — such as wind power — and further exploration for oil in the Middle East and Russia could also lead the energy industry away from the oilsands. Without infrastructure, other industries, or an established community, Fort McMurray could be doomed to the boom-and-bust cycle of so many other resource extraction towns.
“We’re sitting in the middle of the largest resource extraction project in the world, but as a municipality, we’re broke,” says Allen, the city councillor.
The city is already in debt to the tune of almost double its annual budget. Without money, Fort McMurray can’t build the roads, sewer lines and other infrastructure that developers needs to put up houses. Without houses, the workers coming to the area have little reason to stay. Many are angry the province has kept approving new oilsands projects without giving the city money to build the needed infrastructure. They also think the companies should be offering up more money to improve the community.
“It’s to no one’s advantage to allow every Tom, Dick and Harry to have an oilsands plant while we’re left in the pinch,” says Jessome, the owner of the Garden Café. “If you’re not willing to do your fair share, it affects your employees.”
He argues companies need to give more money to community projects for their workers to have a better quality of life. Both Blake and Allen want to attract other industries to the city, but admit that the city is so far behind in basic infrastructure that it might never happen.
“If growth keeps going as fast as it is, it’ll be a long time before [economic] diversification,” says Blake.
BUILDING A COMMUNITY
It’s a sweltering hot August afternoon, and a few hundred locals are gathered in a downtown park for Heritage Day celebrations. Booths serve hot dogs, Indian and Samoan food. A group of kids from a native community north of town rap onstage. People mill around and visit a small cluster of perfectly preserved historic houses.
This is Fort McMurray’s established community, and they have harsh words for anyone who wants to slag their town.
“Are you tired of defending Fort Mac yet?” a friend asks Jerry Bussieres’s wife.
“She tells them ‘Highway 63 is just over there, you can get the hell out,’” says Bussieres, who’s been here since 1952. “If people don’t like it here, why are they here?”
He and other longtime residents are equally disparaging of the workers who come to town to make money and leave, and don’t bother to bring their families. “Your transient population doesn’t contribute to your town or your city or whoever,” says Jack Avery, who first moved to Fort McMurray in 1966 to work in the Suncor refinery, and served for 26 years on the local school board.
For Jessome, simply having a 250,000-strong population won’t make Fort McMurray a great city — it needs recreation facilities and more housing. He fears that without the infrastructure, the population won’t stay and put down roots.
Over the next few days, I meet several of the workers he’s talking about. Most have been here a few years, and most plan to leave within the next few. But the money is attractive enough that many have stayed longer than they planned.
“Everyone wants to leave,” says Ward Stuckey, a 25-year-old construction worker who was lured here from Newfoundland like so many other local residents. “But no one’s gonna.”
