The Patch by Chris Turner

Author:Chris Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

EIGHT

BOOM AND BUST

THE HAUL TRUCK STRUT

In the spring of 2006, the boom in the Patch was fast approaching its peak. Capital investment had raced past the $25-billion mark three years earlier, around the same time the US Department of Energy decided to start counting oil sands reserves as identical to any other proven reserve in its global energy accounting. The reclassification boosted Canadian reserves from 5 billion barrels to 180 billion—third in the world—and provided a massive boost to investor confidence in the Patch. There were soon dozens of companies invested in oil sands development, and new projects were being announced or coming online seemingly every other week. Overall production had grown to more than 1 million barrels a day by 2006, and industry estimates were forecasting 3.5 million barrels by 2015 and more than 4 million by 2020. Delirious boosters sometimes spoke of 8 million or more one day—enough to rival Saudi Arabia for the global production lead. There was no longer much hyperbole in that old “blue-eyed sheik” moniker from the Lougheed days. The muskeg of northwestern Canada was the new Arabian Desert. Alberta was an emerging energy superpower, and the impossibly vast hydrocarbon treasure of the oil sands was its engine. No one had ever seen a boom so explosive.

From 2001 to 2006, nearly half a million Canadians had moved to Alberta from other provinces. In 2006 Alberta’s employment rolls were adding new jobs at a fevered clip of ten thousand a month. In Fort Mc-Murray, the newly employed were living in campers in hotel parking lots, renting out backyard toolsheds, and sleeping in tent villages on the outskirts of town. Half of Calgary’s swelling homeless population of 3,400 had jobs but nowhere to live. And managing it all with delight from the provincial legislature was Premier Ralph Klein. “King Ralph,” they sometimes called him—the blunt, smirking latter-day Calgary cowboy who’d slashed the province’s budget, rebooted the oil sands business, and turned deficits into surpluses. Alberta voters had rewarded Klein with his fourth majority in 2004, and he repaid the favour at the start of 2006 by mailing a government cheque in the amount of $400 to every single resident in the province—a “Prosperity Bonus” to remind everyone just how glorious the good times were in Alberta just now.

And so late that spring, when Klein’s government received word from Washington that Alberta was being invited to participate in the Smithsonian Institution’s upcoming Folklife Festival on the National Mall, it jumped at the chance. The Folklife Festival was a summer tradition in America’s capital, an outdoor display of cultural artifacts and pastimes from around the world in the broad green space between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. The invitation had initially gone to the federal government, but the feds had passed on it. Well, if they didn’t want to strut their stuff in DC, Ralph Klein’s Alberta happily would. His government made plans to send dancers and ice skaters and Mounties, plus cooks to make batches of the pierogies so beloved by Alberta’s Ukrainian immigrant community.

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