Fort Mac: despite shock election in Alberta, Canada's remote boomtown thunders on

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/09/fort-mcmurray-alberta-canada-oil-sands-boomtown

Version 0 of 1.

Related: The Canadians who live along the route of the longest proposed tar sands pipeline – in pictures

Forty-one years ago, Robert Vargo spent $6,000 to buy a car-repair shop on a dusty road in an empty corner of sub-arctic Canada. Today, Alberta Motor Products in Fort McMurray is the largest General Motors dealer in western Canada, in some months selling more vehicles than any other dealer in the entire country.

For those hardy enough to venture so far north, the tarry soil of the Athabasca River valley runs thick with milk and honey. It may take four showers for an oil-sands worker to remove the smell from his body, but there’s always more than enough money in his jeans to buy a fancy new 4x4.

And despite what the rest of the world may think about what Vargo calls “global heating”, he is confident that will always be the case.

“We survived the 80s when oil went down to 20 bucks a barrel, and I’m sure we’ll survive this again,” he says, dismissing widespread predictions that low oil prices will put an end to the boom that has transformed the surrounding wilderness into the beating heart of a national economy.

The outside world is distant in every way from this remote boomtown. This week, Canada experienced a political earthquake, when the anti-pipeline, socially progressive New Democratic party swept to victory in Alberta, the country’s most conservative and free-enterprising province. Far up in the north-east corner of the “Texas of the North”, Fort McMurray barely felt the tremors.

Premier-elect Rachel Notley campaigned on a pledge to increase corporate taxes, hike industry royalties and abandon the effort to build the Keystone pipeline to the United States, which the national government considers essential to the success of its mission to make Canada “an energy superpower”.

But within hours of winning election, Notley reached out to reassure nervous oilmen that “things are going to be just A-OK over here in Alberta”.

Notley’s formerly bold talk about major reform quickly became an agenda for collaborative discussions about what she called “some new consideration that needs to occur”.

Notley also took pains to distance herself from her party’s much greener, more radical national leader, Tom Mulcair. During the campaign, she assured Alberta voters that she had not talked with Mulcair for “months and months”.

Fort Mac: still redolent with the sweet smell of big money

Throughout the election and its aftermath, dirty Fort Mac thundered on with little regard for outside opinion or politics.

Headlines from the distant outside world note massive layoffs and cancelled investments in the oil-mining operations that stretch in every direction from Fort Mac, but Vargo says he is selling more pickups and sports cars than ever. “The last three or four months, we’ve done better than last year,” he says, “and last year was the biggest year we ever had in the history of this garage.”

Related: Alberta finally shifted left in these elections. But can it go green? | David Suzuki

The streets of Fort McMurray are still clogged with dust-caked pickups, and nearby Highway 63 roars with the sound of heavy trucks 24 hours a day. There is no evidence here of the $40bn investment that industry leaders say has disappeared from Alberta in response to tumbling oil prices: that still leaves $40bn a year to spread around a regional population of about 100,000 people. The acrid emissions which taint the atmosphere around Fort McMurray are just the sweet smell of big money – as redolent as ever.

The rest of Canada might have been stunned by this week’s election, but Fort Mac just shrugged and went back to work. No mainstream Canadian politician has ever come close to demanding the death of this very dirty but reliable golden goose.

In Fort McMurray, the only quiet byways are the offices of the unions whose workers inhabit the “camps” established at mining sites throughout the valley. These are the places skilled workers come to find jobs, and they remain empty despite news of regular layoffs at the big operations just out of town.

“Look around,” says Rod McKay, business agent for the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, gesturing at the wide, open spaces in the local’s ample office. “It’s not like people are lined up saying, ‘Hey, hey, I need a job.’”

Workers flock to Fort McMurray from across the country and around the world, but job security is never an issue. “The thing about construction is that each day you work is closer to a layoff,” says McKay. “But there’s always something that comes down the road, right?”

The wage for a journeyman pipe fitter working “on site” is $60 an hour. Unskilled labourers can easily earn six-figure annual salaries. Despite the economic slowdown, local media are still overflowing with adverts for jobs in local industry.

Sarah Murrant knows the drill. In December, her husband Nick was one of 14 heavy-equipment mechanics working at a local shop. Today he is one of three left. But Murrant has a good-paying job with local government and the couple is making no plans to leave Fort Mac. “Those things happen everywhere,” she says. “You keep your head down and you do your work.”

In Fort McMurray, which is often short of labour, layoffs are seen as a virtue – “a great opportunity for organizations to trim fat that they otherwise couldn’t get rid of”, Murrant says.

From boomtown to middle-class normalcy

Ewere Erhunmwunsee embodies the optimism and resilience that pervades all classes in this surprisingly diverse town. The Nigerian immigrant has no worries about finding a new job after having been let go from his last one. “It takes time,” he says, “but it’s not hard. It depends on how hard you push, you know?”

In Canadian mythology, Fort McMurray is only the latest and most notorious of example of the hinterland boomtowns that flourish while resources are stripped – and decline or even die once they are gone. It seen as is a tough, ugly town of bar fights, drug abuse and prostitution – a place to get in early, make big money and leave.

But after decades of steady development and growth, Fort Mac differs sharply from the hinterland stereotype. Oil wealth has resulted in good public schools, first-class recreation facilities and trim neighbourhoods of million-dollar bungalows. While the rest of the world speculates on the end of oil, Fort McMurray has created all the infrastructure of permanent middle-class prosperity in one of the coldest settled places on Earth.

“I spent 17 years trying to get out of Fort McMurray only to leave and realize what I’ve missed,” says Danielle Shimoon, who manages her father’s busy downtown jewellery store. Pregnant with her second child, Shimoon is thrilled by the transformation of her hometown. “It used to be all young men, but now they are bringing their families here and making it home,” she says. “I think it’s a great place to raise kids.”

And there’s no sign of a slowdown in business. “People come up here and want to treat themselves to the luxury side of life,” Shimoon says. Her customers may be wearing fluorescent safety vests, but their dollars flow freely.

One of them, a mechanic who works the dredges that build and maintain the lakes of industrial waste left behind by oil mining, is shopping for diamonds to take home to his wife in distant Louisiana. A typical oil-sands nomad, he has also worked the similar wastes in northern Siberia. “Compared to Siberia,” he says, “Fort McMurray is Disneyland.”

For divorce lawyer Greg Wool, Fort Mac is a different kind of wonderland. It’s a place where janitors enjoy six-figure incomes and clients pay their bills promptly. “As a result, it can quite often seem very out of whack with the rest of the country,” he says. “It’s fascinating – and lucrative.”

“There’s just a high degree of natural honesty in the people who live and work in Fort McMurray,” he adds. “The people willing to pack up and move from across the country or the world tend to have a strong ethical background. There’s nobody harder working.”

Car dealer Vargo shares the view. “People say that women can’t even leave their house at night, that drugs are running rampant – that’s such a bunch of bullshit,” he declared. “I raised three kids downtown. They went through the schools system and not one of them is on drugs. My wife could go wherever she wanted to.”

Not immune to ‘sex, drugs and money’ and racism

Munching fast food on a short break from their jobs, young labourers Brandon Toope and Sean Noseworthy are not entirely persuaded about Fort Mac’s newfound respectability. “It all boils down to sex, drugs and money,” insists Noseworthy, who makes almost $100,000 a year for unskilled labour that keeps him far away from the much dirtier, even more lucrative work at a mine site. “If you’re not here for one of those things, you’re in the wrong city.”

Workers who migrate to Fort Mac with no resources and expect an easy life often end up on the street, according to the pair. “But it’s a good city as long as you stay away from drugs and know how to work,” Toope says. “You can do well here.”

Menkir W from Ethiopia has experienced both sides of life in Fort Mac, having recently lost the job that brought him here five years ago. Now grim and disappointed behind the wheel of a taxicab, he is moving south to new if not greener pastures. The driver is surprised that anyone would ask whether racism held him back from his stab at the Canadian good life. “Of course,” he answers.

The disappearance of transient workers and the continuing existence of a shadow population of the homeless and dispossessed does little to blunt Fort Mac’s prosperity – or to trouble local leaders. The “fly-in, fly-out” workers have largely disappeared, according to Vargo, and good riddance to them. Meanwhile, the distant financial centres of Toronto and Calgary have been harder hit by the oil slump than Fort McMurray.

So far, the biggest loser in the wake of the Alberta election has been the national government of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, whose justice minister, Peter McKay, publicly bemoaned the emergence of “Albertastan” the day after Notley’s victory. Federal politicians of all stripes regard Notley’s destruction of the provincial conservatives as a potential harbinger of things to come when the Harper government faces re-election this October.

None of that makes much difference up here. “We’re not suffering here in Fort McMurray because the citizen who lives here and works here makes good money and is spending their money,” says Vargo.

People come and go, but the boom never ends – and the oil flows freely.

“When oil prices are high, it’s fantastic. We’re all going full bore, making good money,” the car dealer says. “When oil prices drop down, and they call it a recession, we drop down to average business.”

Vargo insists that the rest of Canada – even the world – depends on Fort McMurray to keep it humming. “I don’t think nothing’s going to change for years and years.”