Alberta is about to get wildly rich and powerful
June 13, 2005
What does that mean for Canada?
STEVE MAICH
At Suncor Energy's Millennium oil sands project, just north of Fort McMurray, Alta., the unmistakable odour of black gold drifts up from the ground and hangs thick in the air. Everywhere around you, water pooled in footprints, tire ruts and potholes carries the telltale rainbow sheen of oil. "The smell of economic progress," jokes Brad Bellows, a spokesman for Suncor, playing host on a damp spring afternoon. But it's much more than that. It's the smell of raw power -- the kind that comes from having plenty of what the rest of the world can't live without. It's the smell of a resource locked in the ground for millions of years and which now has the potential to shape the future of a nation, for better or for worse.
Suncor's extraction plant on the bank of the Athabasca River looks like a science fiction movie set -- hundreds of kilometres of steel pipe twisted into incomprehensible knots around hulking industrial buildings, storage tanks and smokestacks. The whole scene is bathed in a constant haze of steam and exhaust. Two other such plants are now operating within an hour's drive of here, and several more are scheduled to commence operations over the next few years, all to exploit what may be the biggest petroleum deposit anywhere in the world, a sea of oil-saturated soil covering an area the size of New Brunswick.
Already, one million barrels of petroleum a day are being spun out of the sand and pumped south, and that number is projected to triple within the next decade. During that time, the oil sands will generate about 100,000 new jobs and billions of dollars in royalties and taxes to various levels of government, not to mention billions more in dividends to investors. But the significance of the oil sands beyond Canada's borders may be even greater.
Energy has become a central obsession of international politics in recent years, as exploding economic growth in Asia and America's ongoing love affair with gas-guzzling vehicles have accelerated the drain on world petroleum reserves. Terrorism, trade, the war in Iraq, nuclear diplomacy -- all of it, on some level, is related to the international preoccupation with energy, and access to affordable oil. So if Canada is to play a more significant global role in the years ahead, experts agree it will be due to the reeking, doughy black soil in northern Alberta, and the rest of the world's keen desire to share it. "The oil sands give Canada one of the single greatest advantages of any state in the Western world," says Paul Chastko, a University of Calgary historian who recently published a book called Developing Alberta's Oil Sands. "It gives Canada the ability to supply all of North America for the next 50 years without touching a drop of imported oil." It is, in short, an economic engine and political lever that any nation would desperately love to have.
But rich inheritances can be mixed blessings -- that opportunity comes with a host of potentially poisonous and divisive questions about how best to manage the windfall. Amid Canada's tangle of regional rivalries, three dominant political cultures have emerged -- western conservatives, eastern liberals and Quebec nationalists -- each with its own starkly different priorities and visions for the country. While attention has traditionally focused on feelings of alienation in Quebec, the sense of historical grievance and isolation is just as deep in Alberta, where most believe Ottawa has long pandered to the economic interests of eastern elites at the expense of the West. Even the cultural symbols seem irreconcilable: it's the clash between cowboy oilmen and their libertarian leaders, versus buttoned-down eastern bankers and their old-money political allies.
Now Alberta is poised to reap the biggest bonanza in its history, an economic jackpot giant enough to fundamentally shift the balance of wealth and power westward. The province can control its own destiny more than any other because, in the years to come, Canada will need Alberta far more than Alberta will need the rest of Canada. What remains to be seen is whether the gift of the oil sands will secure the country's prosperity for generations to come, or be the force that finally pushes the straining seams of federalism to their breaking point.
