Dollars and Doldrums Mix in Canada's Oil Boomtown

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 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.

"It's hard. You're like a stranger to the kids," he admitted. "I really need to get home more."

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.

But building and running the giant machines that carve the earth and extract the oil requires a huge workforce. 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 this town, 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 cut out of the pine forests, 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, who lives in a 1962 Edmonton city bus in a trailer park outside the town. The master electrician had paneled the interior of the bus and set up a computer room, a bedroom, kitchen and lounge. It is comfortable.

"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." McNabb makes $65 an hour and pockets most of an extra $3,000 a month living allowance.

So many people have come from the hardscrabble Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island that the oil companies now run regular charter flights from there directly to Fort McMurray. The provinces are feeling the loss.

"Tradespeople are hard to find here," groused Barry Butler, 53, who runs a roofing company in Fredericton, New Brunswick. "You train them, give them some experience, and they pick up and go west."