B’y-gone ERA
A story of over there, from over here
PETER WORDEN
Special to The Telegram
Lonely and full of not-so-happy-go-lucky individualism, Alberta’s oil patch is a unique place. No doubt about that. No doubt, also, an important chapter in Newfoundland’s story is being written on the Prairies.
Tired jokes float around about Newfoundland’s second-largest city being Fort McMurray; that Newfoundland’s Come Home Year is Alberta’s “Go Home” Year; that Alberta is New Newfoundland.
It isn’t news that Newfoundlanders make up a good chunk of the Albertan demographic. The litany of stories previously in The Telegram on the Alberta exodus and incontestable western dollar attest to this.
For my part, co-workers are Newfound-
landers. On Sunday night friends and I have “Newfie dinner.” Saying “Fort Mac” now oddly has an Easterner ring to it, and I recently astounded myself succumbing to a realization I say “b’y” when I’m not even going anywhere.
The theme our two provinces share in this story is a teeter-totter dynamic. (Only Alberta’s economy behaves like a hefty child whose weight, hopping on unintentionally, smacks Newfoundland in the face.)
Newfoundland’s population goes down, Alberta’s, up. The collective provincial story, however, is not solely of high wages, migration and oil. It is of the otherwise unwritten equivocations of oilfield life. Of loneliness. Of regional pretentiousness. Most of all it is a story of two provinces — both rapidly changing and coping with it.
So welcome, St. John’s, to Lloydminster, Alberta!
Boomtown
Lloyd’s a small boom-city (pop. 25,000) straddling the Alberta-Saskatchewan border; a place similar in circumstance to Fort Mac and any other Alberta town, really, whose economy rides almost wholly on oil and gas exploitation.
“We’re a city that’s growing,” says Lloyd RCMP Sgt. Ken Marchand, adding an average of 700 to 800 newcomers, many of them from Eastern Canada, enter the border city each year. An offshoot of such an influx is well known to Marchand. “It’s an affluent community,” he says, “and with disposable incomes come drug and alcohol use.”
Bluntly, many workers move to the oil patch leaving loved ones, friends, family, school and province long behind. Often the work they seek is socially and geographically isolating, but yes, the wages are good.
The result: a hearty percentage of boomtown residents who work long days in the oilfield to finance even longer nights at the local bar. Oilfield wages will afford all the legal and illegal accoutrements of boomtown living. Drugs sometimes take hold. Loneliness ensues. Working oil has long meant big money — but happiness?
Stated another way, Alberta’s lucrative nature comes with an equal and predictable trade-off of loneliness, something which remains unquantifiable. There is no opportunity cost of feeling homesick, lonely or miserable. These things defy statistics.
In a Globe and Mail feature last summer, “Under Construction: Alberta,” the authors make an interesting referral to Alberta’s “white-hot economy.” The analogy, though, somehow misses the mark. “
White-hot” refers to that which burns efficiently. Lloydminster and other Alberta boomtowns surely are a bustle of economic activity, but I submit if Alberta were a car it would only run as efficiently as one could with its tailpipe dragging behind.
That tailpipe: the mass social woes which come from demanding extra working hands at any cost. From Central America. From China. And, as well, from Newfoundland.
Steady drip
From across the Great Canadian kitchen counter a dripping noise can be heard. Alas, plugging up the leaky faucet of Atlantic Canada is tough, considering incentives to move West: Direct Rock-to-Fort Mac flights; head-hunting oil-job fairs; $500 signing bonuses; free rent; free moving expenses. … the list goes on.
The romantic notion of adventure and money and the Rocky Mountains is compelling and it may be, in the truest sense, a b’ygone era for Easterners. Fishers have become the fished, and nowadays the fish jump straight out of the water, inland. In fact, just about as far inland as you can get: the Canadian Prairie. Far away from a littoral lifestyle in exchange for a much drier one.
And so Lloyd remains home to hundreds of just-here-for-awhile workers; many helping to build a city — a province — that will never know their name. Is it not worth pondering, then, just how many lonely Newfound-landers there are in Alberta? There exists, I’m convinced, a bevy of Atlantic souls bereft of company, love and true friendship. (So much, in fact, the editor of the Lloyd-
minster newspaper The Booster began running maudlin homesick columns from Newfoundlanders living in the boomtown.)
Even the local country radio station, Lloyd FM, airs on the weekend an East Coast Kitchen Party; met with resentment from some. And this may be just the beginning.
The rift, delicately, is that Newfoundlanders are somehow only here on a visitor pass. They are free to look around Alberta but not touch. No “Newfie pride,” as it were. It seems an antique struggle in Alberta and Canada. Migrant workers are viewed somehow as disturbers despite being badly needed for the heavy labour required in industrializing a vast oil patch. The Newfoundland-influx (and this recent radio program) is interpreted by some as a regionalist threat to an indefinable Alberta-ness.
Yet the province remains one of proud adventurers, and welcoming the needy is part of what it means to be Albertan. The xenophobia some exhibit is only part of the strange reality in Canada’s oil patch; a half-paradise where oil and water would sooner mix than oil and love. Where the $31-per-hour laurels of oilfield work rule and a strange resentment of Newfoundlanders is emerging. Where the reality of all this hangs as heavy in the air as the scent of diesel.
In Alberta’s ever-salient, insatiable oil towns, it seems money is the last solace of the lonely migrant worker. But perhaps more detrimental than drugs and alcohol is making money, big money, and being utterly alone with it.
Peter Worden is a freelance writer and newspaper reporter living in Lloydminster, Alta./Sask. Last summer a social experiment led him out from behind a cozy desk directly to the slick, rust-filled outdoors of a vast, ambiguous oil patch. And he survived to tell the tale.
29/12/07
