National Post (National Edition)
‘Man camps’ PM’S latest Alberta issue
The prime minister is in hot water again in Alberta. Justin Trudeau was on a discussion panel at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires on Friday; the topic was gender equality, and he was there to talk up his government’s bleeding-edge credentials on “gender budgeting.” He mentioned that with “big infrastructure projects” such as highways and pipelines there are “gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area ... because they’re mostly male construction workers.” Word of this zoomed back to the Dominion, and there was immediately a semi-contrived controversy about whether he really intended to imply that construction workers are a form of social poison.
It perhaps did not help the PM’S image that a lot of people on social media were quick to assert that male workers in large groups are, in fact, pretty toxic. There was a great deal of talk about awful “man camps,” a phrasing which makes temporary housing for remote industrial projects sound like it is created for the purpose of frisky unisex recreation. Perhaps if you pile up enough porn, beer and sports equipment in the wilderness, a “man camp” will spontaneously self-assemble, and you get a power transmission line or a dam out of it as a bonus while everybody is having a good time.
Well, Trudeau never used the term “man camps,” and would probably like some of his fans to pipe down a bit. Tyler Dawson, my Post colleague here in Edmonton, was careful to place an exact version of the PM’S quote in this newspaper, in the hope of letting people see what they are furious about. I would normally not dream of trying to follow Tyler’s careful, lucid discussion of the Trudeau-war-on-workers issue. But there are not many newspaper columnists who come from families that have had members in camp-based construction jobs, or who have actually been to such a camp.
Trudeau talked about the “gender lens,” so maybe we should hear from somebody who will peep at his comments through a working-class lens. As a bonus, I have also participated in public panel discussions, so I sympathize with the prime minister a little on that score. Tyler was too polite to write this explicitly, but Trudeau was pretty much babbling in Argentina. You have to be extremely disciplined — more so than the good Lord made myself or Mr. Trudeau — to not run off at the mouth on one of these panels. One minute the PM seemed to be arguing for getting women better jobs, perhaps in those man camps themselves. (BREAKING NEWS: they are already there!) But just a few seconds later he was talking about “women entrepreneurs.”
Tying entrepreneurship back to the social impacts of camp labour would require a lot of filling in of blanks: that is perhaps more help than I am willing to give the prime minister, seeing as he was sitting on that panel mostly to burnish his own international star credentials. (If it helps Canada somehow, great.) But I am in a position to explain why Albertans might be touchy about the topic of labour camps.
It’s because everybody hates them. Remote construction jobs offer high pay in exchange for being apart from civilization and family for two weeks of every three, or three of four, or three of five. They become an option when you can’t find a nine-to-five job in a heated shop or Quonset in your town, or in any town, and you don’t want to throw away your education and training or go on pogey. In a local recession they can be a precious lifeline — but they can wreak havoc on a household or a marriage too.
Even for a single person, they are lonely, stressful, and miserable — probably the closest thing to army life a civilian can experience. (I would add that they are surely a lot less terrible now, in an internet-connected world, than they were in my youth, when heading off to Chetwynd or some such place took you out of the range of telephony.) Some of the loudest, harshest criticism of the prime minister has not come from workers, but from the families they leave behind to work remote construction.
If Trudeau expected some benefit of the doubt, the current crisis in the Alberta budget and economy, created specifically by an ecoaware freeze on pipeline-building, will not have anybody feeling especially generous. Of course he has nothing to lose electorally in Alberta, and knows it, but those man camps have always been full of Easterners sending remittances home.
Anyway, let’s not hero-worship the proletariat. While Conservative politicians heaped abuse on Trudeau for sneering at industrial labour, others defended him for mentioning “social impacts” from “bringing construction workers into a rural area.” These impacts are obviously real: they are well documented in the setting of the North Dakota Bakken oil boom. Much of the pipeline work now on hold would bring big, male-dominated temporary camps close to remote First Nations, and in those cases, anticipating “social impacts” is not only common sense, but a core duty of government. From an old-fashioned Marxist standpoint, we should have oodles of man camps building the infrastructure of the glorious future, and perhaps each one should have a shiny guillotine for use on executives and managers who allow bored workers to run riot in nearby communities or mistreat women.