Oil country gasps at the project’s cost

Sherwood Park residents happy it’s being built, but upset with who foots bill

EDMONTON— Ottawa’s startling decision to pick up the $4.5billion cost of the Trans Mountain expansion — thereby kickstarting construction on the controversial pipeline — rippled across the heart of oil country Tuesday.

But as eager as many Albertans are to get oil flowing, many are also feeling sticker shock over the pipeline’s price tag.

Just east of Edmonton lies ground zero for Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline. The original 1,150-km pipe was built in1953 and currently shuttles about 300,000 barrels of oil to Burnaby, B.C., every day.

It’s the expansion of this decades-old pipeline that has garnered headlines across the country. But in Sherwood Park, a suburb founded in the ’50s for local industry workers, the heated political debate is much more personal.

With flat, wide streets and single-family homes surrounded by trees, Sherwood Park looks like any other Canadian suburb. But it’s bordered on the west by a mass of towering oil facilities — some of the biggest in Western Canada — known locally as Refinery Row. Many of the city’s roughly 70,000 residents are connected to the industry that has been around as long as the city itself.

Locals say that, as oil goes, so does the town. Kevin Sembaliuk, owner of a Wild Wings in Sherwood Park, says many of his friends are still unemployed after being laid off from jobs in the oilpatch. The number of people coming in for beer and wings has been slower than he hoped.

“We need it, we want it, let’s get this thing going,” he said of the expansion Tuesday.

Still, he wonders about the cost being passed down to small-business owners like himself, pointing out it’s a constant struggle to keep up with taxes and minimum-wage hikes.

In addition to the upfront costs for the pipeline, the expansion is expected to cost several billion dollars more.

“Prices are going to go up. Some places are going to close; some places are going to survive,” he said with a shrug. “I think it’s more frustrating than anything because they don’t give us any time to catch up.” Residents in town have watched the high-profile antipipeline protests in recent months from afar. Rita Kowalchuk, who has lived in Sherwood Park since 1974, hoped matters wouldn’t get this far. She expected the federal gov- ernment to step in and mediate the B.C.-Alberta dispute before buying the pipeline outright.

Now, she points out, this twist will see everyone in Canada — even the critics — footing the bill through taxes.

“It’s kind of ironic because now the people who are against it are now going to be paying for it,” Kowalchuk said, speaking to StarMetro while out running errands Tuesday morning.

Stacy Dolynny, owner of autoshop HART Transmission & Mechanical, is furious. In a backroom behind his garage where a huge tow-truck is being worked on, he said getting the pipeline built wasn’t worth the price tag.

“The fact that taxpayers have to foot the bill now I think is a bunch of malarkey,” he said as a power drill squealed in the background. “Taxes will go up, corporate taxes will go up. It has to.”

Not that he doesn’t see the benefit of oil jobs.

“We’re all directly affected by oil here,” Dolynny said. “We’re in an urban setting, but a lot of our fleet accounts, our fleet customers, they’re tied to oil somehow. I think the announcement was obviously a good thing, that the federal government stepped up,” he said.

“I guarantee you I will never be voting Liberal or NDP again. Ever,” Dolynny said. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re a bunch of clowns.”