Oil town fights man camps in effort to boost local population
Region councilors in Canada seek to curtail companies from flying in out-of-town workers
Fort McMurray, the remote Canadian town largely built by the oil-sands industry, is trying to limit the ability of those companies to fly in out-of-town workers.
The town that sits in the middle of the world’s thirdlargest crude reserves is drafting a bylaw to limit the construction of temporary worker housing known as man camps, as it seeks to push producers to hire locally or have workers settle there. The aim is to boost population, local businesses and housing prices in a place that endured the grim double whammy in 2016 of a devastating fire and plunging oil prices.
“We want more people living in this region and calling this home,” Don Scott, mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which encompasses the town, said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s going to give a lot more people in this region a lot more opportunity.”
The region’s councilors voted in favor of a motion to stop man camps within a 47-mile radius of town.
Fort McMurray’s fight against man camps is just the latest headache for producers who have had to deal with opposition to pipelines and a production curtailment imposed by Alberta to try to boost local crude prices.
Preventing producers from setting up new camps would only discourage investment further at a time when capital spending is set to decline for a fifth straight year, said Karim Zariffa, executive director of the Oil Sands Community Alliance, a local trade organization representing the industry.
“Any sort of moratorium imposed on industry is basically a moratorium on development, exasperating lack of investor confidence in the oilsands sector,” he said, adding that oil-sands companies are trying to attract people to live locally.
Located about 460 miles north of Calgary, Fort McMurray’s average temperature last month was -0.7 Fahrenheit. The town’s history has been tied to the oil industry since the 1960s, when what is now Suncor Energy Inc. first started mining the sticky bitumen from the local soil. Fort McMurray was then just a small, remote outpost along the Athabasca River, connected to southern Alberta by a single dirt road. Today, it hosts hotels, swanky restaurants and a massive sports center.
But the area has seen a population decline of 11 percent since 2015 to about 112,000. About a third of that was the so-called shadow population that consists mostly of the workers that stay in camps.
Many workers don’t even utilize the local airport, instead flying via chartered planes into private company airstrips. Local homes have lost about 25 percent of their value since the 2014 downturn.
“We need not only the oil sands to be strong, but we need this community to be strong,” Scott said. “It’s going to be a balance.”