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About 450 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, in the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo and close to the Saskatchewan border, there is a once-small town called Fort McMurray, a booming city that has become one of the largest contributors to Alberta's booming oil industry.
Built on what is believed to be the largest oil reserve outside of Saudi Arabia, Fort McMurray is home to vast oil sands that contain a sticky, black substance called bitumen—which, under the right process, can be refined into oil.
Fort McMurray is without a doubt one of North America's fastest-growing cities. The influx of jobs in the region's booming oil industry has attracted people from as close as western Canada and as far away as Southeast Asia.
A 2005 census by the municipal government reports that only 37.4 percent of Fort McMurray residents have lived there longer than 11 years. The census also indicates that the city's population has reached close to 61,000, an increase of almost 9 percent from the previous year.
"In the past five years, Fort McMurray's population has increased by 55 percent," says Don Reimer, the communication manager in the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo.
And that's just the beginning.
"Projected growth over the next six years is an additional 45 percent, to a population nearing or surpassing 100,000, making the centre the third-largest city in the province [after Edmonton and Calgary]," says Reimer, noting that this forecast might even be too conservative.
With population growing at this rate, it doesn't take long for changes to become visible. Jasmine John, a chemical engineering student born and raised in Fort McMurray, says she's overwhelmed by some of the changes she sees compared to five years ago.
"When we graduated [from high school] in 2001, it wasn't the way it is now… you kind of knew more people; when you went around it was more 'small-townish'."
"Now you go back and you won't recognize a single face."
Wealth Gap
The flood of new people coming to Fort McMurray to share the city's flourishing economy and high-paying jobs does bring its own problems. The astonishingly rapid population growth has left the city struggling with issues such as shortage of housing and professionals in the health-care and education sectors.
The average price for a single-family house in Fort McMurray is well over $400,000, and the cost of renting a two-bedroom apartment exceeds $1,400 a month.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the homeless population is on the rise.
"I think so much of what's going on in Fort McMurray and the difficulties that we experience … are around the issue of affordable housing," says Rod MacDonald, executive director of the United Way in Fort McMurray.
MacDonald says that although the region seems very prosperous, not everyone enjoys that prosperity.
For every job in the oil sands industry, there are three jobs in the service sector, and those positions don't pay nearly as well, he says.
"Because of that, there are all sorts of social needs in the community."
A report by the region's Homelessness Initiatives Steering Committee states that there were 355 homeless people in 2004, an increase of almost 5 percent over the previous year. This is while 61 percent of the people participating in the survey indicated that they had a source of income.
The number of people going to the city's food bank shows a similar trend. According to Betty Ann Cathre, executive director of Fort McMurray Food Bank, 88 percent of the people going to Food Bank are the "working poor."
"These numbers have never been seen [before] in the Food Bank here," she says.
Cathre says many people who plan to come to Fort McMurray for work expect 30- or 40-dollar-per-hour jobs, but once they arrive, they realize that not everybody is qualified to work on the oil sites.
"So people come up, end up working for thirteen dollars an hour… and I have people working two jobs, trying to afford to live in a one-bedroom apartment with two or three kids."
The town, as with much of Northern Alberta, also suffers from serious substance abuse problems.
"People come in to the camps, and [with] the people working on [oil] sites, there's a lot of money being made, so we have problems with drugs and alcohol," says Cathre.
MacDonald says these problems are typical in booming economies.
"Detoxification services are pretty big in a place like Fort McMurray with the boom mentality, and people with multiple addictions [are] pretty common," says MacDonald.
"The large construction projects that are continuing in the Fort McMurray region… tend to attract very transient, predominantly male population, and they're just a lot more prone to experiencing those kinds of problems."
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