Editorial

Challenges, opportunities

Things don’t always stay the same.
The relatively robust economy of Slave Lake, for example, might not be that way in a year or two or five or 10. The oil and gas will run out.
At least we’re reasonably certain it will. Given human ingenuity and the application of new technology (as argued in another article on this page) much is possible that we never dreamed of.
But it is still likely that one day there will be no oil and gas industry to fuel the Slave Lake economy. No more seismic work, lease building, rig hauling, well servicing, operating or any of the other work that sustains literally hundreds of small and large businesses in the Lesser Slave Lake area. What then?
Thankfully, it will be a gradual change. It is already happening. Political might be partly to blame, but there has been a general decline in oilpatch activity in the past few years. The older fields are drying up, we’re told.
How well Slave Lake handles the oilpatch shrinkage is the big question of the new century.
There are examples of towns that have survived drastic economic changes. Also of towns that haven’t.
Tourism can save a town. Kimberly, B.C. is an example. It was always a mining town and then quite suddenly a few years ago it wasn’t. It could have dried up and blown away but it reinvented itself as a Bavarian-theme tourist trap and seems to be doing okay. Of course being in the mountains helps. People (especially prairie people) want an excuse to visit the mountains.
Faust Alberta had no such advantage when in about 1960 it found it no longer straddled Alberta’s only decent highway to the Peace Country and Alaska. A bustling, thriving community with three hotels, several stores and other services and a large sawmill, it was the biggest and busiest town on Lesser Slave Lake and had been for years. So well-established was Faust that when a Hollywood film crew came looking for a big white frozen landscape in the 1920s, where did they stay? In Faust.
But a lot of Faust’s prosperity depended on highway traffic. When the province put in Hwy. 43 between Whitecourt and Valleyview, Hwy. 2 along Lesser Slave Lake became largely obsolete. Faust turned into a ghost of its former self and has never really recovered, despite its excellent lakeshore location.
Could a strong vision and timely investment have helped Faust? It certainly helped Kimberly. No doubt it can help Slave Lake weather the change from an oil and gas-based economy to whatever comes after.
Efforts are underway. The regional Economic Development Board was recently re-established and is charged with coming up with a strategic plan for development in the town and surrounding municipal district.
No doubt tourism will be a significant part of the plan. The board will wrestle with – among other things – the opportunities and challenges of developing Slave Lake’s Old Town area along the river. The opportunities appear great, but so do the challenges when so much apparently hinges on reliable boat access to the lake through a perennially shallow channel.
A strong vision and timely investment. Economic diversification. Value-added industry. People with the faith in the Slave Lake area to invest their time and energy and money to make new and good things happen. All these are needed, but only if there is something worth saving.
If this community only exists in people’s minds as a pit stop on the way to personal prosperity, then it probably doesn’t matter what happens to it. We’ll make our dough and move on to wherever the next economic hot spot is.
But if it exists in people’s minds as something much more than that – something worth preserving and developing regardless of other factors – that’s where the kernel of success lies. The rest is just details.