Editorial

Who benefits from the boom

ng up from nothing in the bush a couple of hours north of Wabasca. Chamber of Commerce members were asked to do just that last week, when Lesser Slave MLA Pearl Calahasen got talking about a heavy oil project up there she says is definitely going ahead.
Actually it isn’t really definite, but perhaps as definite as these things get. If oil drops to $20 a barrel next year, Shell will certainly curtail its activities. Heavy oil is expensive oil to extract; new technologies are seldom as cheap as their conventional counterparts.
However, oil will probably stay high, and Shell (and others) will probably carry on with its development plans. Calahasen said Shell was planning on something like a $20 billion investment, and told her it anticipated a workforce of 4,000 to 15,000. Or perhaps that was the size of the new town (which would include family members, presumably). Either way, it’s a huge change to the status quo.
What would the impact be on Slave Lake? As a regional centre, it could certainly expect more traffic, more shoppers, more demand for services. All – it should be noted – without the benefit of a single tax dollar directly from the industrial activity or from the associated residential boom up north.
This would be nothing new for Slave Lake, but the scale of it would probably be. There’s a large ‘shadow population’ that makes use of the services of towns like Slave Lake, but contributes nothing to the tax base. Their impact is real: it hits the protective and social services; it takes its toll on roads, too.
There don’t appear to be any easy solutions. The province could, perhaps, come up with some kind of formula whereby some resource development revenues would be directed to paying for the infrastructure of the municipalities the development affects. But so far the province has not shown any great enthusiasm for doing it.
Not that the provincial government doesn’t contribute. Just not enough, given the way things are going. One example is the $3 million worth of intersection improvements on Hwy. 2 in Slave Lake that the province requires, but won’t help pay for. If oil development north of here goes as forecast, we can expect a lot more such upgrades becoming necessary.

Wood is good
Among many, many other spring activities, let’s not forget about the annual Lesser Slave Forest Education Society’s spring dinner. It is on Friday, May 2 at Northern Lakes College.
The featured speaker is Dave McRae; he’ll talk about forest product innovations.
For tickets, call 849-8722.