On March 26, 2008, Tim Hearn, Imperial Oil’s outgoing chairman, announced that his company might be willing to counter some of the social problems in the Fort McMurray region by helping to build an oilfield community near its Kearl megaproject.

Some found this news remarkable in view of the bad reputation company towns have had in Canadian history. And for good reasons. The first corporate settlements in Canada were Hudson’s Bay Company posts where employees were held in virtual slavery for the length of their contract to the fur trade company. Then came the lumber camps, coal mining communities and other resource extraction settlements. Hours were long, living conditions terrible, and you owed your wages to the company store in a way reminiscent of indentured labour.

Turner Valley: The Early Oil Booms

When Alberta’s first oilfield sprang up along Sheep Creek in southwestern Alberta, oil patch communities “growed like topsy.” Turner Valley developed in a piecemeal fashion, without central planning or a single dominant company responsible for the show. It was close enough to Calgary that it could rely, to a certain extent, on the city for some social services.

That worked – for a time. During the first boom, from 1914 to 1917, small oil companies took care of their employees. During the next one, from 1924 to the early 1930s, independent companies once again looked out for their own. And Imperial Oil – it arrived in the early 1920s – quickly built bunkhouses for its single men just west of the Turner Valley Gas Plant site, but expected everyone else to fend for himself, and his family.

As the oilfield got busier, cracks began to appear in the infrastructure. Some of the squatters’ shacks in the floodplain along Sheep Creek got washed away during the floods. Outhouses and water wells were dug side by side, which was fine until the spring rains contaminated the drinking water with overflow from the biffies.

Free natural gas heated the homes and cooked the meals, but the unscrubbed gas smelled bad and the poorly controlled pressure on the gas lines resulted in many explosions and some deaths. Schools were full to overflowing – kids attended in shifts. And there was no hospital, just a weekly doctor visit from Calgary. When the Royalite No. 14 rig blew up and injured members of the drilling crew, two of them died. Not immediately, but en route to Calgary over bad roads that delayed access to medical care.

Finally, in 1933, the elected politicians in Black Diamond and Turner Valley admitted defeat and turned over their bankrupt villages to the provincial government. No one, industry or government, took responsibility for social and community services in Alberta’s first oilfield. As a result, everyone suffered.

Nearly everything to do with the Alberta oil patch changed in 1938 when the provincial government set up the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB). Its mandate was economic conservation – at its worst, ten dollars of natural gas was being flared to produce one dollar of oil because there were no pipelines to deliver most of the gas to market. The province’s decision to create the ERCB showed it was willing to regulate the “winner-take-all” oil patch.

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