Oil sands workers get quality bed & board in Fort McMurray

Today’s work camps are fit for blue-collar kings

By Gordon Jaremko

August 01, 2009

Gary Clark keeps the house promise, says Bruce Dixon. “Everyone puts on 20 pounds,” Clark assures newcomers.

“Guaranteed,” puffs Dixon, working up a sweat on an exercise machine. “This is my first night in here. There’s a reason for that. I’m not very strong – let’s put it that way.”

Dixon does not admit to being short on courage or physical stamina. At age 51, he has broken out of a career rut in retailing in his native Ottawa Valley, remade himself into a pipefitter and joined a crew erecting steel structures on a windswept Alberta hilltop. His confession of weakness is about failing to resist the temptation to overeat that Clark delivers every day as the dining hall manager in a 388-bed work camp run by Horizon North Logistics Inc. at Hardisty, 200 kilometers southeast of Edmonton.

“And please,” Dixon adds, panting and chuckling. “If you have any influence with the management, ask them to move the desserts so they aren’t the first thing you see when you go into the dining hall. Tell them to make it so you at least have to walk across the room to get into that stuff.”

Work camp cuisine melts the resistance of even the most hardened veterans. “I was amazed,” says Gordon Rees, a 55-year-old electrician from Newfoundland whose role in Alberta industry goes back to working on construction of the Syncrude oil sands plant starting in 1976. “In my first 18 days here at Hardisty last November, I put on 20 pounds. When I went home, I tried to pull on a pair of my jeans and they didn’t fit. I’m still working on taking that weight off.”

Groceries pour into the camp in truckloads twice a week, with the bill for each order running to $15,000 to $18,000, reports chef Dwight Constable. Egg consumption, a barometer of appetites, is measured in multiple 25-dozen cases per week. A big share goes into baking habit-forming buns, cookies, squares, pastries, pies and cakes at a rate of 3,000 items a day.

The kitchen staff is as professional at its crafts as the diners are at their industrial construction trades which often pay six-figure incomes. Constable, a commercial food preparer since 1982, owned a restaurant before switching to work camp catering. Cook B.J. Kindt, with 38 years of experience, has a reference library of recipes. “You follow some books. You also use imagination,” he says, “After so many years, you don’t even need to measure. You just know.”

The food masters make a prime contribution, but far from the only one, to a quality environment that startles a roving reporter dropping in unannounced for a sample overnight stay. The location is an “open camp,” renting out rooms to business travelers if any extras are available. The rate approaches $200 but includes the food and the exercise room to wear it off.

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