The CBC documentary Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta is a gripping story of the controversy surrounding the current oil boom in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Although unintentional, it is also illustrative of the options and the benefits a strategic plan can deliver to an organization facing decisions about managing growth.
While Canadians are generally aware of the recent oil boom in Alberta, the CBC documentary enlightens us as to its cost and also its fragility.
The most captivating aspect of this documentary is how this oil boom didn’t simply transpire from thin air. It was, rather, a direct result of a change in the direction of the strategic plan for the development of the province.
Under the current administration, the province has experienced unprecedented growth.
Growth spells jobs and wealth. That’s good right?
Unfortunately, growth that lacks direction or focus is what math experts (and business consultants alike!) label as chaos.
The CBC makes the downside of this growth both painful and obvious:
As Fort McMurray bursts at the seams, children from Thunder Bay to Cape Breton are made tar-sands orphans by their migrant-worker parents. Canada’s petrodollar breaks the back of the manufacturing economy in the East. Cancer rates skyrocket downstream of Fort McMurray while Rocky Mountain glaciers melt and disappear. And all the while, Alberta crude goes south to U.S. markets while Eastern Canada pays ever more for insecure Middle East oil.
The documentary goes on to encourage the viewer to raise questions about the benefit of this growth by comparing and contrasting the current strategic plan with that of former premier, Peter Lougheed. The essence of the commentary about Lougheed is captured in the following excerpt from Wikipedia:
As Premier, Lougheed furthered the development of the oil and gas resources, and started the Alberta Heritage Fund as a way of ensuring that the exploitation of non-renewable resources would be of long-term benefit to Alberta.
Tar Sands describes how under Lougheed’s steady hand the price of oil and the rate at which it would be extracted were both carefully controlled. It clarifies the relationship between these decisions and the province’s ability to control investment in infrastructure and employment stability as well as the ensuing luxury to invest cash back into the province.
Such options are no longer available to the current administration.
The Tar Sands is interesting for the parallels it presents in terms of the choices and benefits a carefully crafted strategic plan can deliver to a professional practice faced with decisions about managing growth.
Photo credit (top): gordmckenna
This was just another hatchet job by an Eastern dominated news organization. Tar sands orphans? What do you expect…that it’s better for people to stay at home on wefare than to go where the jobs are. In 1942 my father left Northern Ontario for a better paying job in the south. Many northeners did the same. I don’t recall them being ridiculed because they didn’t stay home and let the jobs come to them. I left Ontario when it became apparent that the steam had gone out of the Ontario oil industry and the future was in the West. I didn’t wait around for them to move the resources to may back yard so as to not inconvenience me. I guess it would all be okay if a little bit of the oil sands was spread around every community in Ontario. Maybe that would stop people who don’t live here from telling us how to run our province.
When people like William Marsden go on TV to claim that there is a disconnect between the people of Alberta and our government, I simply point to the results of the last election. Some disconnect! We are quite capable dealing with matters within our provincial jurisdiction without any help from a bunch of eletist Eastern socialist telling us we have to shuffle off back to our proper place in confederation as poor cousins to the self righteous jerks at the centre of the universe.