What Working in Alberta’s Oil Boom Taught Me about Power

In 1967, John Howard Pew, the eighty-five-year-old chair of Sun Oil, and Ernest Manning, premier of Alberta, attended the opening of the bitumen upgrading plant near Fort McMurray. It was part of the Great Canadian Oil Sands development, a subsidiary of Sun Oil. Both men were evangelical Christians. In 1930, Manning began preaching on a radio program, Back to the Bible Hour, and continued to preach as premier, encouraging Christians to live in the light of Jesus’s return. Pew was on the board of the magazine Christianity Today, which he helped finance, though critics said the magazine was merely a “tool of the oil interests.” He saw faith and oil as intertwined, and he conflated both with freedom. “Without Christian freedom, no freedom is possible,” he said. Manning saw both progress and redemption in the oil sands. “We should be anxious,” he wrote, “for people to know about the oil which in the lamp of God’s Word produces a light that shines across the darkness of this world in order that men may find their way to Jesus Christ, the one who alone can save and who can solve their problems, whatever they may be.” Both men saw the oil sands as a gift from God. I moved to Calgary four years after that baptism, in September 1971, the day the province voted in a Progressive Conservative government. It was a shift to the left from Manning’s Social Credit Party, a regime that had lasted thirty-six years. The city was new and white, Aryan looking, defined by oil, the mountains shining to the west. Two years later, Calgary was transformed by a holy war. On October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, Egyptian tanks invaded the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian troops crossed the Golan Heights to attack Jerusalem. The United States supported Israel, and on October 16, Arab oil producers met in Kuwait and agreed to cut oil production by 25 percent in an effort to put pressure on Israel’s Western allies. Production would be cut by an additional 5 percent each month until a Middle East settlement could be reached. Within a few months, oil went from (in US dollars) $2.90 a barrel to almost $12, then $17 ($123 in 2024 dollars), a boon for Alberta. Calgary expanded riotously, indiscriminately. Over the next several years, between $1 billion and $2.5 billion (roughly $15 billion in 2024 dollars) worth of building permits were issued annually. In 1979, Calgary built more office space than New York or Chicago. Height restrictions were waived, setbacks ignored, permittable land uses altered, and half the city planning department laid off. Newly rich, the city was the Jed Clampett of urbanism. For thirty-six years (1935–1971), the province had been God’s Country, ruled by the Social Credit Party, originally led by an evangelical radio preacher, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, and now it was Babylon. The city expanded at the edges, suburbs rapidly built to handle all the people who flock to a boom. The downtown grew like time-lapse photography, new buildings going up, hasty and undistinguished. Studies of boom towns tend to show a dramatic rise in real estate prices, cost of living, wealth, inequality, crime rates, and addiction. Our civic hysteria would last almost a decade.

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The money was in oil, but you had to know someone. New to the city, I didn’t know anyone, but I was looking for a summer job in the oil fields, so a friend and I drove east from Calgary in a rented Ford Maverick, looking for derricks outside Medicine Hat. “The town that was born lucky,” in Rudyard Kipling’s 1908 assessment, sat on a massive gas field covering 313,631 hectares, holding almost 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas. “All Hell for a basement,” in Kipling’s words. The gas was contained in sandstone from the Upper Cretaceous, some of it only 450 metres below the surface, easily accessible. The first rig we stopped at had a sign that read “This rig has worked 0 accident-free days.” A man in his twenties sat on a forty-gallon drum, head down, hand wrapped in gauze, blood staining his jeans. So, a job opening. But we didn’t have any experience, and the driller said he had no use for us. We spent four days driving out to rigs, in the thirty-two degrees July heat, before we found one that would take us. A crew hadn’t shown up for their afternoon shift, and the driller looked at my friend and me, our longish hair, and said, “I guess you girls’ll have to do.” The driller’s name was Joe, an angry man in his mid-forties with a furrowed face that came to a point, like a villain in a children’s book. I wrestled with the nine-metre drill pipe in the late-afternoon heat, sliding on the slick steel floor, losing my hard hat, Joe screaming curses that disappeared in the noise of the engines. Black diesel smoke drifted toward us. The work was exhausting and confusing, and there wasn’t a lunch break. It was still light at 9 p.m., but dark storm clouds were moving in from the west. The air cooled within minutes, and the rain arrived like an artillery attack, bouncing off the steel rig. I assumed we would go inside and wait it out, but we kept working, soaked through and chilled to the bone. At midnight, the graveyard shift failed to arrive. The day-shift driller lived in a trailer parked near the rig, and Joe sent me over to wake him. I hammered on the padded door, and a man finally opened it angrily, scratching and blinking. He was in his late forties, with black hair and rockabilly sideburns. I told him we needed an extra hand, and he turned away, swearing. In the kitchen, a pale girl my age leaned against the counter. She was wearing a man’s shirt, her legs the colour of skim milk, her face puffy with sleep, blinking opaquely. There was an empty bottle of Black Velvet whiskey on the table. The day driller came out, swearing at me, the rain, at God, at the missing graveyard shift. We worked without stopping, pulling the pipe out of the ground, changing the worn-out drill bit, then running the pipe back down. The noise of the engines and the barrage of rain bouncing off the steel made it impossible to talk—a mercy. The rain finally stopped, and a lurid-red sunrise brought some warmth. My friend quit after a month, but I stayed. The work was dirty and dangerous, but the money was good, and it was a colourful subculture, which had a lot of appeal for an English major. And it was a way to measure myself, the young man’s rite of passage, stepping into a foreign, unforgiving world. It represented some kind of freedom, though it was hard to say what kind. Joe was recently divorced, his teenage daughter a runaway. He lived out of his truck, drunk by noon, out of his mind. He would stand over the wellhead, smoking under the emphatic “No Smoking!” sign, telling me for the fifteenth time that people went to university to get stupider. When a safety inspector came out, the only time I ever saw one in the oil patch, he examined the cigarette butts littered across the drilling floor. “You’re drilling for gas, you goddamn doorknob,” he yelled, his face inches from Joe’s. “You think there might be a connection?” The inspector threatened to fine every man on the rig $500 and the drilling company $2,500. While he was there, I accidentally started a small grass fire while trying to fix the back-up generator, which chronically misfired and was a mechanical mystery to me. Sparks flew out and ignited the dry scrub, and the crew, along with the safety inspector, ran around the prairie with wet sacks, trying to put it out. “This is really something,” the inspector said. “This just about takes the blue ribbon.” After he drove off, Joe lit up a Player’s Plain and said, “I may have to educate that son of a bitch with a two-foot pipe wrench.” We drilled in the Palliser Triangle, a large area of southeastern Alberta that contains arid semi-desert with small cacti and rattlesnakes, as well as irrigated farmers’ fields. The farmers welcomed the extra income but resented our presence, loud, unceasing, and messy. We drilled in a farmer’s canola crop, and Joe got in his truck and flattened everything within the lease boundary out of spite, and the farmer came out with a rifle and fired three shots at the rig. An itinerant petroleum engineer occasionally came out to the well site. He drove a Mercury Marquis and drank from a hip flask, a big man who swaggered and barked orders. Driving home through the semi-desert at midnight, Joe and I saw his car parked at an angle about ten metres off the road. The driver’s door was open, and the engineer was slumped in his seat. Joe stopped the truck and said, “I’d better go see if that dizzy prick is all right.” He walked over and stuck his head in the door, then took the keys out of the ignition and threw them into the darkness. He walked back to the truck and said, “Passed out. Maybe we can move the rig before he wakes up.” On a graveyard shift, Joe gave me a hockey stick with a rag soaked in kerosene at the end, then lit it and told me to go to the end of the pipe where gas was escaping. I inched the flaming stick near the pipe, and it exploded into flame, lighting up the prairie night with benzene, xylene, carbon dioxide, and dioxins. On the way back, I drove his truck so he could shoot at rattlesnakes with the .22 he kept on a gun rack. They were out in the morning sun, absorbing heat from the black asphalt. He drank beer, tossing the empties out the window and checking the rear-view mirror to see them smash on the road. We ate breakfast at the restaurant in the Husky gas station on the highway, and as we left, Joe yelled, “We already done our eight hours.” I was staying in the Corona Hotel in Medicine Hat, a cheap flophouse with a shared bathroom on every floor. On the sidewalk outside the Corona, there was glass and blood, evidence of the previous night’s fights. Rig workers got only one night off every three weeks, and they crowded all their anger and longing into that Saturday night. The hotel was filled with roughnecks and defeated middle-aged men at the end of something. A prostitute stalked the hallway, a tired woman in her forties in a faded print dress and cowboy boots. She smiled at me, missing a front tooth, and asked if I wanted a date. In September, I told Joe I was heading back to university. “I don’t imagine you’ll be too hard to replace,” he said. I returned to the rigs each summer, working for different outfits, drilling south of Calgary, east near Brooks and Medicine Hat, north around Grande Prairie. The money was more than I could make anywhere else, and I was part of the provincial zeitgeist. Thirty thousand people moved to Calgary each year, drawn to oil. There was a palpable sense of power, of being at the centre of something. My fellow roughnecks were ex-cons, failed farmers, a British alcoholic who fell into a sump pit filled with drilling mud, and a few students, one of whom quit halfway through the first shift and walked twenty kilometres back to town. There was a short, muscular derrickman who had a dent in his forehead from a pool ball thrown by a woman in a Grande Prairie bar, and an eighteen-year-old who drove a pink Cadillac and worshipped Elvis. Forty kilometres northwest of Medicine Hat was the British Army Training Unit Suffield, a vast training facility for British soldiers. It was big enough (2,700 square kilometres) that it was used for live firing. The rig I was working on was the first to drill on what was called the British Block. I would see British soldiers walking into town, dressed like an Elton John album cover, looking for romance. Most evenings ended with fights with locals in the bar parking lot, but they kept returning, like salmon swimming upstream, slaves to nature. On our first graveyard shift, we heard a shell land somewhere in the distance. The sky flared briefly. The next one was closer, a third shell closer still. The driller handed me his truck keys and told me to find out where the hell they were firing from. “Tell those limey fucks they break it they bought it.” I rattled along the gravel roads as fast as I could, heading toward the buildings we had seen on our way in. I got out and told a soldier I needed to speak to his commanding officer, that it was life and death, a wartime trill moving through me. The soldier was my age, half a world from home, half asleep. The commanding officer had a clipped military moustache. I told him we were drilling for gas out there and his shells were getting very close. “Drilling for gas?” he said. “And you are?” “A roughneck on that rig.” “A rough neck,” he said, emphasizing the second syllable. “I see.” He gave an order to someone who communicated it to whoever was firing the shells, and I drove back to the rig as slowly as possible. Graveyard shifts were best, the sky an expressive dome, the air finally cool. On slow drilling nights, I’d walk away from the rig’s relentless noise and smoke a cigarette out on the prairie and stare at the night sky. Ovid said that all other creatures look down toward the earth but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars. The morning would break, pink clouds in the east, the warmth spreading slowly. In August, my hand was crushed by the breakout tongs on a midnight shift, and I was driven to the hospital in Medicine Hat. There wasn’t a doctor on duty, and so the night nurse called him. He arrived cinematically drunk, staggering and slurring like Dudley Moore in Arthur. He told me to wash my hand in the sink and shakily poured half a bottle of Aspirin into my good hand, most of them ending up on the floor. Four days later, I was on a Greyhound bus to Calgary with an infected hand that looked like an oven mitt. But my hand healed, and I returned to the oil fields every summer. I bought an unreliable eight-year-old Ford Econoline van and listened to sad country songs on the radio and danced with big-haired waitresses, and every September, I went back to university with a swollen bank account and tales of oil patch madness. Oil had captured the civic psyche and infected my world. It offered, more than anything else, a sense of possibility. Here was the New Rome. During the decade I lived in Calgary, the city was utterly transformed by oil. In 1973, the Calgary Tower (then the Husky Tower), a Jetsonian spike that sits in the middle of the city, was the tallest building in town. Its revolving restaurant was frequented by tourists and by university students on LSD who watched their steak sandwiches turn to carrion and observed the passing city in a sluggish panorama. It would be an exaggeration to say the landscape changed from one revolution to the next, but not much of one. There were usually more than a dozen cranes perched above the skyline, poised over the modest 1940s office buildings like birds of prey. Most of the sandstone structures that had defined an earlier version of the city (it was once called the Sandstone City) were gone or slated for demolition. What went up were generic skyscrapers. Calgary was a bottom-line town, and its downtown architecture reflected that. It didn’t bring beauty or enlightenment to its citizens, but rather value to its shareholders. Social critic John Ruskin wrote that buildings have an eloquence, that they speak to us of what is important. Calgary’s downtown spoke of growth—growth as an aesthetic, as a moral imperative. I lived downtown, one of the few who did, renting a basement apartment in a four-storey cinder-block building on Second Avenue run by a lunatic with a small dog. The city’s spiritual heart was suburban rather than urban, partly due to its rapid growth; it came to the modern through manicured lawns and new cars—it had more cars than people. During the week, the core had an infectious energy, but on Sundays it was empty, so empty that a low-budget movie about an apocalyptic future didn’t need to make any arrangements to stop traffic. There wasn’t a car or pedestrian in sight. I watched them shooting and asked one of the technicians if they needed any extras. “It’s the future,” he said. “Everybody’s dead.” The notion of whether I was a “good Calgarian,” or even a Calgarian, was never formally put to me, but I felt the unstated censure of this question. In the early 1970s, half the population of Calgary wasn’t even born in Alberta. Yet there was a public identity. Calgary revelled in its civic character, then as now often described as “brash,” a curious mixture of rebelliousness and deep conservatism. In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential.” In Calgary, the city was existential, but the identity was ordained. In the 1970s, you could still hear Texan and Oklahoman accents on the street. Calgary was more aligned with those states, its allegiances formed on a north–south axis, while it fought the enemy to the east. Pierre Trudeau’s Mephistophelean face became a lasting symbol of that enemy, his National Energy Program demonized in Alberta. The vilification of Trudeau remained potent for decades, passed along to his son like a family heirloom. In my undergraduate mind, I imagined a David Lynchian narrative lurking beneath Calgary’s almost doctrinaire middle class—white, prosperous, righteous. This view found its epiphany in January 1995, when Earl Joudrie, an oilman of renown, visited his estranged wife, Dorothy, in her condo. They were meeting to discuss their divorce, which had been pending for five years. Dorothy was wearing a black sweater, black stretch pants, and heels, and as their conversation ended, she shot Earl in the back six times with a small-calibre pistol. He collapsed on the floor, and Dorothy went to the living room and mixed a double Seagram’s VO on the rocks. She drank it, then mixed another and went to see about Earl, who was alive and conscious and lying face down in his blood. “How long is it going to take you to die?” she asked, sipping her drink. Earl offered her a deal: if she called emergency, he wouldn’t press charges. Dorothy had come to the end of her plan (and her bullets) and had had several drinks and couldn’t think of a clear way out of a very messy situation. She dialed 911 and Earl was saved. Dorothy was tried for attempted murder and found “not criminally responsible.” There were mitigating factors: Earl had been physically abusive during the course of their marriage. Four of the bullets remained in Earl until his death in 2006. The Joudrie shooting captured the public imagination. It was one of those crimes that reflects the civic zeitgeist, the way the Manson murders did in Los Angeles in 1969, or the assault on the Central Park jogger in New York in 1989. The city recognized some aspect of itself. Calgary wasn’t criminally responsible—wealthy, careless, and gunned on whiskey. In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023, it imported 8.51 million bpd from dozens of countries and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between $5 billion and $15 billion (US). With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool. Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, which comes from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and other places. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline. Oil binds us all. It has a pulse; it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. Oil has powered our lives: we are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Adapted and excerpted from On Oil by Don Gillmor, with permission from Biblioasis. Copyright © Don Gillmor 2025. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.The post What Working in Alberta’s Oil Boom Taught Me about Power first appeared on The Walrus.