Most of us Americans don’t think too much of the Canadians.  They’re not really like us and some of them even speak French instead of the Mother Tongue.  We’ve civilized them a bit with a couple of our professional baseball teams, a basketball team and of course we’ve been more than generous in supplying them with plenty of  exposure to our national cuisine; McDonalds, KFC and Wendy’s.  But despite our efforts, they are still just not Americans.  They have an odd way of speaking.

But blessed are the meek.  While we were busy ignoring them or lording our hipness over them, something weird has happened in Canada.  So weird in fact that it has almost instantly transformed two big modern cities and an entire province into a “Kingdom of Gold”, richer than China’s own Shandong province, and almost as rich as Saudi Arabia.  It’s a gold rush of epic proportions but it involves sand, not gold.  What? How?  Why?

Years ago, the Native Americans, (they don’t even call them Native Canadians) in what is now the western province called Alberta used to seal and waterproof their canoes with a mixture of resin and a dark sticky substance that oozed here and there from the bogs.  They coated cloth and waterproofed it and did other early-Canadian strangenesses with it too.  It became known as tar sand  or oil sand and when the twentieth century rolled around, some of the educated folk realized that these black tar sands called bitumen were thoroughly impregnated with oil.  You know, Oil, that stuff that is selling today for $120 per barrel.  What they decided was simple:  Yes, it was oil and yes, it could be extracted from the sand but it really messed up the environment to do it.  I mean really messed it up.  But the saving grace for the environment was that the process was so costly that unless oil sold for over $60 per barrel, it wasn’t worth the trouble, to say nothing of polluting the groundwater and trashing the local flora.  That held true for a century, but then the unthinkable happened – a couple of years ago, oil prices soared and passed the $60 per barrel barrier.The boys with the calculators kicked things into high gear, built the processing plants, secured the rights, trained the workers and now Canada has become the largest supplier of Oil to us.  To us, the poor Americans!  And, the oil reserves in the tar sands are so great that they exceed all the reserves in Saudi Arabia.  Somewhere between 175 billion and 175 trillion barrels depending on cost of extraction.

Now this is the part where you and me come in.  For the last few years, housing prices have soared and doubled in the last three years.  Wages are outrageously high. The demand for workers is huge and insatiable.  They’ve run out of people!  Wendys, KFC and McDonalds are actually closing down because folks won’t work for low wages now.  There goes our contribution to their culture.  If we had a sense of adventure and could drive a giant truck shuttling tar sands between the quarry and the refinery for 12 hours a day, we could even earn $200,000 per year.  Jobs are plentiful and in some of the smaller towns, there’s a gold-rush culture developing. Guys, imagine yourself after a hard day driving those big Caterpillar 797 dump trucks.  You stop off at the local saloon, striding in in your boots and leather jacket, with grime on your face looking for all the world like Indiana Jones and order a steak and a pint.  You look around and there are dancing girls from anywhere and everywhere ready to “dance” with you.  Your pockets are bulging with unspent cash.

The economy there is growing at almost the same rate as China’s.  Wages are great and all of your skills are marketable.  Are you man or woman enough to brave the elements?  Remember Canada isn’t Hawaii.   This is how you could solve all of your financial problems.  Maybe.

Admire the beauty while you can because the costs to the environment are great. Get out into the countryside away from the two major cities of Calgary and Edmonton and drive around a bit towards the Pacific Ocean.  After a while, the beautiful prairie lands are replaced in your view with vast areas of slag-like substances.  Life has been ripped off the surface of Mother Earth and the guts of the planet’s crust have been torn out, washed, cleaned, processed and the leftover lifeless sludge has been dumped back into the tar fields, along with the chemical residue from the processing.  It has been called the most destructive project on earth and the place looks to be modeled on Mordor.

So there you are, adventurer, driving your pickup around Fort McMurray, wearing your boots, leather jacket, flannel shirt and cowboy hat making the kind of money you always knew you were worth.  Perhaps you could even forgive the rape of the land.  It is for a good cause, right?  Heating our homes and fuelling our cars.  And we don’t have to depend on those Arabs anymore!  Well maybe you could make your fortune by writing for the local newspapers, or teaching in the schools, or slinging hash in a beer joint or supplying the tools, garments and vehicles the population now wants to spend its over-supply of dollars on.   But there’s more.

If you can’t bear the life of a tar sand groupie, then maybe diamonds are your cup of tea.  Far up beyond the prairies on the frozen tundra of the North, history repeats itself with the recent discovery of diamonds and the opening of three huge mines.  Pack up your long johns and break out your woolen socks, Yankee, you’re heading way North.  These days, our Canadian cousins produce more diamonds than even South Africa.  So if you can drive one of those 240 ton loaders and if you don’t mind the chapped lips, absence of electricity, roads or towns, then this is the place for you.  You could run one of the giant machines that screw into land that is permanently frozen, the permafrost, 24 hours a day to bring up tons of rock to be hauled, crushed and sifted in the hope of finding some of those expensive little baubles that will someday grace the throats and ring fingers of the girls back home.

Maybe we’ll just go up there for a year, make a bunch of dough, live real cheap and bring it all back home.  Then our worries would be over, right?

Geoffrey