community
Jim McDonald Retired 30-year Syncrude employee “A lot of people here are here for two years to make their money and leave, so it’s difficult in some aspects to say how the town is going to proceed. The things that surprise me are all the events that take place in this town and the volunteer turnout. It’s astronomical. That tells me the core of the Fort McMurray people are good folks that want to stay here and make a living and make a good town, but there’s a lot people passing through that don’t have that same respect.… The oilsands companies that come to Fort McMurray are not held accountable for anything to do with the city, i.e. the infrastructure, the roads…. They come, they take the oilsand, they make lots of money, then they get the hell out. As far as I’m concerned anybody that’s okayed for a big project now should buy into something like a new sewage treatment plant…. They should have to ante up 10 per cent of what they earn in this area and pay for some of this stuff so that the city can catch up.… Tar sand processing is not an easy way on the environment. However, the oil that’s sold abroad, the synthetic crude oil, is probably some of the best quality crude that a person could buy. But it’s difficult processing it to get it to that stage.”
Jon Tupper Director, Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce, running for presidency “We as a community sometimes can be our own worst enemy. We don’t go out and tell our story, we don’t go out to the polls and vote. We have one of
Kevin Flynn
the lowest voter turnouts in the prov-
Has a home in Nova Scotia but has been commuting back and forth to Fort McMurray for 11 years
ince for municipal elections, and one of the lowest voter turnouts nationally for national elections. We had to ask ourselves, why is that? Rather than try to figure out the answers ourselves amongst a board of directors, we thought we’d go out and ask the citizenry. So we created the mycommunitymyvoice.com project to get citizens to tell us what they do feel about our region, what they feel the region should look like, and how do we get there. Once we know what people are thinking, once we can get inside their heads, we can then work to change both our image as a community and our perception within the community, and hopefully tell our story a little bit better, and hopefully see some better voter turnout.”
Natalie Hicks Intake coordinator, Fort McMurray Centre of Hope homeless drop-in centre “A lot of people come here and don’t do enough research, thinking the roads are paved with gold. We have a lot of people that come [to the Centre of Hope] that are very educated. It’s one of the highest homeless educated populations. A lot of people that work come here. We’re busy and getting busier.”
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H E AV Y O I L & O I L S A N D S G U I D E B O O K & D I R E C T O R Y V
“Anywhere you go is as good as you want to make it. If you want to be up here and be miserable, so be it…. It’s been very good to me. The way they’re extracting the oil, there’s going to be some repercussions environmentally, but when you weigh everything out and what it does for the economy—there’s a lot of people that come from all over the country to come here and make a livelihood and make a life for themselves. You have to weigh out the options. The technology is there to do things more environmentally friendly, and I guess the government is pressuring the plants. They’ve already admitted they can do it more environmentally friendly. I think they are headed in that direction, really. That creates more work, so I’m all for it. I’d like to see them do it as environmentally friendly as they could, definitely. And I think a lot of the people feel the same way that even work in the oilsands.”