Word: alberta
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...says an oil worker earning $130,000 a year, a fairly typical salary in Fort McMurray, which has earned the nickname Fort McMoney because it has the nation's highest average income. The timing seems right for Canada too. Carpenters and truck drivers are fetching six-figure wages in Alberta--and working in -50°F (-46°C) temperatures in the winter--but Canada's traditional manufacturing hub of southern Ontario is suffering, ironically, because of its ties to the U.S. auto industry. And Canada's strengthening loonie has shed its huge cost advantage to the dollar...
...expanded pipeline network straight to waiting U.S. upgrading plants and refineries, a majority of which are located in such Midwestern states as Minnesota, North Dakota and Ohio. Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum and Total S.A. of France, along with about 20 smaller but no less ambitious players, are also transforming Alberta's boreal oil patch into the primary supplier of feedstock for an integrated North American energy market. "Canada is extremely important to U.S. energy security," says Rob Routs, executive director of oil sands at Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the world's No. 2 oil company, with annual revenue...
...acknowledge its newly minted status as an energy power broker. "We need to start acting like an OPEC-level player with an ability to change the world economy," says Ross Jacobs of Fort McMurray, a Liberal who was recently defeated in a bid to represent his district in Alberta's provincial legislature. "Canadians need to start thinking globally...
...Relations between the maverick western province and Ottawa have always been stormy. In the 1970s, at a time of skyrocketing fuel prices, leftist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau promoted a National Energy Program of self-sufficiency and Canadian ownership of oil and gas development, which ignited a turf war with Alberta. Alberta won, which means so did the U.S., because the oil could be freely traded...
...bigger issue for Canada is that Alberta will get locked into the upstream rungs of an integrated North American energy market, while high-tech jobs head south, along with raw bitumen. "A Wild West approach to development is raising costs and acting as a disincentive for big energy companies to invest in upgrading and refining operations in Alberta," says Gil McGowan, head of the Alberta Federation of Labour, the province's largest union, representing 140,000 workers...