Small is Beautiful - Mega is Messy

In Joel McKay's discussion of boom and bust (see previous blog) he states:

It’s not an easy conversation to have – Houston has been a

two-sawmill town for as long as anyone can remember.

Houston Forest Products, the second mill, opened in 1978. Our memories are not that bad; rather, it’s that folks don’t live here that long. This too is a piece of the boom and bust: transient population cycle - lots of Houstonites have not been here for "decades". One of the ways folks introduce themselves around here is with the length of time lived in Houston. A typical gathering will have groups of under one year. One to three years. About five years. Some folks make it to ten years. Then there are the long timers, three decades or more, followed by the born and raised. So it isn’t that Houston has had two mills for a hugely long time, or that we have poor memories, but that many of our current residents were not here then, so they know Houston as a two sawmill town.

But wait a minute. In 1949 there were 42 mills in the Houston district, and by 1958, according to local old-timers, there were between 67 and 84 mills in operation. My guess is that not all the little mills were profitable or super-efficient, but they certainly were more boom and bust proof. If one mill closed, it affected fewer workers and there were several other mills nearby where one could likely find work. Small is Beautiful- Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher anyone? It does not take much imagination for those of us who are riding the boom and bust rollercoaster to see that life might be more stable, richer and less stressful with a different model.

The company town is another model that was popular in the 1950’s and 60’s in Canda’s hinterland. Kitimat is the poster child for company towns, a town built specifically for one industry and company, and interestingly, still kicking through its own bust period, and now growing again. Some other communities have had a tougher go of it: Alice Arm, Cassiar, Granisle, to name a few.

And now the approach is to create huge work camps and fly in workers from various parts of the province and country and beyond. And that is one of the key pieces of this model, it houses only workers. Lives and loved ones exist in other towns or cities. The camp supplies food and accommodations, and usually some recreational infrastructure. For everything else, the workers rely on the nearest, now overstretched town. Rumours fly, and numbers grow, but there is talk of some of these camps reaching 5,000 (predominately male) workers. They have no desire to live in this area, they are here for the pay cheque and little else. Their workdays may be 12 hours long and on their days off, they fly home. They are not a part of the community they work in. They are mostly absent from the community they live in.

Meanwhile, in these camp-encircled communities, hotel rooms are booked months in advance, rental accommodation is unavailable and food stores and other services are maxed out. Older buildings with low rent are being renovated and folks evicted: renoviction. The newly renovated suites go for up to $3000 per month to the well-paid affiliated professionals, in town for the boom spin-offs. Now the people who have lived here for years and years, the people who call this town home, are having to move to a place with cheaper rents. You cannot live on minimum wage in boom town. The only choice, if you don’t have the skills for the higher paid jobs, is to take a trip down the highway to the closest bust town, find a place to live for less and look for a job. But this is bust town and the jobs are not here. And now you are a transient, with family at a distance and no connection to place. The roller coaster is now a roundabout.

Is it not possible to develop resources in a planned way and create sustainable, livable communities where people will choose to work as well as live their lives and raise their families? Can we not see that small and planned is beautiful while mega project development is always boom and bust? Is it fair that the province pins its future prosperity on an unplanned model that creates unsustainable, transient populations and communities in our northern regions?

 

Next week: Literacy implications