In many ways, actually, everybody who has been to Fort McMurray knows it's quite unique. It's like a unique little economy within the province of Alberta.
One of the problems for other municipalities—and for the provincial government and Albertans as a whole—is that it tends to skew the economics of the entire province. For example, when you're trying to hire people to go to Fort McMurray, you know what the wage rates are up there, so it's very difficult sometimes to get people working in other parts of Alberta. You end up with a kind of very individual inflation rate that is set by Fort McMurray but that infiltrates into the rest of the province. So it does create all kinds of other difficulties for the province.
You've pointed out the huge amount of capital investment there that is sunk into a particular project. That tends to skew the economy in all kinds of ways—wage rates and everything else—and skew the tendency towards raw production as opposed to value added.
The late Premier Lougheed did in fact, right up until the time he, sadly, passed away, continue to encourage the Alberta government to set a better pace for the development. He said that it really was too rapid.
When you have this amount of investment in a single resource, I can't help but reflect, if I can have a moment, on something Mr. LeFort talked about, which is basically that throughout the history of Canada we've had resource towns that have suddenly boomed one moment and then suddenly just disappeared. What do you do with all that money and resources and human activity that went in there?
If I can just take a personal moment here, I actually worked in Fort McMurray for a number of years in the 1980s. In fact, my daughter was born there. I can actually remember very clearly the morning when Uranium City shut down. Uranium City is not peculiar in the history of Canada. What we have is a whole history of resource towns into which huge amounts of investment were put and then for whatever reason—sometimes technological innovations or changes in fads and fashions elsewhere—the economics simply didn't work any longer and the town suddenly shut down.
One of the things in terms of pacing and getting it right is to think not just about the short term, as in right now, but about how we build an economy, communities, and this country in the long term as opposed to putting huge investments in a single resource. That seems to me to really be the problem.
I'm not sure anybody would disagree with that, but how do we get it right?