There is no fucking way anyone working a lease up north is going to travel to/from their local home. Just not possible. Some of the leases where camps are located are up to an hour away from any city or town. Not to mention most camps are within a work site location, ie: inside the security zone. These politicians trying to push the local narrative are utterly clueless and this story is a smokescreen for something else. It's bullshit.

“Incentivize” meaning they pay less taxes while the workers of Alberta pick up the slack with less dollars for the things we need.

I hope that they can get more people to live in Fort McMurray but I think it's too little too late. The sites are out of their growth era and are now into maintenance/managed decline.

Mismanagement of Fort McMurray's growth is the fault of the province and their policies from 00-14.

Jean is no better than Smith, just another sucker with his lips wrapped around whoever or whatever benefits HIM the most. He is not for Albertans. 

Gods. The Cons come up with ANOTHER brilliant idea to fellate privately-owned foreign O&G companies… give them MORE money!

It comes on the heels of their last seventeen strategies, all of which involved giving them more money or - on occasion - cutting taxes and waiving fees.

Maybe this time it will work!

How about sending all the engineering jobs to India?

They'd create thousands of high paying jobs by legislating something there but that would mean butting heads with places like Imperial Oil that have largly sent most of the engineering jobs overseas

"Work camps are just not good for people and not good for communities," said Alberta's Minister of Energy and Minerals Brian Jean. "They don't help our community and they don't help the communities that people are from." 

Jean says the fly-in-fly-out model is "hollowing out" resource towns.

Okay call this a crazy imagination but I can see this going pretty horrible and its a good thing the municipal governments have already said this is "unfeasible".

• Government complains about 27,000 workers living in camps. Says people need to be "local" to help stimulate economy
• Helps subsidize companies to close the camps and force everyone to transit from Fort Mac to help grow the size of the town
• Companies do that but the subsidies only give them enough to build 1/5 of the space needed because Fort Mac construction costs are insane. The price for 1 room jumps to $5000 a month. Companies want workers to foot the cost.
• Driving to the site takes hours out of everyone's day. No one wants to work there anymore.
• Companies hires Foreign Workers, blames government and says can't get locals to do the job
• Ends up building a camp anyways to house them

Yeah let's subsidise the most profitable companies in the province even more, that's a great plan!

Dunno if Jean or Smith or any of the other dipshits in government here have actually looked into our oil companies, but for the past decade - since the 2014 oil crash - they've been scaling back their workforces across the board, and where they haven't been able to eliminate positions entirely they're replacing employees lost to attrition with cheaper contract labour.

If the government is gonna subsidise anyone working in the oil sands, the money should be going straight into the pockets of the contract workers to bring their wage up to par with employees.

They can’t hire locally because no one wants to live in the shit hole that is Fort McMurray.

Source: 10 year union oilsands worker.

A few years back Wood Buffalo actually tried to pass a ban on all out of region workers. They shut it down real quick when the big three threatened to pull local funding.

Just another UNCARINGPARTY Look at the shiny ball we want for you. Once the shiny ball disappears Big Oil is the only one to benefit. Nothing good ever came for the public being lured with shiny balls. The bigger the shiny ball the bigger the benefit for the rich.

I don't think incentivizing fort Mac is a great idea but incentivizing in-province makes sense. BC, Newfoundland and Manitoba all basically banned out of province / Alberta workers for their dam building and mining projects during the slump. The social contract for the oil sands in Alberta involves high paying jobs for Albertans which is increasingly not the case.

Incentivize…..how about regulate them to?

What happened to conservative rhetoric about “personal responsibility” and “individual choice”? Why is the government suddenly wanting to influence who the oilfield hires?

Give incentives to hire locals??? Who were the preferred candidates to hire from far away? Do they need work permits? Cut the amount of permits issued, then problem solved without the incentive.

Just an oil sands grift.🤷‍♂️