Danielle Smith ‘Represents the Oilsands More Than the People of Alberta’

Don Gillmor moved to Calgary in September 1971, on the same day that Alberta elected its first Progressive Conservative government.

As a university student, he found himself at the core of a significant cultural shift. Alberta was transitioning from 36 years of Social Credit party rule. Just two years later, the OPEC crisis would launch the province’s burgeoning oil industry into the stratosphere. Gillmor took a job working on the rigs.

The work was “dirty and dangerous,” Gillmor remembers in his book On Oil, out now from Biblioasis. But the money was good.

The period represented the heyday of Alberta’s oil and gas industry — a bizarre intersection of religious ideology, debauchery and loose work-safe practices that would make Wile E. Coyote cringe. Gillmor recounts how his boss, Joe, smoked cigarettes as he pumped gas from the earth. When the safety inspector scolded him, Gillmor’s boss threatened him with a two-foot pipe wrench.

“It was a colourful subculture, which had a lot of appeal for an English major,” Gillmor writes. “It represented some kind of freedom, though it was hard to say what kind.”

Calgary, at the time, had more cars than people, Gillmor writes. Those cars symbolized freedom, and the oil being pumped from the ground was fuelling the path forward.

The wild narratives in the book’s first chapter, “Babylon,” launch the reader into an encompassing history of fossil fuels, which traces the industry’s trajectory from the discovery of oil in the mid-1800s through two world wars and the Calgary boom. It takes us from a time when oil served the people of Alberta to today, when politicians appear beholden to an industry fighting for its survival.

On Oil arrives amidst more change. It was published in March, just as the federal Liberals chose Mark Carney as their new leader and the country launched into a spring election upset that saw the governing party re-elected after what was projected to be an easy Conservative win. The book also maps the north-south nature of Canada’s pipeline grid as the Donald Trump administration forces us to reflect on Canada’s economic reliance on the United States.

Gillmor also references U.S. government reports dating back 50 years that warned about climate change and a time when the world would be faced with mass migration, political unrest and war. The final chapter, “The Rapture,” places us dangerously close to those warnings.

Gillmor is well positioned to tell this story. After his stint in the oilfields, he went on to become an award-winning journalist and the author of nearly a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, in addition to a collection of children’s stories.

The Tyee caught up with the author at home in Toronto. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: You wrote this at a time when so much is changing. It was 2023, and you referenced it as the hottest summer on record, but then that was surpassed in 2024. There is the evolving economic and political landscape. Were there moments when you wanted to say, “Stop the press, I have more to add”?

Don Gillmor: There were. The book was finished a year ago and then we did add some things as we got closer to publication. We could see that it was a moving target. Even so, since publication, there have been all kinds of interesting developments. Had the press time been closer to now, I think I would have asked them to stop the presses. So much has happened, even in the last month. It is an interesting moment.

One of your previous novels also touched on the oil industry. What made you decide to write a non-fiction book about the history of oil and your personal experience working in oil and gas?

I was an English major and I always thought at some point I would write a novel about the oilfields, because it was filled with these colourful characters. I tried to write that novel when I was in my 20s, and it just never really materialized. It was almost 30 years later when I took it up again [with the novel Long Change].

Once I delved into that world, I realized how rich a subject it was. There’s hardly anything from my own experience on the oilfields in there, but it stayed with me that there was more to this story. Dan Wells at Biblioasis, the publisher, has a series called Field Notes. He said, “Is there any subject you’d like to write in this format?” I thought oil would be the perfect subject because then I could weave in some of my own experience from decades ago and look at what’s going on now.

Do you draw a line between the 1970s and that free-for-all culture of the early oil days in Alberta and the oil industry that we see today?

Back then, it was kind of the Wild West. The oilsands were in their infancy. They certainly weren’t profitable and, I think, were still viewed as folly by most of the conventional oil producers.

But because the oil [prices] went up so quickly [with] the embargo in ’73, it really changed the face of Calgary and to some degree the whole province, because so much money was pouring in. Everyone felt raised by the same tide. Housing prices were increasing dramatically. Everyone felt they were sharing in this wealth. They were at the centre of something which, I think, permeated the work culture to a much greater degree.

Now, the oilsands are dominating the oil business in Alberta. They account for the vast majority of oil and it’s a much different, really a corporate, operation that’s happening way offstage for most Albertans. It isn’t having the same effect on the population and it isn’t employing the same numbers, proportionally. We’re seeing the downside of it and we’re seeing the cracks in the facade in terms of the amount of public money that goes into the oil business, the oilsands in particular.

We’re at a point where we’re wondering if this is the wisest use of public funds. I think that’s one of the questions that is now going to be the crux of the next year in terms of federal-provincial relations. You can see the poker game lining up right now, with Danielle Smith publicly saying Alberta doesn’t want to secede, and then making it easier for people to raise a petition with enough signatures to, in fact, put that forward. I don’t think she does want the province to secede, but she certainly will be able to use this as a very effective political club.

Both the leading politicians in our recent federal election were promising energy infrastructure. I didn’t hear Mark Carney actually say the word “pipeline,” but he suggested that he would build pipelines, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was very clear about it. Now that our new prime minister is an economist, are you paying close attention to what direction the next government will take? Because your book lays out a pretty clear argument that developing oil and gas infrastructure doesn’t make good economic sense.

I think you’re right. I didn’t hear the word “pipeline,” which was interesting. So, I think east-west electricity transmission lines would certainly be one of the things on his list. I would hope that he would try and make a case for renewables.

Danielle Smith was talking about being an energy superpower. I’m not sure what that term actually means in the modern day. There was an opportunity to have a version of that in Alberta, since they do have the most renewable energy as well. By imposing a [renewable energy] moratorium, I think that she really did a disservice to the province. Right now, we’re really not looking at an argument between Alberta and Ottawa. It's more the oilsands and Ottawa, with Danielle Smith representing the oilsands more than she’s representing the people of Alberta.

I’m guessing that there won’t be a pipeline because Carney will find some middle ground where there’s just simply not enough federal money to subsidize it, and [the oil industry] will balk at trying to do that on their own.

I think the reason so many people think it’s a great idea is that it would provide energy security. Had it been built 25 years ago, I think that’s true to a degree. But how much energy security do you get if oil drops to $40 a barrel? You’d have to be subsidizing the actual extraction, as well as subsidizing the transmission of the oil to the east. Roughly half of it would be going for export, which raises another issue. If this pipeline takes 10 or 12 years, then what does the energy landscape look like in the rest of the world? You see the European countries decarbonizing at a much greater clip than we are. How big would that market be and how long would that market last?

It’s tough to communicate those things to the public. Premier Smith has the advantage right now. It’s much easier to grasp the idea that if we just build a pipeline we’re no longer dependent on the U.S. The argument against it is much more complicated. [Carney] is going to need some really good communications people to battle that narrative, which I think is a powerful one.

Do you foresee a time when politicians, or governments, can no longer afford to spend political capital supporting the oil and gas industry?

Yes. But it’s been set back so far in the States. President Trump has been trying to get back to this mythical time when America was great, which appears to be sort of the ’50s and ’60s in his head, and now he’s actually going back to the 19th century with reopening coal plants. Even though we’re not moving back in lockstep, there’s an influence there and I think it has put a dent in the whole renewable march forward.

There will come a time when it’s going to be politically tricky to put money into the oil and gas industry, but part of the problem is people don’t really know how much money goes in there. It’s very hard to figure it out. As I said in the book, what defines a subsidy? You have Jon McKenzie, the CEO of Cenovus, saying, “We don't have any subsidies whatsoever.” Then you have the International Monetary Fund saying in 2020 Canada gave $81 billion in fossil fuel subsidies. Between those two poles, there are estimates ranging from $4.5 billion to $18 billion.

That’s something that has to become much clearer. How much money is going into [the industry] and what could be done with that money were it not going into the oilsands?

In your book, you mention that Canada is the nation with the highest oil and gas subsidies, but also the lowest renewable energy subsidies. Have I got that right?

Yes. There’s a reference in the book from [U.S. billionaire] Charles Koch, of all people, who admits that oil doesn’t really operate in a free enterprise system. It’s more a system of political capitalism where government essentially gives them advantages and makes them competitive. He’s a full-blown libertarian and I think it would be healthy if there was a more libertarian attitude applied to energy in this country. What happens if we level the playing field?

I think one of the things we would see is a much faster rate of innovation. I talked to researchers at the University of Calgary and they said that the oilsands, at this point, really aren’t that interested in innovative approaches to reducing their carbon footprint. The renewable sector is where a lot of the innovation is happening. If more money went there, we would see a faster transition.

As you’re watching current politics play out, are you collecting material for another book?

I could see another book. There’s a book by an American, Peter Maass, called Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. That subtitle has always stuck in my mind because I think that’s where we are right now. In the very near future, it’s going to be a fascinating political game, both here and south of the border.

The price of oil has gone down. They’re at a point where it’s unprofitable for a lot of fracking companies. Trump’s idea of “drill, baby, drill” isn't really happening, because no one wants to drill and lose money. What happens if they keep dropping? What happens when things get ugly, when this worldwide battle of oil really takes off in earnest?

You cite a CIA report on climate change that said there would be mass migration as parts of the world become uninhabitable, leading to political unrest and war. There was also a 2003 Pentagon report that said something similar. Is that where we are now?

The CIA report was ’74, so it was a pretty uncanny prediction. I don’t think we’re quite there, but I think we will be getting there relatively soon. It’s happening already, but it’s happening offstage.

So much of the calamitous aspects of oil, including the oilsands, are happening in places where not many people really see it. They are affecting other parts of the world. I think once we start seeing real calamity in populated places, it’s going to change the tenor of this whole narrative. We need those wake-up calls, in a way, because we just aren’t processing the distant threat yet.

In the epilogue you talk about hope. What gives you hope right now?

One of the things that I take comfort in is it’s very difficult to make predictions. You’ll see headlines saying, “EV sales have stalled.” Then you’ll see a story where, in Thailand for example, the adoption rate went from five per cent to 14 per cent in a period of about 10 months. Things reach a tipping point and they accelerate much faster than you would expect. China offers a hopeful model. They went all in on EVs. The turnover from combustion engines to electric has been incredibly fast.

At some point the tipping point will be reached and at that point things could change much faster. Texas and Alberta, the two oil fiefdoms, both also have the most renewables in their respective countries. So, there is hope.