“I was very, very disappointed,” said Chetwynd resident Yvonne Tupper, upon learning of the camp approvals. “They’re not thinking about the health care services, the social services, even women’s services.”

Tupper is a member of Saulteau First Nations. She has lived in Chetwynd for 30 years, and she’s been fighting to stop Site C ever since she arrived.

“All around us is industry,” says Tupper, as she walks along the banks of Moberly Lake, just north of Chetwynd. She remembers a time before major projects came to the area, when her family used the area for hunting, fishing and berry picking. “I want future generations to experience what I did.”

Chetwynd rests in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains at the intersection of two major highways that snake their way through B.C.’s north. Self-described as “British Columbia’s entrance to the mighty Peace River Country,” the community hosts major Canadian industries, including forestry, oil, gas, mining, rail and tourism. Chetwynd is familiar with the fluctuations of a shadow population.

A 'new normal'

“The industries go up and down in such a way now that they haven’t in the past,” says Michael Haan, co-director of the University of Western Ontario’s Statistics Canada Research Data Centre.

The country needs to “really think about... geographically precarious employment as part of the new normal,” he adds. Haan believes jobs that require a worker to criss-cross Canada could soon become more commonplace than traditional, stable career paths. That’s why, he says, Canada needs to figure out how to deal with this new economy.

While this might be part of the new economic “normal,” the country still doesn’t have a reliable way to keep track of transient workers. The closest measurement is its count of interprovincial workers, which looks at tax information to determine if someone’s workplace is different from their home address. 

But this data is slow to gather and doesn’t distinguish between types of work. The most recent numbers only go up until 2011.

“You don't know if someone is there because of oil, mining or gas [or another industry],” says Haan, who has researched how to count shadow populations in Alberta. That said, interprovincial worker data is “probably the best that we have,” he adds.

A 'virtually impossible' job

Brad Sperling, one of four area directors in B.C.’s Peace River Regional District (PRRD), says “there really isn’t one service or infrastructure… that these camps don’t touch.” Health care, policing, water, sewage, 9-1-1, evacuation plans and internet connectivity are all impacted by a fluctuating population. 

“Without knowing where these camps are, it’s virtually impossible for us to do our job,” he says.

Sperling has been lobbying the B.C. government for over a year, trying to get more information on camp sizes and locations.

He wants a central registry that would give the district more information about camps before they’re built. Right now, the approval process for camps in B.C. is a patchwork of decisions made by various municipal and provincial agencies. So when it comes to camp locations, capacity and occupancy, the information is fragmented, existing in silos within various government agencies and industry groups.  

In 2012, the Northern Health Authority tried to find all the camps in its service area. The agency estimated that more than 1,800 camps were scattered across northern B.C. alone. It described the process to calculate that figure as “complex and challenging.”

That’s why Discourse is compiling information on work camps across B.C. Piecing together information gathered through open data, Freedom of Information requests, online databases, we’ve attempted to create the fullest picture of work camps across the province.

Nowhere in Canada is this more obvious than in Alberta’s Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), home to Canada’s oil sands.

The region grew from 56 work camps in 2006 to 123 by 2015, helping host a shadow population that grew more than 200 per cent from 13,148 to 43,084. In the same time period, the permanent population grew 22 per cent from 66,662 to 81,948.

The RMWB conducts its own census that includes transient workers, separate from Statistics Canada’s federal count, and it’s done for “very good political and economic reasons,” says sociologist Sara Dorow. She is part of an international research team looking at Canadian worker mobility and has studied these issues with a focus on Fort McMurray, Alberta, for the past 10 years. The municipal census results help Wood Buffalo lobby the provincial and federal governments for funding, and help determine where infrastructure projects and services should go.  

The primarily Métis hamlet of Conklin in the RMWB is surrounded by industry megaprojects. Located one and a half hours south of Fort McMurray, Conklin is home to around 330 permanent community members surrounded by more than 20 work camps. Those camps have the capacity to accommodate more than 7,500 workers.

“All of a sudden, all this industry was dropped on you — like this big, heavy change,” says Joanne Richards, 50, a Métis woman who’s spent her whole life in the Conklin area. “It opened up some doors education-wise, employment-wise.”

But despite all the projects in the community, Richards feels excluded. She’s unemployed and depends on the food bank for groceries.

“Conklin is living like a third-world country, surrounded by a bunch of money-making oil companies,” says Richards, who lives in a small trailer parked off a dirt path, has no access to running water and uses a generator for electricity and heat.

She’s not alone.

In Conklin, over the last year, 73 families made up of over 200 people got their groceries from the Wood Buffalo Food Bank Association. Of those 73 families, 63 had a net monthly household income of under $1,000.

Joanne’s sister, Grace Richards, lives down the road from Joanne’s trailer. Grace’s trailer sits among a cluster of mobile homes on their family’s property. Like her sister, Grace doesn’t have running water, a sewage system or heat.

“There is no place to live out here,” Grace says. “There’s no apartments, no rental units, no nothing.”  Development in the RMWB has driven up the cost of living in areas, including Conklin. The hamlet’s permanent residents need more affordable housing, according to a 2013 report on the community by the RMWB.

Investing in services for hamlets like Conklin has been a point of controversy in the community for years. The RMWB is currently installing a new piped water and sewage system in Conklin and building a $46.8-million multiplex. The multiplex project was once put on hold, but construction has resumed and should be completed by 2020.

Hooking up to the new system will cost each resident $16,000. While some might benefit, Grace says many won’t be able to afford it. “There’s a lot of us out here that are doubled up on one property that can’t afford a home for ourselves, and we can’t benefit from this.”

Back in B.C., Rob Fraser, mayor of Taylor — a northern community steeped in industry — is grappling with balancing opportunities and challenges that may come with a potential natural gas boom. “We want to grow our communities,” he says. “But we want to minimize the impacts.”

Fraser fears the area isn’t prepared for the next big boom.

“I think it will get worse before it gets better if we don’t get a handle on the shadow population, and figure out what is going on out there,” he says.

These concerns were raised by the B.C. Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development in a 2015 briefing note titled “Mitigating the effects of natural resource-based industrial work camps.” Discourse obtained this document through a Freedom of Information Request.

“Provincial agencies, in their role as service providers, are also concerned about their ability to deliver needed services and infrastructure in the face of increased demands,” it says. At the time, with LNG alone, B.C. estimated that proposed projects could bring in from 15,600 to 27,000-plus temporary workers to the areas around Kitimat, Squamish, Prince Rupert and the Peace River Regional District (PRRD).

But the briefing note defended the current approach, in which the province plays a minimal role in camp regulation, suggesting this strategy gives more say to community and industry. It added, creating a central registry would be a “resource-intensive solution.” It also pointed out that the PRRD has access to additional provincial funding, valued at more than $1.1 billion. It will be given to the PRRD over the next 18 years to make up for the demands of industrial development on communities. 

In a 2016 letter to Sperling, then-B.C. Health Minister Terry Lake suggested that the PRRD should “see if a voluntary best practices approach for information-sharing” with industry would work.

But leaders in the region don’t feel equipped to deal with the issue. It’s “something the province should be doing,” says Fraser. “We don’t have the jurisdiction to require [industry] to come and talk to us.”