What the Last Oilsands Boom Left Behind

The previous oilsands boom, running from the mid-2000s into the 2010s, arrived with a set of side effects: cost inflation, labour scarcity and housing shortages. Those three pressures were themselves part of the boom, not incidental to it — the money and the workers had to land somewhere, and the places they landed ran short of both labour and roofs. That is the memory any talk of a fresh expansion has to answer for. As Global News frames it, the industry has changed significantly since then, which may matter if costs, workers and housing are again the binding constraints.