Alberta's Oil Patch: The People, Politics, and Companies.

Michael Payne is head of the reasearch and publications program,
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Reading this book in Alberta in 2009 is a reminder of how volatile the energy business is and how difficult it is to predict what will happen even a few years into the future. The book opens with some 2006 job advertisements that suggested Alberta was the Big Rock Candy Mountain of employment. Economic conditions are far from dire in Alberta three years later, but these advertisements seem very dated when even the government has abandoned the rhetorical excesses of the “Alberta Advantage” years.

Timothy le Riche is a former business editor with the Edmonton Sun, and this book reflects the optimistic tone that marked business reporting on the energy industry until the most recent market “corrections.” The author’s history of Alberta’s oil and gas industry emphasizes the province’s staggering wealth of resources, the larger-than-life characters that enriched themselves and many others by exploiting these resources, and the high stakes politics that shape energy policy and resource management. There is a strong strain of boosterism in this book—especially in those sections dealing with the oil sands and their potential as a source of oil for a North American market facing declining reserves of conventional oil and gas. It is very much a popular history of the industry written from the perspective of an optimist and someone who remains focused on the material benefits energy resources offer Albertans.

Le Riche is no muckraking investigative journalist, which ensures this is not a critical or especially analytical history of Alberta and the energy industry. He has consulted, however, a reasonable selection of scholarly and popular histories of the industry and summarizes their main findings effectively. These materials are acknowledged in a note on sources, but as with many popular histories, the substantial debt owed to these earlier works could have been more obviously recognized in the text.

Finally, the book does include some errors that more careful editing might have picked up. For example, it was Chief Justice Thomas Berger, not Rodney Berger, who wrote the famous pipeline report. Similarly, the last few chapters of the book on spies, oil company billionaires, and other miscellaneous topics seem like they were added to make up pages or to use up a few last research notes. Certainly there is no bold conclusion in this book to support the introduction’s suggestion that “we study history to interpret where we’re at today and to understand where our future may be heading.”