Branded as a marvel of nature and industry, the District of Kitimat lives up to its name.
In early autumn, spectacular orange and yellow leaves break up swaths of cool green forest. Thick clouds hover over the base of the mountainous terrain overlooking the sparkling Douglas Channel on B.C.’s North Coast.
It’s a serene landscape disturbed only by trucks trundling to and from their work sites. The commotion is heaviest about eight kilometres from the town’s centre, where large white buses roll in and out of the sprawling LNG Canada terminal.
Liquified natural gas is the big fish these days, but other natural resource projects have come and gone in Kitimat over the decades. The town’s methanol plant closed in 2005, followed by the exit of its pulp mill in 2010.
District of Kitimat Mayor Phil Germuth recalls that decade as a “little depressing,” but the business owner-turned-politician doesn’t think Kitimat fits the mold of “boom and bust” either.
There’s more to the coastal town’s relationship with industry than the cliché often prescribed to it, with some of the more nuanced impacts apparent as construction on the $40-billion LNG Canada liquefaction and export facility nears completion.
“We’ve had ups and downs, but never bust,” Germuth tells Global News.
“Bust is when you have nothing and Kitimat’s never been that.”
A town founded for industry
Tucked at the end of a deep water fjord, Kitimat is a young community, founded in the 1950s to house the Aluminum Company of Canada’s energy-intensive aluminum smelter. Its land and stunning surroundings, however, have a much longer and richer history — occupied and unceded by the Haisla Nation since time immemorial.
The First Nation’s hub lies at the tip of the Douglas Channel in Kitamaat Village, where some 700 Haisla citizens still live.
On the other side of the channel, fumes from Kitimat’s raison d’être — the smelter now owned by Rio Tinto — rise within a stone’s throw from the neighbouring LNG Canada construction site.
The Shell-led LNG Canada project is the single largest private-sector investment in Canadian history, aimed at unlocking the “full economic potential of Canada’s rich gas reserves for the first time,” according to its website. Now more than 85 per cent complete, the project is on track to begin exporting to Asian markets in 2025.
Germuth, who was born and raised in Kitimat, is proud to host the project, which he says has done well mitigating the impacts of an influx of workers that, at its peak, rivalled the population size of the town.
Past projects were not as successful in that regard. When Rio Tinto began its modernization project after 2010, the company provided allowances for workers living off-site, Germuth says. The influx brought Kitimat’s vacancy rate from about 40 per cent to zero “overnight pretty much,” sending the costs of monthly rent soaring.
“It’s no slight on Rio Tinto, it’s just things you learn things as you go along,” he says, standing in the greenery of a park across from the district’s office inside the City Centre Mall. “LNG Canada — their project had decided early on: no living-out allowances. We fully supported that for obvious reasons.”
According to the District of Kitimat’s 2022 Household Survey Report, the town still has more than 1,300 “shadow residents,” however — temporary workers whose estimated earnings are almost double that of its 8,600 or so permanent residents. Since a final investment decision was made on Phase 1 of the LNG Canada project in October 2018, the average resale price of a house shot up 46.3 per cent to $390,457 in June of 2021, an August 2021 Housing Fact Sheet adds.
Industry opportunity comes with a cost
On its website, LNG Canada states that it strives to be “the best neighbours” it can be, touting $3 billion in contracts and procurement to local and Indigenous-owned businesses. Last month, it donated $900,000 to the Kitimat General Hospital Foundation, effectively making it possible for the charity to purchase the town’s first CT scanner.
Laurel D’Andrea, president of the hospital foundation, shares that news with enthusiasm from amid the sweaters, mugs and other souvenirs displayed at the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce. Also the head of that chamber, however, D’Andrea says she has noticed some side effects to Kitimat’s close ties to natural resource industries.
“It’s hard to kind of attract entrepreneurs,” she explains. “Sometimes, I compare us to Smithers, because they’re quite heavy with entrepreneurship. But they don’t have as much large industry as we do, so they’ve got a lot of funky shops and boutiques.
“Here, like I said, there’s so many good-paying jobs in industry, it’s a bit of a stretch for people to leave that comfort zone.”
The executive director says she’d like to see Kitimat become home to a new coffee shop, a hardware store that’s open on Sundays, a gift shop for Haisla artists, a seafood restaurant, and a handful of home décor, boutique or consignment options, just to fill in the gaps.
“It’s important to keep people local, so if we had more stores to support, then they might not head to Terrace or shop online as much.”
It’s not a downside to have the financial security of an industry, D’Andrea adds, but on top of challenging local creativity and diversification, the well-paid positions contribute to a labour shortage in other sectors. It’s especially difficult for smaller businesses that have gone to the trouble of recruiting workers from elsewhere, but can’t compete with industry salaries, she explains.
On the double doors of the picturesque Chalet Motel and Restaurant, a sign reads: “The whole word is short staffed. Please be kind to those that showed up!”
Like D’Andrea, owner Sarim Faisal moved to Kitimat from elsewhere. He road-tripped to the North Coast from Toronto in 2013, fell in love with the “mountains and the scenery and the people” and stayed.
Faisal took over the Chalet Motel and Restaurant in 2019. Since then, he says he’s seen tremendous growth and hopes that projects like LNG Canada, Rio Tinto, and the Haisla Nation’s proposed Cedar LNG will fuel the upward trend.
“The restaurant, it’s gone from quiet lunches to sort of fully packed,” Faisal says, standing in the parking lot near a string of gazebos for customers and the lounging public.
“We’re just glad to see, you know, more activity in the northwest and especially for Kitimat.”
It may be a sentiment shared by many in Kitimat, but LNG Canada is not without its critics. Opponents have expressed concerns about its carbon footprint and environmental impacts as the global climate crisis intensifies.
While LNG Canada says its terminal would be the least emissions-intensive of its kind in the world, the Pembina Institute estimates those emissions would still eat up a quarter or more of B.C.’s targeted annual allowance for the entire oil and gas sector by 2030.
The project has also been contested for the source of its fracked gas: the Coastal GasLink pipeline. While the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s elected leaders have agreed to the pipeline, its hereditary chiefs and their supporters are concerned about land sovereignty and the well-being of ecosystems. In 2020, their campaign sparked widespread protest and service disruption through rail blockades that made headlines around the world.
Indigenous opposition to the project weighs heavily on the mind of Ellis Ross, a former chief of the Haisla Nation. As the BC United MLA for Skeena, however, his goal is to ensure the region’s economy is stable.
“Poverty, to me, is no joke, suicide is no joke, and if you look at the statistics of First Nations across Canada, every First Nation deals with it,” Ross says, giving a wave to passersby who honk their horns as he interviews by the sidewalk.
“I think sustainable development across the board in all sectors is key. You really got to diversify in different areas, and number one, to get to that stage — partner with First Nations.”
'Kitimat has never been bust'
As D’Andrea, Germuth and Faisal describe, there are tradeoffs to the jobs and revenue that industrial projects bring.
For the Haisla Nation’s Ed Ross and Darcy Woods, however, LNG means an opportunity to work full-time in their communities for the first time in more than a decade. The pair are longtime cooks and deckhands for the North Vancouver-based Seaspan, and more recently, HaiSea Marine.
A joint venture of the Haisla Nation and Seaspan, HaiSea Marine’s battery-powered electric tugs will provide towing and escort services to LNG Canada’s tankers when they hit the water around 2025. Some 400 vessels are expected to visit the export terminal each year, dotting the Douglas Channel daily.
A longtime rotation of two weeks on and two weeks off kept Ross and Woods travelling to Metro Vancouver constantly, but in just a few years, they’ll be home full-time.
“You do miss things — you got grandkids, you got children — you miss out on some birthdays and stuff like that,” Ross tells Global News.
“I’m looking forward to it, it’s very exciting to be working in our home waters.”
According to census data and local estimates, Kitimat’s population hit its highest point between the 1970s and early ’80s, surpassing 13,000 people as Alcan’s production peaked and construction on a pulp mill, ammonia plant and methanol plant got underway.
In the post-war industrial boom, the Kitimat Project was considered the largest construction project of its time, with a dam, tunnel, powerhouse, transmission line, smelter and town all built within five years.
Back then, Germuth says every store was brimming with customers and there weren’t as many dilapidated buildings and closed-up storefronts as Kitimat has now — but that’s not the same thing as “bust,” he argues.
“We’ve had the aluminum industry here, which has been the anchor of this community … the only reason we were built,” he explains.
“Bust is when you have nothing and Kitimat’s never been that. I think that’s not fair to say to communities that maybe only have one paper mill or pulp mill and that goes. Yeah, that’s bust.”
The mayor says he’d like to see Kitimat’s population swell to around 15,000 once more, attracting the kinds of businesses and entrepreneurs D’Andrea talks about, some of whom might take a crack at fixing some of the rundown properties. To that end, he says the district and chamber host annual business workshops and an “entrepalooza” to help connect local entrepreneurs to investors and funding sources, among other initiatives.
“That would be the dream and to keep Kitimat exactly what it is as a marvel of nature and industry,” Germuth says.
“We’re looking forward to even more opportunities — maybe it’s hydrogen, maybe it’s another LNG, maybe there are some renewable power options out there.”
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