The entire day was slow-going and lazy. We had wandered around the town commenting surreptitiously on ‘Fort McMurray-isms’—that is, various opinions we’ve come to form in the last couple of days. For example, just before skipping town, we’d parked ourselves outside of Zellers, under a sign that read ‘No loitering, No Littering, No Spitting,’ and cooked ourselves some noodles on Macdonald’s camp stove. Most of the stores in that particular strip mall complex were closed, and Dru wondered aloud at how many cars there still were in the parking lot, which was close to full.

Notes from the Tar Pits: From McMurray to MacKay
Macdonald Stainsby
June 14, 2007

Courtesy of Google, some satellite images of the strip mining of tar sands near Fort McMurray. The large gray areas are tailing ponds.

Explore for yourself, starting here.

Above:

1. Syncrude's bitumen processing plant is not accessible, though it is visible from the highway. Apparently, there are plans to move the highway so that the road past Syncrude will be a private road.

Ottawa Citizen: Canadians crazy for Facebook, politicians getting on board.

México DF: "¡Frida era de izquierda!"... "yo también." Major protest as Calderón attends opening of Frida Kahlo exhibit.

Feliz cumple años Ernesto Che Guevara, (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967).

A 12 minute piece by Téléjournal that aired on TV last night revisits the story of evictions in El Estor, Guatemala, on behalf of Canadian mining company Skye Resources that was broken by The Dominion in January, 2007.

Eurasian Minerals announces drill results from their exploration activity in Haiti.

Top: patrons at the "Oil Can". Above: not under the same roof; a clandestine camper between a fence and a highway, and a syncrude-sponsored tent where hot tubs are sold

Today, we received our first real Fort McMurray experience: after two nights, the roommates of the one person we know in town decided that they didn't want us sleeping on their floor anymore. We now face what anyone coming to town or working a job that pays less than $100k/year faces: housing. It's not so bad, as we had planned to camp anyway, but even finding a spot to pitch a tent will be challenging.

I Hitched into Fort McMurray from Edmonton late last night with Dru and Macdonald. It was dark and wet all the way here and having never been so far North before, the trees to me seemed sickly and pallid, pointless as far as trees go. I felt like the straight, black road could cease at any moment and we’d simply fall off the end of the earth.

Anse d’Hainault’s isolation, however, did not save it from an earlier agricultural catastrophe: the eradication of the kreyol pig. In the early 80s, while the dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was still in power, there was a rumored outbreak of African swine fever among Haiti’s pigs. At the behest of the US government, ever mindful of the interests of its pork industry, the Haitian government wiped out nearly the entire pig population.

In Haiti, the divide between the capital and the rest of the country, between center and periphery is so great that one author has spoken of the “two worlds” of Haiti. Yet life in the periphery is not totally unconnected to the tumultuous events of the center. Anse d’Hainault, a seaside fishing village that has the distinction of the town furthest from Port-au-Prince, gave us a first-hand view of this dynamic.

We had a brief conversation with Flex Turner, a twenty-five year resident of Fort McMurray, Syncrude employee, and soup kitchen volunteer.

Turner said that since the kitchen where he volunteers started 13 years ago, he has "seen the numbers explode" every year. In addition to the city's homeless population, which he estimates at around 500, the church-based kitchen serves the working poor--mainly those "at McDonald's," cleaning jobs and the hotel industry--and welfare recipients. Once people pay their rent, he said, "there's not a lot left over for food."

From top:

Campers in the Abasands Heights neighbourhood. A small bungalow here can sell for $400,000, it's said, and thousands of workers are living in trucks, vans, tents and corporate-run camps.

Quad tracks on a local trail.

Trucks bring in new equipment daily.

When you're traveling to Fort McMurray, Alberta--five hours north of Edmonton--people assume you're going there to work. The average income here is around $90,000/year. Presented with "we're going just to find out what's going on," people are baffled. The northern city is known for being an expensive, rough place with nothing to do, too much traffic and a lack of services.

So why are people coming up here by the thousands?

New CCPA study shows that Nearly half of military contracts had no competition - Use of such sole-source deals on the rise.

I wrote an opinion piece for the most recent issue of This Magazine about the historical background of Canada's foreign aid, and what that means for current efforts to "reform" and increase foreign aid. It's available online, though for some reason it's missing include apostrophes and quotation marks.

On our way to the tar sands in Northern Alberta, one of our rides gave us an impromptu tour of a feedlot, where the storied Alberta Beef is raised.

International Co-operation Minister Josée Verner Outlines her Foreign Aid Agenda in today's Embassy Magazine:

The government plans to increase CIDA's field presence and create comprehensive websites to update Canadians about progress, something the minister says has already been done in Afghanistan, and which [Verner] would like to see in all of Canada's development partners, though she's not sure when or how.

Brazilian president Lula da Silva has written a piece called 'Challenges for the G8 summit' for La Jornada de Mexico.

He states:

"The promotion of the use of ethanol and biodiesel helps to democratize access to energy, and diminishes world dependance on finite hydrocarbon reserves...

[Biofuels] constitute economic, social and technological alternatives that are within the reach of countries that are economically poor, but rich in soils and arable lands...

Canada will initiate FTA negotiations with Colombia, seeking FTA between Dominican Republic, Peru and Colombia. / Canadá inicia negociaciones preliminares para establecer TLC con Colombia.

Five presidential candidates in Guatemala announce their economic platforms.

Ceasefire between ETA & Spanish government ended by ETA.

Not only are cops posing as journalists in Canada, but they want full access to documents held by journalists.

SPP: Broaden debate on North American integration says Robert Pastor, who is speaking in Ottawa today.

According to the Citizen, Pastor says that passports for Canadians in the US is a miguided idea. In fact, "A national biometric ID card would be a far better solution, [Pastor] said. Such a card 'will actually make life easier without necessarily threatening anybody.'"

NEUMANN: Canada in Afghanistan

On our way from the airport to the center of Jeremie, a town on the tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula, we pass a contingent of UN soldiers decked out in shorts and Oakley shades going for a jog along the road. Our driver informs us that this is part of their usual routine: down to the beach for some swimming or volleyball in the day, jogging in the afternoon, a little game of soccer in the evening. In other words, a military man’s Club Med. It’s deployments like these that have earned MINUSTAH the popular nickname of “TOURISTAH” among Haitians.

GUARDA EXPOSED: How a nice Quebec firm found itself in a war zone. The Citizen's Don Butler sings praise to Guarda, Canada's Blackwater. According to Guarda's CEO "We hire locals, which is rare. We're perceived differently because we're Canadian."