Image supplied by Drawn+Quarterly Ducks is a brutally honest look at life in the camps during the early boom days. Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity. “Most people associate it with these images of gigantic trucks and huge mines, but they rarely think about the human beings inside them.”

“If you’re not involved in the industry, I feel the image is very distorted,” she said. The municipality’s 2021 census showed Albertans are more likely to move to Fort McMurray than any other province. The Newfoundlander’s Club is a Halal restaurant. Today, the population isn’t swelling with newcomers. The book is also a time capsule of life as an oilsands worker during the halcyon days of the last oil boom that ended when global oil prices plummeted in late 2014. What she has published has been praised from critics. It was recently listed by former president Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2022.

Some moments could not fit in the book, such as drug abuse in the hallways of her downtown apartment or resentment Fort McMurray residents felt towards transient workers like herself.īeaton estimates she had enough material for a book three times as large.

Not everyone will like what Beaton shows, but the book is just what she saw. The now 39-year-old cartoonist also paints a sympathetic picture of her coworkers, most of whom are kind and normal people making a living for loved ones back home. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Kate beaton oil sands