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Mike Blanchfield covers international affairs for The Canadian Press in Ottawa.
Underground Takeover – Mike Blanchfield
Foreign Companies are lining up to buy the extraction rights to Canadian oil, nickel and potash and spending billions in the process. Are we selling our birthright?
The town of Kitimat was born in the brash 1950s, the product of a successful marriage between herculean feats of engineering and unabashed visions of grandeur.
Canadian captains of industry carved the town out of old growth forest at the end of the Kitimat River, blasting an industry out of British Columbia’s rugged Coast Mountain range that would sustain its people for the next half-century. The engineers of Alcan – then the Aluminum Company of Canada – saw a rich future in this rugged northwestern BC terrain. The company built the town over four years, as 35,000 workers bored a 16-kilometre tunnel through the mountains and erected a massive hydroelectric dam and aluminum smelter. In August 1954, when Kitimat produced its first batch of aluminum, Prince Phillip was on hand to help celebrate the day.