That investment surge has little to do with their previous economic raison d'etre, though. Alberta will have a renaissance in the later half of the century, sure, but it won't be oil related. Thunder Bay is slowly rebounding and it has nothing to do with trees.
Because there are more plentiful and cheaper sources of oil, and when demand contracts, it will be the more expensive (ie, oil sands) sources of oil that stop getting purchased first. Canada has the least convenient form of oil. There is a limited future for it.
Thunder Bay has 17 grain elevators on its waterfront. 8 are abandoned and 4 are mothballed. But Canadian grain exports are reaching record numbers, and it's largely because of where the grain is going. This will happen to oil, but the issue will be less where the oil goes, and more where it comes from. And it won't come from us, no matter how many pipelines we build.
I know it feels good to talk about this as if there's actually a future there, but my city did this through most of the 1990s and we ended up going nowhere as a result of it.
Thunder Bay has lots of solar farms. We get a lot of sun, even in the winter. Sure, they're not as productive as those in the desert, but they're more productive than any built further east. It's not employing a lot of people (neither is the wind farm), and the decline in industry in general means our coal plant is useless (we barely use enough energy to keep our hydro dams operating, let alone a coal plant). But these are the spin-offs of economic depression once your commodity based economy loses is value along with that commodity.
Another thing that we've learned the hard way is that the kinds of jobs where you can walk out of high school and into a well paying resource/manufacturing position are coming to an end. Our way of life was built on that, a lot of kids in the 1970s and 80s were raised with this mentality of "when you graduate, you'll come work at the elevator/mill/CanCar with your dad"; as those kids were graduating, the elevators, mills, and CanCar were closing down and contracting.
Flying around this region in a bush plane in the 1960s, anyone would have thought the forestry sector would thrive forever. For a period of time 100 years ago, this city was larger than anything in Alberta, and saw itself as the next Chicago, which itself had grown from nothing to a million people during a generation—a 19th century Dubai.
No one told us in the 1980s that forestry and the grain exports would disappear within a decade and lead to regional economic depression and numerous ghost towns. And looking at how Alberta is reacting to similar news, I don't think it would have mattered much. But fortunately for most of Canada, when Northern Ontario's economy collapsed, it didn't destroy the country. But Alberta? You guys are leading us down a really rough path, and complaining that we won't let you run any faster.
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