If Frank Oberle had his way, Tumbler Ridge would not exist.
40 years ago, Oberle, Member of Parliament for Prince George-Peace River described the then still-as-yet-to-be constructed Tumbler Ridge as “a breeding ground of human misery”.
When the town was announced, Oberle said “There have been 42 studies done on northeast coal but not one study deals with people.”
While he and then-MLA Don Phillips had been good friends (and business partners at Aspol Motors) before then, they parted ways over the development of the North east coal project.
It was not a friendly break, either. At the time, Oberle said the deal to develop the Northeast Coal Project and create the town of Tumbler Ridge was “a typical Socred scheme; treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark and covered with manure,” saying the Socreds were spending money like “Drunken Sailors.”
Oberle was one of three people offered the job of being the town’s commissioner, but turned it down.
While the provincial government was describing the development as a milestone in the development of “the great inland empire,” Oberle called for political hearings to work out the “socio-economic terms of the deal.”
Oberle, who opposed the project bitterly, said “I am very much afraid that not sufficient care was taken to make sure that the project will wash itself on the bottom line.”
Oberle believed the BC Government was allowing itself to be manipulated into a bad place by the Japanese steel companies. “If you want to know what was happening behind the scenes,” he said, “the Japanese insisted on the Anzac route and insisted on the town site, because their number one concern Is with security of supply.”
Oberle was convinced that when the price of coal went down, the government would move in to subsidize the freight rates before allowing the town to shut down. He was also convinced the Japanese steelmakers were well aware of this. “When they have us hooked on line, they will pressure us on the price,” Oberle said.
He wasn’t the only one who doubted the project. Ray Williston, a former Socred cabinet minister and then-president of BC Cellulose Ltd was convinced that “Problems at both ends of the line are going to create timing problems. I will be very surprised if they can be delivering coal by 1983. Someone must know an awful lot more than me if they think they can do it according to the timetable. It is a very, very difficult engineering task. Those people building it are really going to have to be humping it.”
Williston said his “gut reaction” to the northeast coal deal was that the Socreds should have left themselves more leeway.
Even as the town began to rise, Oberle stood in opposition of it. The former mayor of Chetwynd would argue that, while the provincial and federal governments spent more than $13 million on studies before moving ahead, they didn’t study what impact the town would have on the surrounding communities, arguing that Chetwynd and Dawson Creek would be taxed to build things for Tumbler Ridge that the town couldn’t provide.
At the time, he would point to the Peace River Power Project. Oberle was a rising political force in the Peace at the time, still only president of the Chetwynd Chamber of Commerce. He told WAC Bennett that the project would cause a lot of disruption in the local economy.
Bennett told him that he was nuts, that this was the start of the Peace Region’s rise to becoming the industrial heartland of BC.
While Oberle’s opinion on instant towns hasn’t changed, he admits that Tumbler Ridge has done a good job weathering the storm. Oberle—who turned 89 on March 24, says that he’s proud of the work that he and Phillips did to turn Tumbler Ridge into a community.
“It’s a source of pride for me and Don Phillips you know, we were involved in the politics of the whole thing in some way pivotal to getting it all done,” says Oberle. “I had some criticism of creating a company town. My view was that it would have been better to use the existing roads and rail facilities to base the workforce, either in Dawson Creek or Chetwynd, and have special trains or special transports moving the shifts back and forth. I went through the same exercise in Mackenzie. And my experience that was that company towns lack certain elements of making life a normal, one of them being that just young people and children, no grandparents and no places for women to work and this kind of thing. But I got overruled and the town went ahead.”
He says when the mines shut down in 2000, he felt that his predictions were coming true. “It seemed all my predictions were justified,” he says. “But there is a certain maturity there now, a history and the resources have stabilized, so for the moment no longer any risk of a repeat of what happened.”
But in the end, he’s still not sure of Tumbler Ridge’s security. “The people that make a town, the business people, the small businesses and shops and stores? Nobody worries about them, they just walk away. Nobody pays any attention to the people who take a risk and establish a business. So that really hasn’t changed. But what do you do? The only thing that you could say is that it looks like the resource is stable in the market seems to be well established and stable. So there should not be any real upheaval in the near future.
“Between Phillips and I, we made sure there was a rec center and I was involved in getting a doctor’s office there and, you know, the essentials. The liquor store was a big problem, but we got a police station and the things a town needs, but it was a struggle. And now there’s the potential for tourism and oil and gas and other things that could be anchored in Tumbler Ridge, but some of the concerns I had? Stay relevant today.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
