National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 67

OHN Illl IDMUNKIN 01KN-f Shell's upgrader facility near Fort Saskatchewan is part of a suite of projects for mining and refining heavy oil originating at Fort McMurray. Construction, now employing 6,000 people, is scheduled to finish in 2003. For more information canada.com on ton cona County. There, the lumber is sorted, transferred onto more than 30 rail cars and shipped to markets in Eastern Canada and the United States. Ian Shepherd, Canfor's manager of Saskatchewan, Sherwood Park and Strathcona County, go to www.canada.comedmonton and click on Outlook 2002.

Whether boasting about its business climate or its residential growth, Strathcona County is one happening place transportation, ROV COOK Edmonton jimnml Stafl Writer SIR IIC ON (ill I A I UI.RI "We're in the most fortunate region in all of Canada, possibly in North America. We're blessed with strong growth in manufacturing, we have become more and we enjoy the best quality of life in Canada." Strathcona County Mayor Vern Hartwell says it's cheaper for Canfor to truck its lumber to Strathcona County than to ship it by rail directly from its mills or through Vancouver. T.A.G. Reloading does the sorting and Westcan Bulk Transport the shipping under contract to Canfor. opened a $10-million, state-of- the-art fabrication facility.

Or Lockwood International a Houston-based oil and gas equipment distribution company that just opened a warehouse in the Griffon Industrial Park a development that sat empty for 19 years, but which is now attracting a lot of interest because of a shortage of good quality, fully serviced industrial land. CP and CN run down the centre of the pad. In addition to handling Canfor lumber, T.A.G. also buys lumber from other mills, and recuts and repackages it for shipping. "We're well served as a transportation hub," said Strathcona County Mayor Vern Hartwell.

But more than road and rail, I Iartwell says that also applies to pipelines. "We have the ability to market petrochemical products anywhere in North America, readily and economically." And the county's pipeline network is growing fast and furious. Corridor Pipeline is spending $700 million on a bitumen pipeline, Williams Energy $235 million on an interconnecting pipeline and ATCO Pipelines $8 million on the South East Edmonton natural gas pipeline. "We're in the most fortunate region in all of Canada, possibly in North America," said I Iartwell. "We're blessed with strong growth in manufacturing, we have become more and we enjoy the best quality of life in Canada.

It gives us the ability to attract major corporations as well as small business." Hartwell says energy will always be a mainstay of the county's economy, but he sees new opportunities for businesses such as call centres, pharmaceuticals, software companies and agricultural processing firms. VnCON 1.I0 talled more than $200 million up 16 per cent from the previous year. Included in those were nearly 1,100 housing starts, strengthening the county's claim as Alberta's third largest municipality with a population of more than 72,000. With its partners in Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association (Sturgeon County, town of Lamont, and the city of Fort Saskatchewan), Strathcona is transforming a 194-sq. kilometre area northeast of Edmonton into Canada's largest processing centre for petroleum, petrochemicals and chemicals.

To date, more than 30 companies representing more than $11 billion in investment have located in the Heartland area. They read like a Who's Who of international business: Amoco, Air Liquide, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Shell, Imperial Oil and Sherritt International. But it's not all big business. Smaller companies are growing, and others are moving to Strathcona County, lured by the hot economy and quality of life. Companies like Jireh Industries, which does aerospace quality machining and makes robots that inspect on -surface and underwater pipelines for cracks and corrosion.

Or Lockerbie and Hole, a 104-year-old Edmonton firm that began as a plumbing company and branched out into oil and gas, petrochemicals and pulp and paper. It is consolidating its Edmonton operations in the county, where it just Excellent links to roads and railways World's biggest, Canada's best, state-of-the-art, fastest growing, lowest cost the words are used again and again in describing Strathcona County, Edmonton's eastern neighbour. And rightly so. Shell's bitumen upgrader and $400-million expansion of its Scotford refinery is touted as the biggest industrial construction project currently underway in North America and the biggest energy' project in the world. Petro-Canada is in die second year of an even bigger 10-year, $4-billion refinery upgrade and Imperial Oil is spending $500 million to modernize its refinery.

In all, more than $8.5 billion worth of new construction is underway or planned. Building permits last year alone to T.A.G. owner Tom Gandolfo said the reloading facility the biggest of its kind in Western Canada has been open for just over a year. Canfor chose the Strathcona site for its $5-million-plus facility because of its easy access to both CP and CN Rail. "This is one of the few areas in Edmonton or Strathcona that both railways are close enough to each other that they can service one parcel of land," Gandolfo said.

More than 30 million board feet of lumber are stored on a 15 acre paved pad at the Canfor facility. The rail spurs For B.C. lumber giant Canfor, the attraction was Strathcona County's excellent road and rail links, its strategic location at the junction of major east-west and north-south transportation corridors and its cost advantages. Canfor owns 129 acres of land north of the Yellowhead Highway, the Trans-Canada highway's northern route. Each day it ships more than 80 trucks loaded with dimensional lumber everything from 2x4s to 2x12s from its mills in Alberta and B.C.

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