60 BCBusiness december 2014
KiTiMAT, B.C.
260 km soUthWest of smIthers
Numerous awards line the walls of realtor Shan-
non Dos Santos's office in downtown Kitimat,
near where Gateway would reach its western
terminus. She sold more than 180 houses in each
of 2012 and 2013—that's a transaction every one and a half
days, on average. "I was sometimes doing two or three deals
a day and working until three in the morning," she says. As
a resident of Kitimat for three decades, Dos Santos's switch
from banking into real estate five years ago couldn't have
been better timed. But things have since slowed dramati-
cally: in April there were fewer than 15 listings; today there
are 95. A seller's market has become a buyer's market again.
Kitimat, situated on the traditional territory of the Haisla
Nation at the head of Douglas Channel, was built on the for-
tunes of the Alcan aluminum smelter. Its carefully planned
streets of boxy two-storey 1970s-era homes looped around
the City Centre Mall create the feel of the consummate com-
pany town.
Rio Tinto Alcan's $4.8-billion modernization, which will
increase capacity by 48 per cent to 420,000 tonnes per year,
has swelled workers' camps and rental accommodations
with 1,500 skilled tradesmen, engineers and labourers.
Three
LNG plants, one crude oil refinery and three natural
gas pipelines, each with terminals in Kitimat, are on the
drawing board, carrying a combined capital investment of
more than $30 billion. Yet Alcan's upgrade will be complete
in 2015, and not a single
LNG plant or pipeline is poised to
break ground. That's why Dos Santos cautiously holds out
hope that Gateway will be able to meet the 209 conditions
set out by the
JRP, win over stakeholders and start work in
the near future. "We need a project approved. We need some
development," Dos Santos says, worried that Kitimat could
be relegated back to an all too familiar boom-and-bust cycle.
Despite its industrial roots, Kitimat remains skepti-
cal of Gateway and its benefits. Last April, mayor Joanne
Monaghan surprised outside observers when she announced
the results of a non-binding plebiscite that asked whether or
not citizens support the
JRP's recommendation to the federal
government that Gateway be approved: 58.4 per cent voted
No. But for many locals, the vote was anything but a surprise:
both freshwater angling in the rivers of the northwest and
saltwater fishing out in misty Douglas Channel are a big part
of life around here.
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PoPulation
9,000
