You fly in and fly out,” she says.Īs she went on to make her name as an award-winning cartoonist in Canada and the US, the story still haunted her. She arrived to find herself in an isolated camp, handing out tools in a warehouse 12 hours a day to men brutalised by spending months on end cut off from their homes and families. She was 21 years old, and had just finished a degree in history and anthropology, when she left her home on an island off the easternmost tip of Canada for the job more than 2,000 miles away.Īn illustration from Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands.Īlberta was the place to find a better life – “it’s booming there … no end to the money,” Beaton writes.

What about the workers? What about the cancer rates in the Indigenous communities?’”Ī decade and a half later, Beaton has piled her memories of life in a camp in Alberta – built to exploit one of the world’s largest single oil deposits – into a chunky, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. I see a lot more than that going on, too, and no one seems to care. And I was like: ‘It’s terrible about the ducks, but I see people around me failing. “All of a sudden the whole world turned their heads and they’re like: ‘What’s going on over there? Doesn’t look good to me.’ Because of the ducks. Kate Beaton remembers it well, because she was working there at the time.

I n April 2008, an international media storm erupted over the death of 1,600 ducks in a toxic pond in Alberta, Western Canada.

Kate beaton website