The Federal Government

Over the years, several organizations within the Canadian federal government took an interest in the oil sands, including the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), the Department of Mines, the National Research Council, the Canadian Parks Service, and the wartime Office of the Oil Controller. Their roles and responsibilities overlapped, were passed back and forth, and sometimes ran in parallel or in conflict with each other. Personalities, interests, ambitions, the economy and historic events all played a part in complicating matters.

Formal investigation of the oil sands began with the GSC, which sent several scientists to the Athabasca region during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their encouragement motivated the federal government’s ill-fated attempts to drill into an oil reservoir. After several failures to reach the fabled oil,

the federal government shifted its attention to western Canada’s coal until the interest of Sidney Ells was piqued. From 1913 to 1917, Ells, working for the Mines Branch, led oil sands research in Canada, both in exploration and mapping, and in the investigation of physical properties and practical applications. His work was interrupted, however, by World War I, and he did not return to the subject until 1919.

Meanwhile, in 1914, the Geological Survey of Canada established a program to study road materials across Canada. In 1916, Karl Clark was hired to work in a new laboratory created for the GSC to conduct experimental work testing such materials. In short order this lab, and Clark with it, was transferred to the Mines Branch. Soon after Ells left for war service, Clark was assigned to review Ells’s oil sands work.

The Honorary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (HAC) was created by the Canadian government in 1916 to foster research programs that could support the war effort. Oil sands research fell into this category. In this capacity, the HAC began working with Ells, who approached the University of Alberta in 1917 to move his base of oil sands study there. Henry Marshall Tory, president of the university, was favourable to this idea. He was already aware of the oil sands, having been among a group of people who had brought the resource to the attention of the Mines Branch in 1913, sparking Ells’s entry into the field. Tory assigned a professor to review oil sands material, including the work done by Ells, and then left for Europe in 1918 to set up an educational program for returning servicemen.

By 1919, Ells and Tory were back in Canada. Rather than allow the HAC to

run Ells’s research program at his university, Tory hired Clark to lead an independent Alberta team. Tory also spearheaded the creation in 1921 of a provincial version of the HAC, the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta, the first of its kind in Canada. He then set about becoming involved directly in the HAC, and by 1928, he had moved to Ottawa to be the first president of that organization’s successor, the National Research Council (NRC).

As head of the NRC, Tory was in a position to foster cooperation between the federal and provincial oil sands programs. In 1929 and 1930, Ells with the federal Mines Branch and Clark representing the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta worked together on the Clearwater River project. Unfortunately, the success of this venture was cut short by the economic pressures of the Great Depression.