Brett Baumgartner’s alarm goes off at 5 a.m. four days a week, and he hops in his pickup truck after throwing together a quick lunch to make the short drive to a place folks in Hardisty, Alta., population 623, refer to as the Hill. He estimates 80 per cent of working-age Hardistans work on the Hill, the locals’ shorthand for a vast industrial complex that is home to about 100 dome-capped oil storage tanks. Each tank stands about five storeys high and 50 metres across and, as far as landmarks go, saying they are hard to miss would be a huge understatement. Fed by pipelines that bring in oil mostly from Alberta, but Saskatchewan, too, the tanks, along with subterranean caverns, have a combined storage capacity of 38 million barrels of oil , several million barrels of which get piped daily to the United States. “Things run 24 hours on the Hill, so there are always people working there, day and night,” Baumgartner said. The 42-year-old is a field operator, a job that, among other things, involves clambering to the top of the tanks and lowering a sampling can down to scoop up oil by the litre so that it can be tested for sediment, viscosity, density and water content. Come winter, it is a task best summarized in two words: it sucks. The born-and-raised Hardistan also wears the mayor’s hat, another job that presents headaches and name recognition is one of them. Take out an old-fashioned road map and Hardisty will appear as just another tiny dot in a country that is full of tiny places parked on the edge of nowhere, but it is a nowhere unlike anywhere else. Hardisty is the headwaters in oil country, where the great river of Canadian hydrocarbon wealth gets released to refineries in places such as Sarnia, Ont. and Montreal, as well as Chicago, Texas and Louisiana. About $501 million of oil is exported through Hardisty daily, according to Invest Alberta, or somewhere in the neighbourhood of more than $180 billion annually. Without Hardisty, there would be no gas for your car, asphalt for roads, jet fuel for jaunts or the billions in tax revenues and oil-related royalties flowing back to the Alberta government and Ottawa. Oil money helps pay for hospitals, highways, ports and all the other trappings of a wealthy society. A tiny dot, indeed, but Hardisty’s impact on Canada’s welfare is massive. “Hardisty is the big origination hub for Alberta crude,” Richard Masson, former chief executive of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, said. “It is vital.” You do not need to convince Baumgartner. His wife Amanda also works on the Hill, although he is not inclined to say which company she works for since what happens on the Hill is meant to stay up there. But there are big players such as Enbridge Inc. , Gibson Energy Inc. and Husky Midstream General Partnership, as well as some bit players. What he can say is that the companies pay well — the average household income in town was $117,000 in 2021 — and they step up to sponsor community events, including the annual rodeo that attracts thousands of tourists, and there might not be a Hardisty to speak of if not for the tank farm. Even with the tank farm, there is still not much of a Hardisty to speak of in terms of population, which is the most confounding aspect of being the most important oil town in the country. Try as they might, Baumgartner and his neighbours have yet to solve a problem that bedevils towns that do not have tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil-industry-related economic activity pouring through them annually to boast about, and that is how to go about getting bigger. “It is the strangest thing. You would think that with everything that is going on up on the Hill, more people would live in Hardisty and more businesses would want to move here,” he said. “We have been doing our best to make that happen, but it has been slow going, and I have to admit people in town are beginning to get a little impatient.” Founded in 1907 as a railway stop on the rolling prairie grasslands 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton, Hardisty’s population in 1951 was 536. By the turn of the 21st century, it was 564 and it has barely budged since, although Baumgartner said he is optimistically awaiting the results of the 2026 Census. An additional cause for optimism can be attributed to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision in April to breathe new life into the cancelled and highly contentious trans-border Keystone XL pipeline project . The Canadian half of it, dubbed the Prairie Connector, is owned by South Bow Corp. and will flow out of Hardisty. Meanwhile Prime Minister Mark Carney has been making nice with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith by talking about the need for new pipelines and promising to transform Canada into an “energy superpower.” The oil industry’s power players have been doing their share of talking as well. Enbridge chief executive Greg Ebel told investors on a quarterly earnings call in May that “we are in a world with an amazing growth macro for energy infrastructure, the best growth opportunities I have seen in 10 to 15 years.” Enbridge set up shop in Hardisty in 1949 and now counts 39 above-ground storage tanks plus underground storage caverns on the Hill. The company employs 61 people there, many of whom are from town. The Hardisty terminal straddles Enbridge’s Mainline pipeline network, a conduit that has been sending 3.2 million barrels of oil per day to customers across the U.S. and Ontario. Demand on the Mainline has been exceeding the network’s capacity to deliver, and plans are underway to add an additional 430,000 barrels of capacity by 2028. “Hardisty is the largest pipeline hub in the country and it has the most tank storage, and for oil producers, oil marketing companies and oil refiners, it is fundamental because it is where things get priced and it is where you have options,” Masson said. For example, one option for a seller who does not like the price on offer for Alberta crude, a.k.a. Western Canadian Select, is to find another customer who is willing to pay more or else store the oil in Hardisty and hold out for a better price. Further afield, the war on Iran has choked off the global oil supply and led to spiking gas prices. An increase in oil production and delivery capacity to meet demand and relieve some of the associated cost pressures on businesses and average folks could in theory be in the offing, and the people on the Hill and the town below it have a keen interest on how things play out. But what is good for the oil industry is not necessarily good for population growth, Joseph Marchand, a labour market economist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said. He has made a career out of studying small-town employment patterns and the closest approximation he can find to Hardisty is Cushing, Okla. Often described as the “pipeline crossroads of the world,” oil storage capacity at Cushing is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 98 million barrels, or more than double the capacity in Hardisty. About 8,400 people called Cushing home in 1940, which is 87 more than were living there in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Southern Rock Energy Corp. in 2023 announced it would be building a greenhouse-gas-emissions-reducing refinery in town for US$5.56 billion, creating 420 full-time jobs and, presumably, more full-time local residents. “Rural America is still alive and open for business,” Bruce Johnson, of the Cushing Economic Development Foundation, told a local news outlet when the project was announced. But three years later, the refinery and whatever community benefits it is destined to bring remain unknown since the project has been snarled by delays related to land acquisition issues. “You would think that if the Iran war drags on, along with an oil price shock, that places like Cushing and Hardisty are going to boom,” Marchand said. “But the only boom you tend to get in these towns is during the construction phase of new pipelines and new storage tanks; it is short-term growth, not long term.” Case in point: Enbridge built three new storage tanks in Hardisty in recent years and had 150 people working on it, most of them contractors. Their connection to the town was beneficial in the short term — with increased spending in restaurants and on hotel rooms — but temporary. Once the tanks were complete, the workers were finished with Hardisty. Marchand, who moved to Edmonton from New Jersey in 2007, said any small town that dreams about getting bigger faces a common question: where are all the newcomers going to come from? Hardisty is not a quaint bedroom community a short hop from the big city, but a two-hour haul from Edmonton. The professor doesn’t drive much, but he said the drive southeast toward Hardisty with the sun rising over the prairies is “breathtakingly beautiful,” although those same roads get so dark at night that they can be terrifying for a city slicker to navigate. “There are a lot of small towns between Edmonton and Hardisty and they are all beautiful in their own way,” he said. “I don’t want to be rude about it, but I could stop in any one of those towns and say, ‘Hey, I want to live here,’ and so it is a lot of substitution; they are substitutable.” Or are they? Tony Kulbisky grew up in Vermilion, Alta., an agricultural hub about an hour north of Hardisty, and is not “scared” of small-town life. Indeed, he has spent the better part of 20 years working as a town manager in an assortment of Alberta towns, including a 3.5-year stint in Hardisty beginning in 2005, which more or less coincided with the beginning of the Keystone XL pipeline saga that initially ended when former U.S. president Joe Biden killed the project on his first day in office in January 2021. Apart from the storage tank farm, what set Hardisty apart was that the locals had their “poop together,” Kulbisky said. Residents did not require any prodding to get organized and instead were chockablock with volunteer groups such as the Agricultural Society that, perhaps somewhat confusingly, operates the arena and the local campground, the Rodeo Association, a walking trail maintenance crew, the Legion and more. These volunteer groups help fill the gaps and organize fundraisers to meet the needs that the town’s finances cannot. Even back in Kulbisky’s time in Hardisty, the talk was always around how to enable growth since growth generates more tax revenues and gives communities a greater ability to provide the type of services that make their town more attractive than the next town down the line. Hardisty set aside a chunk of land for future development during the initial rumblings around Keystone and also sunk a bunch of money into water mains, sewer hook-ups and the like. Keystone may not have happened yet, but the deep servicing on currently vacant lots installed during the Kulbisky era remains primed and ready to go. “Hardisty is a pretty sophisticated community,” he said. “Smaller municipalities have to have aspirations of growth because if you don’t have growth, it’s just a matter of time before the last person says, ‘Don’t forget to shut the lights off when you leave.’” The aspirational spirit continues to burn bright among locals. Hardisty’s most recent effort to get the word out about its wonderfulness was a promotional video released in December 2024. The video is three minutes and 40 seconds long and depicts scenes around town — people playing hockey, waterskiing at the lake, fishing on the Battle River, having lunch on an outdoor patio with a lot of happy-looking folks — and is voiced over by a rich and melodious speaker. “Perhaps the most beautiful thing about Hardisty is the strong sense of community at its core; here, you are not just another face in the crowd, you are part of a close-knit, welcoming community,” the video said. Ashley Hilton, an industrial medic/admin person on the Hill, did not require video evidence to convince her that Hardisty was the place to raise two kids with her partner. The same-sex couple spent years renting in Calgary and paying close to $3,000 a month. The city was loud, congested, dirty and, she felt, unsafe. “Living in Calgary was a total nightmare,” she said. She has been living the dream in Hardisty for the past four years and paying $1,200 a month to rent a three-bedroom house on a generous-sized lot in town. Contrary to rural Alberta stereotypes, the community is home to other same-sex families and has embraced Hilton and her family with open arms. “People look out for one another here,” she said. “We are in for the long haul.” The desire to live somewhere affordable, safe and where neighbours know their neighbours is something Connie Beringer spends a lot of time speaking with prospective clients about. Originally from southern Saskatchewan, she moved to Hardisty to work as a truck dispatcher on the Hill. The pay was great, but it was an all-hours type of gig and she quit once she had kids and later became a real estate agent. Beringer has sold 18 houses over the past 24 months in Hardisty, where there is no such thing as location, location, location, given nothing is more than five minutes away and three-bedroom homes can be had for less than $200,000. “I get one or two calls a week from people in Ontario and B.C. asking me about a listing,” she said. Two such callers were flying in from out of province over the May long weekend to take a look around the town. Now, Baumgartner said, if he could just convince some oil-industry-related businesses to do the same. The mayor regularly cold-emails companies to pitch them on the idea of opening a branch office in Hardisty. There is plenty of action on the Hill, and more could be coming soon, but he wants to see more action on Main Street. Why commute all the way from Edmonton when you can live in a town with its own lake? Hardisty celebrated a major win in recent weeks as the Alberta government approved the community’s application to launch a charter school. Having a tank farm on its outskirts was not enough to save the town’s local K-9 public school from the district school board’s chopping block a few years back, and the kids have been busing to neighbouring communities to learn their ABCs ever since. Losing a school often spells d-e-a-t-h for a small town, but Hardistans were having none of that. In April, they held a fundraiser at the community hall and collected $200,000 in donations for what will be its new, partially government-funded, independent not-for-profit school that is opening in September. Newcomers are encouraged to register their kids. “Hardisty is a great place to live,” Baumgartner said. “We just want some more people to move here.” • Email: joconnor@postmedia.com