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NEW WATERFORD, N.S. — When Frankie Morrison wanted to remodel his kitchen, he didn't take out a loan, or dip into his retirement savings. Instead, the 53-year-old father of three followed in the footsteps of his son, his eldest daughter, his brother-in-law and just about every other working-age man in this former coal-mining town: He headed west for a spell, to take part in the Great Economic Miracle known as the oil sands.

“I came home with $9,200 in my pocket after six weeks,” he explained, flashing a $200 watch his employer gave him for avoiding accidents on the job. “My buddy just came back and he made $43,000. He bought a four-wheel drive, put new cupboards in his home, a new kitchen and new flooring. As a fella says, you make hay while the sun shines.”

The problem is, Mr. Morrison was making hay in Alberta while he was employed as the town councillor for New Waterford, a small community perched on the eastern tip of Cape Breton Island, near the mouth of Sydney Harbour. The local media discovered his side-act and pointed out he was still receiving a weekly travel stipend from the government (he paid the money back, saying it was an oversight).

Mr. Morrison was scarred enough by the experience that he doesn't plan to return to Alberta any time soon, but his constituents are showing no such reluctance – in fact, they're heading out in swarms.

New Waterford, population 6,500 and falling, embodies one of the less remarked-upon implications of the oil sands bonanza: a profound social and demographic shift in the small communities that furnish so much of the project's labour force during its massive construction phase.

So many of New Waterford's men are working out of town that the fire department can't recruit volunteers and the dart leagues are foundering. The local high school is having a difficult time finding coaches. A great number of children are being raised by their mothers. And finding a plumber or electrician is next to impossible.

Meanwhile, some of the youth heading west in search of jobs are staying there, exacerbating the town's attrition and raising questions about the future sustainability of basic services.

“There's hardly a household you can go by without running into someone working in the oil sands,” Mr. Morrison says. “There's a lot less men around. It's unbelievable. They're either getting ready to go or they just came back. In the 40 to 50 group, they're all out there.”

GROWTH AND CONTRACTION

It wasn't so long ago that New Waterford was a thriving coal-mining town of more than 12,000 people. In the 1970s, the town built a state-of-the-art high school, Breton Educational Centre, that served 2,300 students. There were four elementary schools, as many gas stations, and more than a dozen convenience stores dotting what was, for the town's size, a vibrant downtown strip.

Today, the population has been sliced in half, and the high school's enrolment has dwindled to 813. Only one elementary school remains, and the corner stores have either been sold or boarded up, replaced by a Needs chain. There is even talk that some of the area's six Catholic churches will be shuttered in the coming months.

Unemployment has remained stubbornly high since the last mine closed in 2001 and, despite the introduction of a large call centre, the town is struggling to adopt to a new economic reality.

Fort McMurray has stepped into this benighted breach, single-handedly keeping hundreds of families off the welfare rolls and pumping millions of dollars into New Waterford. At the same time, the migration of workers – some seasonal, some permanent – has dramatically changed the face of the town.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the pubs. Rosco's, a local watering hole, recently shut its doors for lack of business. At the New Waterford Army & Navy Club, where time is measured in pint glasses and hands of tarbish, a local card game, things are little better.

The card tables sit empty, and the cavernous bingo hall of a tavern is deserted, save for four older men huddled in a corner and feeding coins into a video lottery terminal.

A few of the regulars have apparently been siphoned off by the Knot, a neighbourhood bootlegger with a kindly disposition toward smokers and early birds – it opens at 7 o'clock in the morning.

But that isn't the real reason business has been faltering, confides Tony MacKinnon, a 57-year-old ironworker who has commuted to Alberta for work over the past several years.

“It's the oil sands – that's why this place is so dead,” he explains. Mr. MacKinnon is open about his dislike for Alberta (“I hate the place,” he grouses), but the money is too good. “My wife, she don't mind,” he says, pausing to rub his thumbs and fingers together. “As long as the bacon is coming.”

This dislocation is nothing new for families in Cape Breton, where the vicissitudes of an industrialized economy have always meant leaving home in search of work. In the 1950s, gardeners and housekeepers streamed to New England. In the 1960s and 1970s, the destination was Ontario's manufacturing sector. Intermittent booms in Alberta have also attracted workers from the island over the past few decades.

The impact of the oil sands, however, promises to be much more pronounced, not just because of the breadth and longevity of the labour demand but also because of the type of people it's attracting.

“Young people are going out and not coming back,” lamented Frank Corbett, the MLA for the region for the past decade, a span in which his riding has lost about 2,000 voters, or 20 per cent. “We're seeing highly skilled people leaving on an education we paid for. Alberta is getting a great deal here.”

So expansive is this exodus that Mr. Corbett is dispatching a ward captain to Fort McMurray before the next provincial election to make sure the men are registered to vote.

Whereas the number of people living in Canada swelled 10 per cent between 1996 and 2006, the number living in Cape Breton Regional Municipality decreased by more than 10 per cent – the largest drop of any census division. The municipality includes Sydney, Glace Bay, New Waterford and a handful of smaller villages.

While declining birth rates have abetted this slide, the bigger issue is what demographers call out-migration: people leaving and not coming back.

THE EXODUS OF YOUTH

One benefactor of this trend has been the city that locals have dubbed Fort McMoney, or “the Shrine” – a glib reference to how an oil sands job can “heal” people collecting disability.

No one has exact figures but anecdotal evidence suggests well over 1,000 New Waterford residents have been lured west. Some are unionized employees working the “21/7” (out for three weeks, and back for one); others, like Mr. Morrison, the councillor, go out sporadically. And then there are those, like Joe Hanes, who left several years ago and have yet to return.

Mr. Hanes, a 30-year-old pipefitter who makes $110,000 a year, has helped friends get work in Alberta and reckons approximately 60 per cent of his graduating high-school class is now making a living there.

“It's the same old song,” he said, between sips of a Coors Light during a brief visit home. “The younger guys are a little spoiled [by the salaries]. There's a lot of people out there who won't move back.”

According to recent figures based on tax filings, the net migration of Nova Scotia taxpayers to Alberta has more than tripled, from 1,074 in 2004 to 3,686 in 2006. More than 13 times the number of Nova Scotians left for Alberta than for the No. 2 destination, British Columbia.

And for those who moved to Alberta, more than half came from either Halifax County or the much smaller Cape Breton County, where New Waterford is located. These numbers don't reflect the larger number of Cape Bretoners who are commuting to Fort McMurray, often via chartered planes that ferry them directly to the Sydney airport.

“When I was there I'd run into people from New Waterford a lot easier than I would in Sydney,” said Jill Williams, a local businessman who began going to the oil sands in 2006. Mr. Williams, whose family owns JT'S Pub and Steak Room, said he made enough in nine weeks to send one daughter to university for the year and to pay for a Mexican vacation.

“The money out there is intoxicating,” he said.

JT's customers on this day are a fitting proxy for the town: a table of 14 has gathered for lunch, yet all of them are retired – and the vast majority are women.

“Our town is about 60 per cent seniors,” said Ed O'Quinn, who recently retired after selling the Community Press, a local newspaper. “We've lost our youth.”

Many residents argue the social costs – which include well-documented drug problems among the town's youth – could be much dearer if the men here didn't have the oil sands and were instead forced to rely on social assistance.

But economists like John Whalley, economic development manager for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, believe the project is a temporary fix and are worried about the long-term viability of many small towns on the island that aren't economically self-sufficient.

“The outflow of people is an enormous drain on our region,” Mr. Whalley said, noting that the shrinking tax base is being forced to fund a rapidly aging community, which in turn requires higher health-care spending.

Xstrata, the global mining giant, is preparing to open a coal mine in nearby Donkin, but that would require only between 250 and 300 workers. Other business leaders argue that the call centres have created a solid base of computer-literate employees, and that Cape Breton is in a good position to lure more technological employers.

Until that happens, there is little evidence the population will stop ebbing and greying, especially with the lure of steady work and handsome pay in the oil sands.

Mr. Morrison has already watched two of his children move to Alberta. His youngest daughter, meanwhile, spent last summer there to save money for school, but he insisted she return to Cape Breton to undertake her degree.

“I won't let her go,” he said. “I told her, ‘You're going to be gone soon enough.'”