In 1979, I was a summer student working at Gulf Oil’s refinery in Clarkson, Ontario. I was assigned to its oldest crude unit, part of the original British-American Oil refinery built in 1943. It was my first job in the oil industry, an industry where I’d work for the next 35 years.

Walking into that place, I felt unsettled. It seemed dangerous, and it was. The week I started, a technician died in a horrific acid spill. Shortly before I left at the end of the summer, a fire nearly destroyed the whole facility. The technicians fought the fire themselves. That was just considered part of the job.

This isn’t the norm — most days, people don’t get hurt and refineries don’t burn down — but the risk is always there. And the people working in those places live with it.

That summer, I gained a deep respect for the people in Canada’s oil industry, one that only grew stronger over the decades. Canadian oil workers handle risk, complexity and logistical challenges with creativity and grit. Thanks to them, Canadians rarely think about whether the fuel we need will be there. It just is.

I remember something else from that summer. Near the end, a technician took me outside, opened a small valve on the pipeline feeding the unit, and let a few drops of oil drip onto the ground.

“Look — that’s Leduc crude,” he said, with a kind of reverence I didn’t understand then, but would not long after.

We don’t have much mythology in Canada, but Leduc is one of our foundational stories. On Feb. 13, 1947, Imperial Oil struck oil at Leduc No.........

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