“If you don’t have a personal connection to the actual area, the location, or the workforce, or the people that travel back and forth and work there, then it’s harder to have an understanding of day-to-day life there.”
When Kate Beaton migrated west to work in Alberta’s oilsands, she didn’t know what to expect — other than a job that would allow her to pay down her student loans.
“If you don’t have a personal connection to the actual area, the location, or the workforce, or the people that travel back and forth and work there, then it’s harder to have an understanding of day-to-day life there,” Beaton said in a phone interview from her home in Cape Breton.With “Ducks,” Beaton’s graphic memoir that’s now competing in Canada Reads, she sought to show people what the experience can really be like.
“This book is a window into so many critical conversations about the environment, about Indigenous land rights, about the student debt crisis and about gender relations. So there is an angle for every person to have their perspective shifted in some way,” Roach said on the radio show “Q” ahead of Canada Reads’ Monday premiere.None of that was being discussed when Beaton graduated from university with a pile of debt that she decided she would try to dig herself out of in the oilsands.