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It’s because everybody hates them. Remote construction jobs offer high pay in exchange for being apart from civilization and family for two weeks of every three, or three of four, or three of five. They become an option when you can’t find a nine-to-five job in a heated shop or Quonset in your town, or in any town, and you don’t want to throw away your education and training or go on pogey. In a local recession they can be a precious lifeline — but they can wreak havoc on a household or a marriage, too.

Photo by Ryan Jackson/Postmedia News

Even for a single person, they are lonely, stressful, and miserable — probably the closest thing to army life a civilian can experience. (I would add that they are surely a lot less terrible now, in an internet-connected world, than they were in my youth, when heading off to Chetwynd or some such place took you out of the range of telephony.) Some of the loudest, harshest criticism of the prime minister has not come from workers, but from the families they leave behind to work remote construction.

If Trudeau expected some benefit of the doubt, the current crisis in the Alberta budget and economy, created specifically by an eco-aware freeze on pipeline-building, will not have anybody feeling especially generous. Of course he has nothing to lose electorally in Alberta, and knows it, but those man camps have always been full of Easterners sending remittances home.

Even for a single person, they are lonely, stressful, and miserable

Anyway, let’s not hero-worship the proletariat. While Conservative politicians heaped abuse on Trudeau for sneering at industrial labour, others defended him for mentioning “social impacts” from “bringing construction workers into a rural area.” These impacts are obviously real: they are well documented in the setting of the North Dakota Bakken oil boom. Much of the pipeline work now on hold would bring big, male-dominated temporary camps close to remote First Nations, and in those cases, anticipating “social impacts” is not only common sense, but a core duty of government. From an old-fashioned Marxist standpoint, we should have oodles of man camps building the infrastructure of the glorious future, and perhaps each one should have a shiny guillotine for use on executives and managers who allow bored workers to run riot in nearby communities or mistreat women.

• Email: ccosh@postmedia.com | Twitter: colbycosh