Mr. Speaker, many Canadians believe that our commercial oil industry was born in Alberta.
Next Saturday at the Oil Museum of Canada in the village of Oil Springs, the site of Canada's first commercial oil well, author Patricia McGee will launch her new book entitled, The Story of Fairbank Oil, a chronicle of the Ontario birth of Canadian and world production of crude oil.
The oil business was born in Lambton County in southwestern Ontario in the 1850s. The technology and manpower of that time were exported to a country then called Persia where Lambton County residents opened these oil fields.
Ms. McGee's book traces the story of the Fairbank family which for 124 consecutive years has sold Lambton County crude to Imperial Oil, a company also founded in Lambton County.
One hundred and thirty-nine years after its founding, the Van Tuyl and Fairbank hardware store in Petrolia is poised to become a national historic site, a fitting recognition of the importance of the Fairbank family in the world oil--