Alberta's Choice
We can have our natural beauty or increased fossil fuel extraction, but not both.
Jasper is in ruins.
Twenty-five thousand tourists and residents were forced to evacuate the cherished national park on July 22 after an out-of-control wildfire ripped through the park, reaching the townsite two days later while leaving a trail of destruction Mayor Richard Ireland described as “almost beyond comprehension.”
Jasper will rebuild; there’s no doubt about it, just as Fort McMurray did after 2016 and Slave Lake after 2011.
But the destruction of a universally beloved national park brings into focus an increasingly urgent choice Albertans have to contend with.
Do we want the untrammelled beauty of our natural landscapes or do we want untrammelled fossil fuel expansion that’s making devastating wildfires increasingly common? We simply cannot have both.
When the Trans Mountain pipeline is permitted to use precious firefighting resources to ensure it’s able to continue shipping 890,000 barrels a day of planet-killing tar sands crude through Jasper, despite acknowledging last year that the risk of its pipeline burning is low, something is deeply amiss.
Canadian leaders’ response to wildfires increasingly resemble those of their American counterparts’ to school shootings.
Politicians line up to express their thoughts and prayers for the victims, and thank first responders for their grace under pressure. Some, like Premier Danielle Smith, might even shed a tear over what was lost.
But don’t you dare identify causes or culprits. That would be politicizing a tragedy. Never mind that the tragedy is a direct result of political choices made with input from powerful lobbying groups, whether it’s the National Rifle Association or Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
Partisan bickering over which level of government has jurisdiction over Jasper, which consists of a municipality located within a national park, obscures the substantive political discussion necessary in times like these.
Yes, wildfires are a fact of nature, but as increasingly record-breaking temperatures give way to growing drought conditions, wildfires become increasingly frequent and severe.
Climate is the issue, which neither the provincial nor federal government appears willing to address with the necessary urgency.
Former premier Jason Kenney set the tone in his government’s inaugural 2019 budget, in which he cut firefighting funding and outlined plans for massive corporate tax cuts that saved Big Oil billions of dollars, allowing them to ramp up production while eliminating jobs.
Premier Smith has arguably outdone her predecessor’s devotion to petropolitics, spending $170,000 to travel to COP28 in Dubai in December 2023 to lobby against curtailing oil and gas production months after imposing a sudden moratorium that curtailed renewable energy production.
Smith has gone all-in on dubious carbon-capture and storage (CCS) technology, which she claims is “about transitioning away from emissions … while exporting more oil and delivering more energy,” as if there’s no inherent tension between increasing oil production and reducing emissions.
What happens to the carbon once it’s stored underground is a question few of our leaders appear willing to ask, let alone answer.
Embracing CCS as a climate solution is an ambition shamefully shared by NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, who lauded Shell Canada for “leading the way on decarbonization” by approving two carbon capture and storage projects in the province last month.
Shell wouldn’t have made these risky investments without generous subsidies from the provincial and federal governments.
While the federal Liberals have made some promising gestures on the climate file as of late, including a forthcoming cap on oil and gas emissions, a clean electricity mandate by 2035 and anti-greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act—all strenuously opposed by the Alberta government—it’s important to read the fine print.
The federal government promised last year, for instance, to eliminate “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies [emphasis added]” by the end of 2024.
A month ago, as recently reported by John Woodside at Canada’s National Observer, Export Development Canada provided loans worth up to $200 million to TC Energy to help the company export gas from its Coastal GasLink pipeline, which passes through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory against the wishes of its hereditary leadership.
Soon after, the feds provided another $19-billion loan guarantee to the aforementioned Trans Mountain pipeline, on top of the $17 billion it previously lent to the project, which the feds purchased from Kinder Morgan in 2018 to ensure it got built, a decision enthusiastically endorsed by then-Alberta premier Rachel Notley.
“Every person who has spent the last few weeks fleeing wildfires or choking on smoke should be outraged and asking for their money back,” Greenpeace Canada senior strategist Keith Stewart told the Observer of the feds’ continued generosity towards the fossil fuel industry.
Meanwhile, the arsonists are making a killing as they keep drilling while the planet burns.
In the same timespan, Imperial Oil made $1.2 billion, thanks in part to record first-quarter production of 277,000 barrels per day from its Kearl mine—the very mine whose tailings have been leaking into the Mikisew Cree Nation and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s water since 2019, culminating in a 5.3 million-litre spill of contaminated wastewater in February 2023.
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. produced 1.33 million barrels per day in the first quarter of 2024, earning $1.5 billion, a significant decrease from the record-high production of 1.42 million in the final quarter of 2023, but still higher than the 1.32 million production in the first quarter of 2023.
These companies, plus ConocoPhillips Canada and MEG Energy, compose the Pathways Alliance, which is seeking billions of dollars in subsidies to invest in a 400-km network of pipelines leading to a massive CCS hub in Cold Lake without the consent of Cold Lake First Nations.
The consortium responded to the federal government’s anti-greenwashing regulation, which requires companies to provide evidence for emissions reduction claims, by scrubbing its entire online presence.
Our politicians are beholden to these bad-faith actors, who have sucked Alberta dry for decades, littering our landscapes with their abandoned infrastructure, poisoning our water and creating the conditions that are setting our cherished parks ablaze.
And now they’re using the false promise of CCS to do it all over again with further public subsidies.
Three years ago, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Albertans of various walks of life and political stripes came together to mobilize against a fossil fuel project that put the province’s natural beauty at risk, providing a model for future climate action.
In May 2020, then-premier Kenney quietly revoked Alberta’s 1976 coal policy, which banned open-pit mining on the Rockies’ eastern slopes, after months of lobbying from the Coal Association of Canada.
With a pandemic-induced oil price slump, Kenney thought he could make up for lost revenue by opening up the mountains to metallurgical coal mining, putting the Oldman River at risk of selenium contamination from runoff.
Around the same time, public hearings were scheduled for an application to mine a portion of the eastern slopes in the Crowsnest Pass that was never included in the coal policy from Benga Mining, a company owned by Gina Rinehart, the wealthiest person in Australia and an avid climate denier.
This one-two punch signalling that Alberta’s side of the Rockies was for sale galvanized an unlikely and unprecedented coalition of environmentalists, First Nations, ranchers and landowners to fight for the future of our mountains, water and wildlife.
“I cannot think of any example in Alberta’s history where this kind of coalition has come together and on this scale,” University of Alberta political scientist Laurie Adkin told The Narwhal in 2021.
Kenney tried to dismiss opposition to the expansion of mining in the Rockies as a bunch of big city dwellers trying to impose their alien values on rural Alberta, demonstrating his superficial familiarity with Alberta’s social landscape.
The movement to protect the Rockies spread far and wide, transcending urban and rural, progressive and conservative, and Indigenous and settler divides. An Alberta government survey from April 2021 with 25,000 respondents found that 90% were opposed to opening up the eastern slopes to mining.
The popularity of protecting the Rockies pushed the Alberta NDP to adopt banning coal mining from the eastern slopes as a policy in its otherwise uninspiring 2023 election platform, a promise renewed by Nenshi in his resoundingly victorious NDP leadership campaign.
When forced to choose between their pristine natural landscapes and making a quick buck from fossil fuel extractions, most Albertans didn’t hesitate to select the former.
The UCP government had little choice but to backtrack, reinstating the coal policy and issuing an indefinite moratorium on coal exploration in March 2022, with the exception of four “advanced projects,” including Grassy Mountain.
In the meantime, a joint review panel from the federal and provincial governments rejected Grassy Mountain’s application to mine coal in Crowsnest Pass, noting its adverse impacts on the water and wildlife, a decision upheld by three separate courts.
Rinehart is back with a new company, Northback Holdings, and is attempting to revive Grassy Mountain with Energy Minister Brian Jean’s blessing.
If the Alberta government opts to proceed with what writer Andrew Nikiforuk called this “zombie coal mine,” the movement that was formed in 2021 will undoubtedly reemerge to fight another day.
The lesson of the fight against coal mining in the eastern slopes is that extractive industries are far from invincible. Politicians can’t be trusted, but they can be moved to do the right thing provided there’s pressure from below to counteract the backdoor influence of billionaires.
So as we mourn the loss of Jasper as we know it and prepare for further losses as the climate crisis spirals, let us seize this opportunity to build a broad coalition, brought together by grief, to hold the bastards profiting from the loss of our natural environment to account.
We may not be able to stop the climate crisis in its tracks, but we can certainly prevent it from getting unimaginably worse for future generations by putting our differences aside in favour of bold climate action.
That means no more arbitrary moratoriums on renewables. Not another cent in fossil fuel subsidies. No more carbon capture scams. Force oil and gas companies to clean up their mess. Slow down the pursuit of endless economic growth. And last, but far from least, honour our Treaties.
The longer we wait, the more destruction, loss and grief there will be on the path to the inevitable.