Even with exploration halted, the coal committee’s consultation would be “utterly ineffective,” claimed Rachel Notley, because its “terms of reference explicitly exclude from consideration” matters “at the heart of the call to limit coal mining,” namely, “water quality, water quantity, and land-use planning.” Notley’s view echoed that of Ian Urquhart, Conservation Director of the Alberta Wilderness Association, who had called the Terms of Reference (ToR) a “betrayal of public trust” because of their narrow scope. The coal review was “just one more betrayal” by the Kenney government, agreed Andrew Nikiforuk, because “the review won’t include anything that matters like water and land use.” University-of-Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes similarly maintained that the committee’s ToR did not allow it “to consider the consequences of coal development for water allocations and water quality” and made “it difficult to examine issues related to landscape-level planning and cumulative impacts.”

Critics also read the ToR as precluding discussion of the complete ban on any new eastern-slopes coal mining wanted by so many Albertans (including me). The consultation “looks weighted towards an assessment of where and how coal can be developed in Alberta rather than whether or not continuing coal exploration and development is a permissible use of the landscape,” it was argued, meaning that the coal committee would conduct no more than a “pick your poison consultation.”

In email correspondence at the time, I agreed that if these shocking accounts were true, the coal committee’s ToR would completely contradict the Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA) and the South Saskatchewan Land Use Plan. But once I had read the ToR, I concluded that they were not nearly as narrow as had been claimed.

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