The title of this post was the subject line of the email I sent on April 11 to various UCP politicians and officials, and especially to all UCP members of the Alberta’s Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members’ Public Bills. The committee was slated to consider Rachel Notley’s proposed Eastern Slopes Protection Act. My emailed letter argued that it was in the UCP’s partisan interest to give the bill full legislative debate.

Here’s the letter:

Dear X:

I am a lifelong conservative. Indeed, I have some notoriety as part of the so-called “Calgary School” of conservatives at the University of Calgary. Among other things, I was one of the six signatories to the famous 2001 Alberta Agenda, much of which was revisited by the province’s Fair Deal Panel in May 2020. It won’t come as a surprise, therefore, that I voted UCP in the last provincial election.

But I am also one of a great many conservatives who oppose new coal mining in the eastern slopes. I have written recently about the bipartisan Oil-and-Gas-but-Not-Coal (OGNC) alliance that has emerged in Alberta to defend the integrity and water security of the eastern slopes. The conservatives in the OGNC alliance can rightly and proudly trace the roots of their position to the Lougheed government. A short version of my take on this can be found here and a longer version here (you may already have encountered one or the other). Ultimately, I contend that the OGNC needs a strategically placed + sign, becoming OG+NC.

The basic theme of OG+NC is that the oil and gas + hydrogen, infrastructure, petrochemicals, tourism etc.  – all of which the government rightly promotes – offer much better cost-benefit ratios than does surface mining in the eastern slopes. Especially as the economy is poised to improve on so many other fronts, we simply don’t need the distraction of this ongoing political conflagration about coal. The comparatively small economic returns of new coal mines in the eastern slopes simply aren’t worth the environmental costs and risks.

And they’re not worth the political risks either. Given all of the other political controversies now threatening the coalition of UCP voters, it is surely time to turn down the temperature of this needless fight about coal. A bipartisan gesture at this critical juncture would not go amiss. Bipartisanship can sometimes be in one’s partisan interest.

I therefore hope that, as a member of the Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members’ Public Bills, you will vote to allow the proposed Eastern Slopes Protection Bill to proceed to legislative debate.

The proposed Bill would prohibit coal mining and exploration in category-2 lands, which seems the likely outcome of the consultations currently under way. The Bill would focus the consultations where they really belong – i.e., on projects proposed for category-3 and -4 lands, subject to a moratorium on new projects in those lands pending the outcome of consultations.

If I were an MLA, I’d want to put this controversy to rest by passing the Bill. At the very least, however – and in the spirit of consultation the government now favours – the Bill should get full legislative debate.

I wasn’t the only one urging committee members to recommend that the Bill proceed. For more on this story, see the next post in this series.