Critics saw the government’s decision to allow exploration activities to continue during the Coal Committee’s consultations as a sign of bad faith. Recall Rachel Notley’s argument that “If the UCP wanted a good faith consultation, all of these activities would be halted until Albertans told the government if they wanted coal mining or not.” Continued exploration was surely anomalous if a ban on coal mining really was a possible outcome of public consultation. “Absent a moratorium on new development work,” argued my friend Kevin Van Tighem, “consultation will be a sham because that exploration work signals that the government has already decided the outcome: more strip mines.”

Kevin made this point in a facebook post provocatively entitled “Can Sonya Savage Save her Government?” That post portrayed a UCP split between enthusiastically pro-coal forces led by figures such as environment minister Jason Nixon, and coal moderates led by energy minister Savage. The latter were at least open to a no-coal outcome, and minister Savage’s reinstatement of the 1976 policy and appointment of “an advisory panel with some good members on it” were “positive first steps” by “a responsible Minister, working diligently to get her government out of a mess that was created by other Cabinet Ministers and by senior bureaucrats in her own Department of Energy.”

Nevertheless, continued Kevin, Savage’s “efforts will lack credibility, and the work of her advisory panel will look pretty bogus, as long as coal companies are allowed to continue cutting exploration roads and drill pads into their new leases on our Eastern Slopes.” Unwilling to “participate in a sham,” Kevin indicated that the coal committee could expect input from him only if and when a “total moratorium” on new exploration was put in place.

I was persuaded by much of Kevin’s analysis, but disagreed with that last point. Seeing “a constituency within the UCP caucus and cabinet that just wants a graceful exit from a regrettable blunder,” I argued in an email that a coal-committee recommendation “against all eastern-slopes mining provides the political cover for such an exit.” In a divided party, Savage might not be able to win on every issue, meaning that continued exploration might “be the regrettable and incoherent cost of the greater ultimate victory.” Accordingly, instead of letting “perfection be the enemy of the good,” we should do what we could to help the committee come to the right conclusion. That meant participating in an admittedly imperfect consultation rather than sitting it out.

It didn’t come to that. Pressure for a moratorium on exploration continued, and the coal committee itself recommended one in order to ensure that its process would be “effective and credible.” On April 23, Minister Savage and Committee Chair Ron Wallace announced that exploration activities in category-2 lands would cease during the consultation. .

But would the consultation nevertheless be “utterly ineffective” because it was too narrowly focused, as Rachel Notley and others contended? That question — the subject of the next post in this series — was also addressed by the April 23 announcement.