As the coal committee’s consultation on eastern-slopes coal policy gathered steam, the federal-provincial Joint Review Panel on the Grassy Mountain project reached a decision.

Recall that Grassy Mountain, in the Crowsnest Pass, came within the relatively permissive category-4 part of the 1976 Lougheed policy because it had been previously mined. When Benga Mining proposed new operations at this “legacy” mine, it was subject to environmental review under both provincial and federal legislation. In 2018, the two governments established a Joint Review Panel (JRP) to assess the project. The three-member panel served both as “roster of hearing commissioners” for the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and a “review panel” under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (2012). The JRP submitted its report on June 17, 2021.

The JRP had to decide whether the project was in “the public interest.” This entailed “comparing and weighing” the project’s “potential positive and negative impacts … across economic, environmental, and social domains” (para 3013). The “positive economic impact” would be “low” outside the Crowsnest Pass area and only “moderate” within it, the panel found. Although some of the adverse environmental impacts — e.g., water quantity and air quality — were also found to be “low to moderate,” serious threats to water quality and wildlife tilted the public-interest calculation conclusively against the project:

Overall,we conclude that the project is likely to result in significant adverse environmental effects on westslope cutthroat trout and surface water quality, and these negative impacts outweigh the low to moderate positive economic impacts of the project. Accordingly, we find that the project is not in the public interest (para 3048).

The AER and the Alberta government accepted the decision and closed Benga’s Grassy Mountain project.

A day before the JRP decision on Grassy Mountain, the federal Minister of Environment announced that he would designate all other metallurgical coal mining projects in southwest Alberta for federal environmental assessment, and on June 28 he so designated the Tent Mountain project. This meant joint review panels for all such projects.

The question of reviewing projects would become moot, of course, if the Alberta government accepted a coal-committee recommendation against new coal mines in the eastern slopes, which is what we “four unusuals” urged (see the next post in this series).

ADDENDUM (August 2021): Although the AER’s acceptance of the JRP decision stopped the Grassy Mountain Project, Jonathan Wilkinson, the federal Minister of the Environment, also issued a “Decision Statement” against the project on August 6. Benga and two First Nations appealed the AER decision to the Alberta Court of Appeal and the federal minister’s decision to the Federal Court of Canada. Those appeals will be the subject of a subsequent post in this series.