“Four Unusuals” is how Harvey Locke referred to a group called together by Kevin Van Tighem in late May, 2021. Kevin wondered whether, in this polarized age, four individuals from across the political spectrum — Kevin, Harvey, Ted Morton and myself — could find enough common ground for a joint submission to the coal committee. Could these “four unusuals,” who “disagree on many things,” model how to “transcend partisan lines” on the issue of coal mining in the eastern slopes? Yes! We co-authored the submission below — also available from the coal committee’s document library — and met with the committee to discuss it.

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.

The AWA‘s Ian Urquhart, who had called the coal committee’s terms of reference a “betrayal of public trust,” welcomed the April 23 announcement that the committee would address environmental issues, but thought this should be part of a broad landuse planning exercise. Planning just for coal policy was putting “the cart before the horse,” in his view.

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.

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.”

In the previous post, we saw the Committee on Private Members’ Bills unanimously (and surprisingly) recommending that Rachel Notley’s Eastern Slopes Protection Act proceed to the full assembly. But the spring sitting of the 2nd session of Alberta’s 30th legislature would soon end, and bills not passed by then would “die on the order paper” with the new legislative session expected in the fall. Normal legislative procedure takes time, and the NDP worried that even the second-reading debate they coveted might not occur before the session ended. Legislative debate can be expedited, however, if the assembly unanimously agrees to bypass normal procedure. On April 19, Notley introduced a motion requesting unanimous consent to give her bill second reading that very evening (see pp. 4613 and 4615-16 of the Alberta Hansard for the afternoon of April 19, 2021).

The previous post featured my letter urging UCP members of Alberta’s Committee on Private Members’ Bills to recommend that Rachel Notley’s Eastern Slopes Protection Bill proceed to full legislative debate. The committee met to decide this issue on April 13. Its deliberations can be watched here or read in transcript version here.

The odds seemed stacked against the bill. Private members bills from the opposition benches rarely get a positive recommendation from this committee, and none had thus far during the UCP regime. The expected political posturing from both sides for most of the meeting led me to think Notley’s bill would meet the same fate.

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.

Originally published at The Line on April 6, 2021. Based on a longer piece published at the School of Public Policy on April 1 and on this site on April 3.

Alberta’s coal-fired political conflagration has revealed a broad and deep anti-coal animus. Polling tells us that about 70 per cent of Albertans oppose the Kenney government’s efforts to increase coal mining in the eastern slopes. Contributing to this alliance are those who want Oil and Gas but Not Coal (OGNC) to help drive Alberta’s economy.

Continue reading →