Letter: Three concerns about UCP’s coal policy

By Letter to the Editor on March 19, 2021.

Dear editor,

I have three general concerns about the UCP government’s coal policy. The first comes from their secretive repealing of a “hands-off” policy of 44 years. About a month ago, Albertans discovered a “done deal.” We learned the UCP had, on June 1, 2020, quietly cancelled the 1976 policy, with no public consultation, not even the pretend courtesy of the usual UCP cherry-picked “advisory panel” with predetermined conclusions.

We also learned that large areas of formerly protected Eastern Slopes had been leased for coal mining, and environmentally damaging exploration work was well under way. Only after public outrage and UCP embarrassment at being caught, will there be public consultations, beginning on March 29 – 10 months after the fact. How do UCP minds function to have believed that something of this magnitude, importance, and of such ugly and permanent damage needed no public consultation? Are their dreams for Alberta as empty as their consciences seem to be? You decide.

Secondly, the UCP will not cancel the leases to the coal industry they signed between June 1, 2020 and the time they were caught by the public. Premier Jason Kenney and company readily tore up the contract with our doctors, just over a year ago. They happily cancelled the agreement(s) to ship oil by rail some months before that. Why not cancel the leases? While it is true that, in the last 10 months no actual mining has been started, it is also true that the spectre of environmental disaster will become real when the leaseholders begin mining, because up to six coal mines could result from the existing leases. Those leases must be cancelled.

Thirdly, we now learn (News article, March 9, Page A4) that the coal industry was intensely lobbying the UCP before it formed the government, and for a year after, to get at our Eastern Slopes. The UCP is so far into that industry’s back pocket that it even used coal industry lobbyist wording, almost word-for-word, to announce, “Rescinding the outdated coal policy in favour of modern oversight will help attract new investment for an important industry and protect jobs for Albertans.”So disturbingly eager are the UCP to join the Australian billionaires’ club that they brazenly resorted to borrowed blather and sycophancy to try to sell Alberta down selenium-polluted rivers.

Gregory R. Cote

Irvine

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