While Premier Danielle Smith attended the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, her government once again signalled its intention to open up the eastern slopes of the Rockies to Australian coal speculators and billionaires despite massive public opposition.
Without public consultation or even so much as a press release, Energy Minister Brian Jean’s Jan. 15 letter instructed the Alberta Energy Regulator to rescind three ministerial orders on coal, including an indefinite moratorium on mining and exploration in the eastern slopes of the Rockies. The order was to be maintained until proper land-use planning had been completed.
“This recission of the coal-related Ministerial Orders will reduce the regulatory confusion around coal development applications,” explained Jean in his letter to the AER.
But there has never been any confusion.
In 2022 the unpopular government of Jason Kenney imposed a moratorium on coal mining and exploration in response to massive public protests against its plans to bulldoze the Rockies for metallurgical coal mining. A public commission on coal found that 70 per cent of Albertans opposed coal mining in the eastern slopes.
Jean’s new instructions, released by the AER Monday, ignores those democratic impulses and effectively allows Australian coal speculators to resume coal exploration and mining on leases acquired four years ago, including projects located just west of the famous Cowboy Trail.
The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society of Southern Alberta says the removal of the coal ban “means that new coal mine exploration and development on more than 188,000 hectares of leases could begin as early as this spring, and companies are already being notified that their exploration permits are no longer paused and are once more active.”
The decision places numerous watersheds up and down the Rockies at permanent risk of environmental insults, including toxic coal dust, water contamination, strip mining, landscape destruction and toxic selenium pollution.
“I am really angry and feel betrayed by this government,” said rancher Laura Laing, who has been fighting for a permanent ban on coal mining in the Rockies. “We are right back to Square 1 and making decisions without public consultation.”
“The fact that our government would act against ranching and agriculture by allowing new developments in mountain watersheds and put them on a permanent platform of risk due to selenium pollution is crazy.”
“This government has picked the wrong people to fight with,” said Laing.
David Luff, a former assistant deputy energy minister who helped craft the 1976 Coal Policy that protected the eastern slopes from open-pit mining, decried Jean’s decision as unethical and knuckleheaded. He also warned that it will spark a huge political backlash against the government.
“The minister did not tell Albertans directly about what he was doing,” Luff told The Tyee. “He presented directions to the AER and now we are finding out that the minister of energy has opened up the entire eastern slopes to coal exploration and mine development, with the exception of Category 1 lands (lands not in national or provincial parks).”
Luff characterized Jean’s behaviour as autocratic. “I would suggest that the removal of the coal ban without any consultation with Albertans, the owners of the resource, is morally and ethically wrong.”
“I think once Albertans become aware of this decision they will be angrier than they were in 2020 and 2021 when Jason Kenney rescinded the Coal Policy,” he said. “The blowback on government will be larger, more vociferous, better organized and last longer.... It will be an election issue for sure.”
Luff, like many government critics, suspects that the government’s decision to once again revive coal mining in the Rockies was driven in part by its fear of $15 billion worth of lawsuits initiated by five Australian coal companies.
After Kenney cancelled the Coal Policy in 2020 with no public consultation, a dozen Australian companies rushed into the Rockies.
But public backlash to Kenney’s coal push was so strong that it forced his government to restore the policy and stop all mining.
After his government cancelled coal leases and established the 2022 coal ban, four Australian companies — Cabin Ridge Project Ltd., Atrum Coal Ltd., Black Eagle Mining Corp. and Evolve (Montem Resources) — decided to sue the Alberta government seeking $13.8 billion in damages. That court case begins in April.
Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart has also launched two separate lawsuits against the government, one for rejecting her Grassy Mountain project in 2021 and another for damages due to the coal ban. She is seeking more than $2 billion in compensation.
Rinehart’s lawsuit also accuses the United Conservative Party government of “conducting a regulatory approval procedure in bad faith and pressuring officials to reach the decision based on the political atmosphere in the province.”
Jean’s ministerial order does not automatically quash these cases, said University of Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes. But it does remove the argument that they cannot develop their properties due to a coal ban.
Bankes speculates that Jean’s decision to surrender the Rockies to Australian coal miners is solely motivated by the populist ideology of the UCP government.
He said the government understands that its incompetent management of the whole coal issue has frustrated the property interests of investors. “Because the UCP government also believes that property interests are not subject to a community interest, they believe that they must compensate Australian property owners unless they can make that frustration go away.”
Bankes told The Tyee that the government had many other options. It could have fought the lawsuits in court or even passed legislation denying compensation.
Instead Jean, who attended law school in Australia, chose to prioritize the alleged property rights of coal speculators encouraged by the bad policies of the Kenney government, he said. The interests of foreign speculators appear to hold more value “to the UCP government than protecting the health and environmental interests of Albertans from the inevitable consequences of coal mining — selenium poisoning,” Bankes said.
Premier Danielle Smith also suggested the decision to end the coal ban was all about saving taxpayers money.
But Bill Donahue, a lawyer and environmental scientist, rejected the premier’s reasoning. He formerly served as chief monitoring officer and executive director of science in Alberta’s environmental monitoring branch. There he witnessed the government’s irrational fear of lawsuits first-hand.
“Do I believe that Smith and her advisers believe that coal companies can sue them?” asked Donahue. “Yes, because they personally know nothing about the law.”
He added that he has witnessed “such unwarranted quaking and a complete reversal of 100 per cent legal decisions by Alberta Environment in response to empty threats of lawsuits from resource companies, after their legal advisers ignored the clear law in formulating their advice.”
“Simply put, executives and their advisers in the resource branches of the Alberta government seem to live in abject fear of the threat of lawsuits from resource companies, without recognizing that anyone can attempt to sue anyone else for almost anything. Whether it could possibly go anywhere is a nuance that seems to be lost on them.”
Donahue said that the government’s decision to put the interests of Australian coal miners ahead of those of ordinary Albertans was baffling and could only be explained by one of three reasons.
It could be the product of “almost-religious ideological hyper-intransigence that demands fossil fuel development at all costs.”
Or it could be “political corruption done the way it's always been done — with ministers making sketchy backroom deals with rich developers and their lobbyists who want to get a lot richer by walking all over Albertans and leaving a massive mess behind when they pull stakes.”
Or it could be “simply stupidity and incompetence,” Donahue said.
Read more: Politics, Alberta, Environment
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