Alberta Surrenders to the Australian Coal Lobby

The Alberta government gave its citizens an Australian sack of “modern” coal for Christmas, as well as a load of misinformation accompanied by a mountain of disingenuousness.

In an abrupt news conference held Friday, Energy Minister Brian Jean and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz declared the government was changing mining policy for Alberta because the world needed more metallurgical coal.

“It’s a big day,” said Jean, who has been lobbied relentlessly by the Coal Association of Canada and Australian billionaire and mining magnate Gina Rinehart to support coal mining in the Rockies.

The Alberta Coal Modernization Initiative would not only develop new rules for coal mining in the eastern slopes, said Jean, but increase coal royalties which currently stand at one per cent.

He added that “air, water and land would not be sacrificed” even though, in addition to opening the door for new underground coal-mining projects, he openly embraced support for what the government classifies as a cancelled project: the Grassy Mountain open-pit coal mining development, owned by Rinehart.

Yet Jean’s claims defy the geographical realities of coal mining and its environmental risks. Surface-coal mining has a long record of creating toxic dust, destroying mountains and polluting watersheds for decades.

For that very reason, Alberta and federal regulators previously rejected Grassy Mountain as “uneconomic” and a significant threat to water quality and quantity in 2021.

But Jean has described the project as an “advanced coal project” which supposedly makes it exempt from a current moratorium on coal mining. (The courts are challenging the minister’s interpretation.)

He also said Grassy Mountain would be exempt from any new rules.

A shift most Albertans oppose

During the conference, neither Jean nor Schulz made any reference to what the public really wants. Repeated surveys have consistently shown that most Albertans don’t support coal mining of any kind in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

In fact, most believe the government’s only priority should be the protection of critical watersheds.

Jean admitted Friday that coal development in the past has been “bad,” but that something called “responsible resource development” — a catchphrase for every speculative project in Alberta — would prevent selenium pollution, a multibillion-dollar bane of metallurgical coal mining in neighbouring B.C. and many parts of Alberta. No viable technology has currently solved this environmental problem.

“If the technology doesn’t exist, it won’t happen,” Jean responded to a media question. “But we do understand it does exist.”

The news conference was so abbreviated that it is not clear what type of surface or underground mining will soon be dotting the eastern slopes in the years ahead — only that more is coming. Queries from The Tyee to the energy minister went unanswered.

Reaction from a variety of Albertans to the rushed announcement just five days before Christmas, including former civil servants and environmental experts, was swift and angry.

Corb Lund, a popular musician who lives in southern Alberta, described the government press conference as “an Orwellian word salad meant to calm the public right before Xmas.”

“Grassy Mountain is a go, and we'll say anything to make it happen, then let even more mines into the Rockies in after that,” he concluded.

Charges of ‘greenwashing’

Dr. Bill Donahue, the former chief monitoring officer and executive director of science in Alberta’s environmental monitoring branch, and now an independent scientist in B.C., was equally blunt.

“It is all greenwashing bullshit,” Donahue told The Tyee. “It is a way to push the UCP’s original 2020 plan to open the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mining, and now we’ll make a case for it again.” He called the announcement “a farce.”

Contrary to claims made by Jean that some unspecified coal mining generated revenues as high as $200 million, Donahue said the industry acted as a minor economic player with extreme environmental costs in the province. “For most years in recent history, the total provincial coal royalties averaged around $10 million a year. It’s not even a rounding error in terms of provincial budgets.”

In Donahue’s view, claims the government would strengthen regulation in consultation with industry were bogus. “The existing regulations ensured that the Grassy Mountain project was rejected by regulators in 2021. If you create a new regime that advocates and approves a project like Grassy as the current government is now doing, then you are weakening standards — not strengthening them.”

What Alberta environment monitoring and research has consistently shown, from the McLeod River headwaters to the Crowsnest Pass, added Donahue, is that coal mining pollutes the air with toxic coal dust and will contaminate distant waterways with selenium and other heavy metals (arsenic and cadmium) for decades, including long after Alberta's nominal regulatory reclamation has been completed. Moreover, the type of contaminants leaching from coal mines “significantly reduces the quality of water and its suitability for irrigation.”

The fact that the Alberta government can look across the Rockies and see what is happening in Elk Valley — where mining has created a multibillion-dollar selenium problem, complete with lawsuits — and still support coal mining here is just galling, added Donahue.

Why is coal mining being supported by the UCP government “when Albertans will benefit so little from it?” he asked.

David Luff, the former deputy environment minister who helped craft the 1976 Coal Policy that protected the eastern slopes, characterized Jean’s promise to guard water quality with modernized rules for coal mining as both dishonest and incorrect.

“If this were true, the government would not permit any new coal mining in the eastern slopes and require that all lands disturbed by coal exploration and development be reclaimed within the next three years,” Luff told The Tyee.

Jean had offered in his news conference that an approach called high-wall mining would prevent wider environmental harm. “There are currently no coal mines operating anywhere in the world — even those using high-wall mining technologies that prevent 100 per cent of the selenium produced at the mine site from entering watersheds downstream,” Luff said.

Northback has already calculated that its proposed mining project will leach 10 micrograms per litre of selenium concentration into downstream waterways, Luff added — a target 10 times higher than the Government of Alberta guideline for the pollutant. “This information alone should be enough evidence to stop Northback in its tracks.”

The Alberta’s government new scheme to revive coal mining in the Rockies also failed to include the overwhelming democratic wishes and interests of its citizens, Luff said.

“The government must undertake extensive consultation and engagement regarding the public's vision for the eastern slopes and a set of guiding principles that both the government and the Alberta Energy Regulator would follow to achieve the public's vision,” he said.

“The discussion doesn't begin with the development of a new modernized coal policy. The discussion begins with a new modernized eastern slopes policy.”

‘The government hasn’t listened’

Laura Laing and her husband’s ranch is in the municipal district of Ranchland, whose inhabitants overwhelmingly oppose coal mining in the headwaters of the Old Man River as a dramatic threat to water quality. She called Jean’s comments totally disingenuous.

“The government hasn’t listened. Saying no open-pit or mountain-top removal does not say no surface-coal mining or no new coal development in this landscape. Albertans aren’t falling for it.”

In 2020, former premier Jason Kenney opened the Rockies to Australian coal speculators when he abruptly cancelled the 1976 Coal Policy that effectively banned open-pit mining in the Rockies. He justified the gutting of protections as needed modernization. And he did so just before a public holiday. But unprecedented public protests forced the Kenney government to backtrack and restore the Coal Policy in 2021.

Ever since, the UCP government of Danielle Smith has actively sought ways to support the Australian coal lobby and whittle away at protections for the eastern slopes.

Rinehart’s company claims the massive project will right historic wrongs by reclaiming pits and gouges on the mountain left by previous miners.

“Wow, that’s smart,” said Jean. “They are looking at something that wasn’t reclaimed properly, they are going to require the company to reclaim it properly, and at the same time they are going to do it economically and not cause environmental problems. That’s a great solution.”

The facts speak otherwise. Katie Morrison, executive director for the Southern Alberta chapter of CPAWS, noted that “the previous mine disturbance is 12 per cent of the proposed new project footprint, with an additional eight per cent disturbance by roads and oil and gas developments. It is nonsensical to justify such a massive increase in disturbance and associated long-term and potentially unresolvable risks to air and water quality, species at risk, health, Treaty rights, and many others, in the name of reclamation.”

She and other critics don’t understand why Jean calls the destruction of an intact mountain just to reclaim 12 per cent of old mining damages “smart.”

Morrison added that Jean’s announcement clearly put the interests of the coal industry ahead of the public interest in the province.

She also called the conference a bad case of déjà vu: “The government was highly criticized in May 2020 for quietly rescinding the 1976 Coal Policy on the Friday of a long weekend, without any prior consultation with Albertans.” And now they’ve done the same thing again.

A selective referendum

Jean’s coal modernization announcement comes on the heels of a fraudulent referendum on the future of coal mining held in the Crowsnest Pass. Fossil fuel lobbyists and the Smith government openly supported the referendum in an attempt to manufacture an illusory social licence for the Grassy Mountain project.

Referendums can be blunt instruments. They typically offer a false choice: jobs and prosperity or unemployment and despair. Research has shown they can seduce voters with promises based on corporate or government propaganda with no accountability. As a consequence, they often produce decisions based on limited and biased information or the overstated benefits of some development.

That’s exactly what the Grassy Mountain referendum did. It deceptively asked Crowsnest Pass residents if they supported Rinehart’s coal project without mentioning an inconvenient fact: the proposed project is located in the municipal district of Ranchland where almost all residents are opposed to the scheme.

Asking residents of one geographic location to make judgements on a foreign-owned project actually located in another jurisdiction completely undermines the spirit of democracy. (Incredibly, UCP supporters and the local council for Crowsnest Pass now want to annex part of Ranchland where the mine will be located.)

The referendum also excluded a quarter of the tax-paying property owners in the Pass because they did not live there full-time and would have voted no to a mine.

Furthermore, the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass also did not disclose its own conflict of interest in sponsoring a referendum. In 2021 the council signed a secret agreement drafted by Rinehart’s company to provide water from the York River water license for the Grassy project. The agreement doesn’t expire until 2028.

In a slick corporate campaign, Rinehart’s company spent millions trying to buy local support and even drove citizens to the polls. It won the referendum by promising jobs and prosperity, even though foreign-owned coal mines have a poor track record of delivering jobs or prosperity.

The CEO of Rinehart’s Northback Holdings, Mike Young, has called the recent “yes” vote in the municipality of Crowsnest Pass “a mandate for responsible development.”

Young also explained the explicit reason for UCP government intervention on Rinehart’s behalf: “Premier Smith requested a local referendum and voters have given a clear message. The decisive victory shifts the focus to the next steps by the premier and the need to provide clarity on regulatory processes and to provide certainty for resource investment in general.”

And that’s what Jean’s modernization announcement was all about.

But the so-called modernization policy has cruelly ignored the economic interests of people who depend on fresh water from the mountains in southern Alberta.

In particular, the framing of the referendum directly disenfranchised more than 200,000 Albertans who live downstream of the mining project, and whose water quality and quantity would be dramatically affected by a mine located in the headwaters of the Old Man River watershed.

That was the blunt conclusion of a 2021 regulatory decision that Brian Jean and his government now seek to openly overturn by providing exemptions for billionaire lobbyists, along with deceitful rhetoric about “modernization.”