The Stink of BS at Premier Smith’s Coal Town Hall

Premier Danielle Smith and three cabinet ministers presided over a boisterous “coal town hall” in Fort Macleod Wednesday with the purported goal of having a “discussion” about the government’s unpopular support for Australian coal speculators and their plans to mine the hell out of the Rockies.

About 500 severely normal Albertans, many as pissed as summer hornets, filled the hall to the brim. Ranchers. Irrigators. Landowners. Hikers. Moms. Water drinkers. Conservationists. Musicians like Corb Lund and Sid Marty. Small-c conservatives. Former mayors. Water scientists. My neighbours.

They packed the seats and lined the walls. Some coal supporters from the Crowsnest Pass attended too, but they were clearly in the minority.

Members of the majority, much to the dismay of Smith and company, all had one basic question: Why is her government supporting Australian coal magnates and ignoring Albertans concerned about their water security in a drying land overcast with smoke from persistent wildfires?

The pathetic and disingenuous answer was this:

The government supports a wonderful thing called “responsible development” in the Rockies because what sensible person would support “irresponsible development”?

And the world needs metallurgical coal and Alberta will deliver, because the modern economy demands it.

And because Aussie coal speculators have filed (dubious) lawsuits for $15 billion, the government now must appease them with a modern coal policy that finds “middle ground.”

In other words, the United Conservative Party government ended a highly popular coal moratorium ostensibly to save taxpayers money by dodging lawsuits that the government’s coal bungling created in the first place.

Piling the manure

Although Smith will sue Ottawa at the drop of a hat, she apparently can’t lift a legal finger to defend the Rockies, Alberta’s iconic backbone.

So citizens who didn’t wear boots to the event went home with buckets of bullshit and bafflegab on their shoes. As a veteran reporter, I wore waders, but the stench of political bullshit, which psychologists say they can now measure, wafted all the way home in the car.

Political bullshit, by the way, is defined as “persuasive communication that has no regard for truth, knowledge or evidence.” And that’s what Smith and her deferential companions delivered shamelessly.

They behaved and talked like a government beholden to Australian coal speculators and wondered why no one trusts them. It was telling that not one minister spoke in defence of the majesty, let alone the critical water supply role, of the Rocky Mountains.

Now, reporting on political bullshit can be tedious so let me just give you a small sample of the night’s proceedings.

Energy Minister Brian Jean, who obnoxiously occupied the stage like a loud vaudevillian, started things off by hailing the premier as a visionary leader. (In Donald Trump style, every minister began by praising Smith, a premier who has expelled two MLAs, Peter Guthrie and Scott Sinclair, for questioning the integrity of her government.)

Jean then explained it was possible to dig coal without messing up local water supplies, even though Alberta’s historical record, the experience of Teck Resources in B.C. and several government-funded studies all challenged the veracity of his bullshit. The minister then promised “responsible development” and added that it would be the best in the world. He got booed. Big time. Then Smith took the microphone. She tried to reframe the whole issue and pretended she was just trying to solve an inherited problem. But that’s not true. Her United Conservative Party created the coal fiasco by catering to lobbyists, and her government has magnified the problem by repeating the same mistake.

The rutted road to the town hall

Here’s a brief recap of how we got here. Caution — it stinks.

At the behest of coal lobbyists, the previous UCP government of Jason Kenney secretly opened the Rockies to coal development in 2020. It justified the scheme as “modernization.” That’s political code for allowing coal mining in watersheds and mountains where it wasn’t allowed before. The UCP didn’t run on the issue or consult with the public about these changes.

As a consequence, Albertans, particularly ones in this region who have a low tolerance for bullshit, revolted en masse against the blatant giveaway to foreign companies. (Coal royalties are one per cent in Alberta.) A non-partisan movement of water users then forced Kenney’s UCP government to reverse course. It then declared a moratorium on coal development in 2022.

Rather than uphold that moratorium, Smith undermined it by supporting the coal speculators as soon as she became premier. She first repeated Aussie propaganda that more open-pit mining on Grassy Mountain would somehow help reclaim its old mining footprint, which occupies only 274 hectares of the mountain. The new project, of course, would excavate an area nearly six times greater — 1,521 hectares. You can’t reclaim a mountain by levelling it.

At the town hall Smith now offered a different excuse for mining the Rockies. She explained that the only way to avoid a $15-billion Aussie expropriation claim against the government was to end the coal moratorium and modernize policy with the help of coal lobbyists.

She got royally booed, and for good reason. The premier had many other options, but that would have required leadership.

She could have killed the claims by formally expropriating the leases the government granted under the Mines and Minerals Act. She also could have marshalled her best legal team to fight the claims the same way she fights Ottawa. Or she could have argued that a coal moratorium that protects the public interest and the province’s water resources does not constitute de facto expropriation. Piss off, speculators.

Instead, Smith caved to foreign interests and foreign lobbyists. In so doing she showed her true colours: another chaos maker who works for the rich.

Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, who mostly talks like another energy minister, explained that the government was doing the world’s best job at monitoring air and water quality in Alberta. Nobody believed her.

Tough questions, empty answers

Then came a slew of hard questions and a flurry of bullshit answers.

Why wasn’t the government protecting Alberta’s sovereignty in the Rockies or standing up for Albertans? asked several citizens.

Jean’s answer was that “we are protecting Albertans” and everyone booed. Schulz repeated that the government was standing up for Albertans every day. And there were more boos.

Another citizen asked what coal mining would do for the province’s $2-billion outdoor recreation economy other than mangle it.

The tone-deaf Jean replied that he had a trapping licence (that is not a recreational activity) and really enjoyed snowmobiling in Fort McMurray. Recreation and mining can go together, he claimed.

The premier added that new technologies would protect water and that “we are encouraging companies to look at underground coal mining techniques.” The boos grew louder and louder.

An experienced mining engineer, Cornelis Kolijn, reminded Smith and company that one of the reasons the Alberta Energy Regulator, or AER, unequivocally rejected the Grassy Mountain project in 2021 was that it had grave doubts about its economics due to an abundance of “shit coal” at the site.

The ministers, who clearly had not read the AER’s 2021 decision to reject the mine in the public interest, all wanted a copy of Kolijn’s card for more discussion. That was the moment when Smith and her entourage really declared their singular ignorance about the realities of the coal issue. They hadn’t even read the AER’s 2021 no-go decision.

It got worse. Former Lethbridge mayor Chris Spearman then asked Jean why he had not replied to 20 basic questions he had sent him weeks ago.

Here’s one of the questions: “Why is the Alberta government proceeding with coal mining when their own studies demonstrate that coal mines pollute river systems, emit excessive selenium, generate windblown coal dust and continue to pollute for decades after the mines cease operating?”

Jean apologized and said he would get back to Spearman. Eventually.

I left before the loud and raucous gathering ended to attend to my dog. But I sampled enough of the emotional evening to know it showed a captured and incompetent government in big trouble with its electorate. On this file, Smith and the UCP keep compounding a massive credibility problem.

I can only assume Smith’s government called the town hall with the cynical hope it would give citizens an outlet to blow off steam and thereby let the government continue on its merry way, writing policy with Big Coal and appeasing their legal interests.

But that strategy is not going to work in southern Alberta. Here citizens, who proudly consider themselves to be conservative, respect water and the rights of downstream users. And for seven years now they have consistently repeated a simple message: No more coal mining in the Rockies.

Until the government hears and acts on that message, this coal fight will just get bigger.