Why I’m Losing Faith in Stewards of Alberta’s Future

Faith is fragile and it’s fading fast for governance in Alberta. For me it’s not just for the obvious reasons — politically motivated pension schemes and police forces, perverse social engineering and the systematic dismantling of public health care.

No, as a professional biologist I see Alberta through the lens of its natural resource treasures and how they are being squandered instead of stewarded for the future.

It raises the question of who regulates resource development and maintains public trust in the process.

Really, it’s no one. The whole government red tape reduction program represents the corporate desire to have essential environmental guardrails removed. The minister of environment and protected areas has sentenced caribou to extirpation to benefit timber and petroleum interests. But the arbitrary decision by the chief executive officer of the Alberta Energy Regulator, or AER, to cancel a public hearing over a coal mine near Grande Cache at the request of the company brings this to a head.

Rob Morgan, the AER CEO, is a professional engineer, as apparently are most of the AER staff. When a former CEO was asked, multiple times, how many biologists the AER employed, he was unable to answer. Yet decisions on resource developments are made by people without a background in, training for or an understanding of biology and ecology. It’s a regulatory world dominated by engineers. As Winston Churchill intoned, “We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.”

Not to denigrate engineers and the essential work they do, but their mantra seems to be “When in doubt, build it stout.” For biologists, the advice is “When in doubt, don’t do it.” This is especially evident in coal mining where monitoring has categorically shown the issues created, the repeated failure of engineered solutions and an enduring legacy of unremediated problems.

Yet here we have Rob Morgan, an engineer, making an erratic decision on a process about the development of publicly owned assets and the impacts on other natural resource assets.

This is a good time to stop and remind ourselves that the assets being developed and others impacted by development are ours. They are held for us, in trust, by the provincial government. In case that isn’t clear, it is Albertans, us, the great non-corporate unwashed, who own them.

And we need to have our say in this process, which is often in the form of a public hearing — like the one Rob Morgan cancelled because Valory Resources, a foreign-owned coal company, requested that it be stopped.

A key defence offered for his decision is that he assessed that most people in the area close to the proposed mine were in favour of it. Only two non-local environmental groups opposed it. Hence, rather than the bother of a public hearing where questions of the mine proponent might prove embarrassing, better to review this in house and avoid a lot of messy scrutiny.

As we’ve seen with other coal mine proposals, the fact that local people may be in support of a wrong thing does not make the thing right.

The AER generally avoids opening up discussions on broad impacts by hewing to the “directly and adversely affected” rule. This means you have no “standing” in a development decision unless you live immediately adjacent to it and can demonstrate some adverse impact. It also means there is no regional scale cumulative effects assessments undertaken to understand the ability of the landscape to absorb more development.

If a coal mine adds a witch’s brew of toxic pollutants to a river, downstream water drinkers, anglers, naturalists and downstream businesses who depend on clean water have no standing to intervene. People living downwind from mines lofting cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic compounds over them have no say before the AER. Albertans who understand that the costs of these issues and their remediation will, inevitably, be borne by them have no say.

To many, this represents the theft of due process on issues that affect us broadly.

We desperately need a return to a government and a regulator that accept they are servants for Albertans, not of corporate interests. Albertans can be impacted by decisions even if they are not “directly” affected. This needs to be acknowledged as part of due process.

A regulator not only must do the right things in the public interest, but also must be seen to be doing them. To accomplish that, there must be transparency, competency, impartiality and a broad, long-term environmental and economic perspective.

These features do not, by and large, currently exist within the AER. The cumulative evidence is that the AER lacks the institutional capacity to effectively make decisions in the broad public interest. At stake is the future of Alberta’s natural resource treasures, water, wildlife and wild areas.

The AER, its leadership and its political masters have forgotten whom they serve. They need to be reminded.