Tom Johnson saunters from his dust-covered pick-up truck and, with his foot, he nudges the side of an old tractor tire now cemented to the ground in the middle of his pasture — a make-shift trough.

The extreme drought conditions that have beset his cattle ranch near Oak Point, Man., about an hour’s drive northwest of Winnipeg, have forced him to block out what the weeks or months ahead might have in store. Instead, he’s putting his head down and focusing on the new challenges each individual day presents.

“My son Cam found instructions on how to make these on the internet. You know, it didn’t cost us very much at all,” Johnson said. “But you can’t find a water trough in the country anywhere.”

At 63, Johnson should be looking forward to retirement and handing the reins off to his son. Instead, they’re working to reinvent the way they do things on a farm that’s been in their family for nearly a century.

Water in lowlands and ditches has always served his cattle fine, even in dry years, but there is no trace of water to be found there now. So for the first time they had to drill wells — two so far, with plans for a third.

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As the sun sinks in the evening sky, furry white faces begin peeking out from the bushes, and slowly the sleek, rust-brown Hereford cows slink towards the troughs. They pick at what little vegetation is left in the field but the dry ground is unforgiving.

And it’s not the only region experiencing severe disruptions.

At the same time flames are engulfing homes and businesses in Lytton, B.C. Canadians are seeking refuge from days of extreme heat at splash pads and beaches across the country. Skies across the continent are clouded with the now-familiar orange haze that signals a nearby wildfire. 

These are the moments that demonstrate the significance of the climate crisis as well as a frightening hint of what lies in the future.

In Manitoba, other — often less-seen — examples illustrate how the threat is coming for Canadian livelihoods, food chains and even secure potable water supplies. It’s a transformation that will likely shift where and how people in this country live in the coming decades.

Cam Johnson, 28, hauls the water tank trailer out to the cattle multiple times a day, filling the tires, waiting for the cows to come and drink, making sure their health isn’t deteriorating.

“It was hard enough before — just farming in general. It was tough to make a living out of it. But then you throw this on top, it’s pretty near impossible,” Cam said.

Normally the cows graze in these fields until the end of September, but in the next week if nothing changes, they’ll have to start buying overpriced feed, which makes this operation unsustainable.

The prospect of having to sell off the herd looms large. But like any good farmer, the senior Johnson rattles off a number of contingency plans to keep as much of the herd intact as possible should the drought continue. Maybe they’ll sell off the calves early, he says, or maybe they’ll just sell down the herd to a smaller number. 

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While the local auction house is normally closed in the summer, this year it’s open and cows are going at firesale rates. Johnson gestures at the neighbouring farm that shares a fence with him, “Our neighbour right here, his cows are already gone.”

His grandfather started this farm in 1928. Johnson would love to make it to 100 years, but more than that, he wants to be able to hand the farm off to his son and the feasibility of that dream is now in question.

“He’s my baby. He’s the one who wants to keep farming, otherwise I would just throw in the towel and say, ‘That’s enough,’ ” he said over the rumble of his truck as it bumped across the barren field heading for home.

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The Rural Municipality of St. Laurent, where the farm is located, has declared a state of agricultural emergency, as has another interlake community further east. Even in lesser-hit Saskatchewan the Stock Growers Association is calling on federal and provincial government officials to provide support for ranchers. In recent weeks, both the Manitoba and Saskatchewan provincial governments have had to change crop insurance policies to improve support for crop and cattle farmers. The federal government is offering $44 per tonne of feed needed for cattle. 

But for some ranchers, it’s too late, their herds are gone.

For others, the help just won’t be enough to weather the storm. 

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Riding down the road passing through one rural municipality to the next bright red signs at each jurisdictional line declare that a fire ban is in effect. This drought stretches from north of Winnipeg down to the U.S. border.

The Canadian Drought Monitor has classified all of southern Manitoba under varying degrees of drought, with large swaths deemed to be under an exceptional drought — the most severe category.

As a result, Morden — a city of more than 10,000 people an hour and a half southwest of Winnipeg — is staring down the barrel of a drinking water shortage.

In May, the city was forced to issue water-use restrictions prohibiting watering of lawns or filling of pools, and other non-essential activities. At the time, Lake Minnewasta — a man-made lake that is the city’s sole source of water — was about 1.8 metres below full-supply level, the lowest seen since 1983. Now, even with restrictions in place, the lake has fallen to 2.6 metres below the normal level.

“I never knew weather radar was a thing until this. Now every time there’s a hint of rain, I’m watching weather radar,” said Morden Mayor Brandon Burley.

“Every time it sprinkles rain, I go outside in an undershirt and hope for that cinematic moment where the heavens open up. But nope.”

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Residents finding reprieve from the heat on the lake’s beach, joke that at least there’s more beach real estate this year, and they tell tales of neighbours getting water trucked into Morden to fill their pools.

Striding through the sand, Burley points about halfway down the beach. “The water’s normally there,” he said.

The drop in water level is especially stark at the lake’s boat launch, where fishers stand below the raised parking lot, in what would normally be the lakebed, to cast off.

Last week, city council met to approve the urgent construction of a half-million-dollar water pipeline that will connect Morden to a neighbouring community’s water supply. But that community too is weathering the drought and has implemented water restrictions. 

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Finding shade at a picnic table bordering the lake, Burley explains that this problem, while more dire in the summer because of the water evaporating in the heat, won’t be put to rest until rain comes, which leaves the potential for this to hang over Morden into next year, at which point things could get even more desperate.

“If [the water level] gets about five to six feet lower, then we don’t have the treatment capacity anymore, and that’s what we have to work on contingencies for. At that point, we’d either be trucking water in — which we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand — and/or running an overland pipe into the aquifer miles out of town,” Burley said.

It was a problem that city council knew the community could be facing in the future, and money was set aside in next year’s budget to help address the problem, but in the meantime, the fast-growing city has had to slam the brakes on development and expansion plans.

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The Prairies have been the site of historic droughts for hundreds of years. “Since the colonization of the Prairies, we’ve been impacted by some pretty dry years like ’37, ’61, ’88, 2001 and so on, but nothing like droughts that occurred prior to the colonization of the Prairies. And they will occur again,” said Dave Sauchyn, the director of the University of Regina’s Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative.

Sauchyn has used tree rings to illustrate the stories of past droughts in his research, but now climate change is altering the risk profile in the region.

“These droughts occurred in the past because of some natural climate processes, some climate patterns that diverted the water to other parts of North America,” Sauchyn said.

“But they are now occurring in a warming climate where there is more water loss… Our summers are getting longer, our winters are getting shorter. And so there are more days in which we’re losing water each year. And so when we have a combination of a lack of precipitation, and more days of water loss, you can expect that in a warming climate, the droughts have greater impact and severity.”

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Sauchyn was the lead author of a chapter on the risk profile of the Prairies in a warming climate in a report by Natural Resources Canada. The research team identified drought as the most costly risk to the region. While extreme events like the Fort McMurray wildfire and the Calgary floods are often identified as the most expensive occurrences to date, those only take into consideration insured losses. Whereas in a drought, the socio economic spillover effects — like a farming family losing their herd of cattle — are far more widespread and long lasting and the costs often go untallied. The direct cost to the Canadian agriculture industry in one year of drought between 2001-2002 was estimated to be $2.97 billion, without taking into consideration the multi-year nature of that dry period, or the untallied spillover effects that often last for years.

With more than 80 per cent of Canada’s agricultural lands situated in the Prairies, these changes in climate also have the potential to destabilize food security.

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The Natural Resources Canada report outlines that adaptation will need to occur to meet these new challenges in the decades to come. But adaptation doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be able to continue the same activities in a different manner, Sauchyn explains.

“For ranchers, culling the herd is an adaptation, right? Hauling water is an adaptation. Building a water pipeline is an adaptation,” Sauchyn said. “But then the ultimate adaptation is to leave. That’s what happened in the ’30s — a large part of the Prairies was depopulated.”

Ian Mauro, executive director of the University of Winnipeg’s Prairie Climate Centre, says if communities and rural areas fail to find ways to plan for the future that can inspire hope, these changes in climate paint a bleak picture moving forward.

“We’re seeing this climate grief, we’re seeing mental health issues, we’re seeing the future as this dark and scary place. And when you think about the next generation looking at that, and going like, ‘Do we have an opportunity to live a healthy life here?’ If the immediate thought is, ‘No,’ for that next generation, then we’re in a lot of trouble,” Mauro said. 

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“Communities will live and die by the ability for young people to visualize and realize that their community could be a place that they could live in over the long term.”

Tom Johnson is doing all he can today to provide that long-term future for his son — the ability to stay in the community and do what he loves. But this one drought calls that all into question, and it’s no surprise why he’s choosing only to focus on the day at hand.

“We’ve got a little bit of grass yet. We’re good for water for a little while. The pasture would come back if we got, you know, three inches of rain. Would sure help.”

But the skies don’t show a prospect of rain. Instead, another heat wave is in the forecast, clouding over that life he’d once imagined.

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A severe thunderstorm in Calgary in mid-June delivered a salvo of hail that shattered windshields and stripped siding off houses. The accompanying rain flooded streets to the point of closure — though not before submerging dozens of cars.

In a press conference on June 15, Mayor Naheed Nenshi said the magnitude of damages within the city exceeds even those of 2013, when the Bow River swelled to precipitate the largest flood Calgary had seen since 1932.

“Over the last 15 years, Alberta has had the most severe environmental disasters associated with water of any part of Canada,” says John Pomeroy, director of the Global Water Futures program, which is based at the University of Saskatchewan.

The 2013 flood caused more than $400 million in damages in Calgary and $5 billion across southern Alberta. The town of High River was evacuated entirely, with more than 100,000 people displaced across the region. Five people were killed.

The Bow River and its network of tributaries is a system of extremes. In years when there’s less rain and runoff from snowmelt in the mountains and foothills, this system also has the power to withhold the world’s most essential resource: water. As the climate warms, Calgarians are seeing fewer seasons of moderation — and more floods and droughts. 

The Bow River forms a critical piece of the larger network of waterways making up the South Saskatchewan River Basin, as it snakes its way from the B.C. border in the Rocky Mountains, northeast all the way to Manitoba. 

Pomeroy, also a Canada Research Chair in water resources and climate change, has been studying these waters for decades, conducting field research between Jasper and Kananaskis Country.  

Understanding how climate change will affect Alberta’s river systems, he says, is critical to developing the appropriate public policy tools and infrastructure to deal with the new ways in which these rivers flow. 

Charting the impacts of climate change on Alberta’s rivers

While floods have ravaged portions of the province, a lack of water has caused even more trouble in Alberta, Pomeroy says, calling the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire a “manifestation of drought.” It caused nearly $10 billion in damages. 

Then there are the much more subtle impacts, like the extensive drought seen in the province at the turn of the century from 1999 to 2004. This drought also caused billions of dollars in damages, particularly in the agricultural sector, Pomeroy explains.

“[Alberta] certainly suffers tremendous challenges already. And these are expected to become more severe as climate change progresses,” he says.

Pomeroy and other researchers with Global Water Futures are using atmospheric modelling techniques to assess exactly how climate change will influence different rivers in Alberta. 

Looking at the Bow River as an example, Pomeroy says they’re already seeing “tremendous” surges in annual water supply. His research shows that when water flow in 1980 is compared with the years that followed, until 2010, the Bow River saw in excess of 15 per cent more volume on average. 

By the end of the century, water flow is expected to increase another 27 per cent. But perhaps even more critical than the amount of water flowing is that peak flows are occurring earlier and earlier in the year — moving forward by weeks, maybe months, by the end of the century, Pomeroy says. 

All of this has been triggered by an increase in winter precipitation, more often in the form of rain than snow, paired with an increased frequency of mid-winter snowmelt. Spring precipitation in the area has risen and is expected to continue to do so, by as much as 16 per cent by the end of the century if warming continues unabated.

The timing of spring rains and melts is critical because Alberta’s second biggest industry, after oil and gas, is agriculture. Farmers rely on the flows from the Bow River to be available when crops need water. 

Pomeroy says Alberta hasn’t had to invest in upstream water storage infrastructure in the past as snowpack served as a natural storage device. That, he says, is likely to change. 

“Right now, Alberta uses the flows that peak in June for irrigation in June. So it doesn’t need to be stored very long. If peak flows are coming in March or April, [then] irrigating in June or even into July becomes very problematic,” Pomeroy says. 

“Alberta has been very fortunate, historically. That’s about to change.”

Regulating water supply in the face of climate change

In an effort to wrangle the changes in the river system, the Alberta government is considering costly new infrastructure. Flood mitigation projects like the Springbank dam, which will control flow on the Elbow River west of Calgary, and other smaller undertakings, have been well publicized. 

The Springbank project in particular has been highly controversial, with nearby landowners arguing it will have significant impacts on the environment, including wildlife. The Tsuut’ina Nation, southwest of Calgary, opposed the construction of the dam for years before the Government of Alberta offered the First Nation a $32-million grant for mitigation of impacts resulting from the dam, in exchange for the withdrawal of its objection.

Three other proposals, billed as flood mitigation projects, are designed to control upstream water storage in the Bow River system so water continues to flow when it’s needed most. All of the proposed projects would have sizeable — but yet unmeasured — environmental impacts. They have estimated price tags in the hundreds of millions and construction timelines spanning up to two decades.

Three reservoir options are being considered to manage water flow in the Bow River system from Seebe to Calgary. Map: Government of Alberta

One option is the construction of the Glenbow East dam and reservoir, which would sit upstream of the Bearspaw Dam southeast of Cochrane. Another proposal would see the creation of a new reservoir on Stoney Nakoda lands near Morley. A third option is to decommission the existing Ghost River Dam just west of Cochrane and move the dam 2.5 kilometres downstream to create a larger reservoir.

None of the proposed projects have been approved by the province. Conceptual assessments have been completed but have not been made public, according to the province. The next step will be conducting feasibility studies of the selected project or projects.

Generally speaking, these projects have been billed as flood prevention infrastructure. Frank Frigo, a water resources engineer and the City of Calgary’s leader of watershed analysis, says they could prove even more useful in addressing drought prevention and mitigating the impacts of changing river flows. 

As more infrastructure is created, it builds resiliency within the system, says Frigo, adding that it gives the city the power to address both flood risk and water needs at the same time. 

“Just because you have a bigger bucket, doesn’t mean you have to use it, but the fact that you can use it — it’s kind of like having a seatbelt and an airbag. [It’s] more levels of protection,” Frigo says. 

“We might not grasp the problems of the future, we might not have the tools [or the] acuity to see exactly what the management problems of the future may be, but the more capacity we can build into the system that’s flexible, the better.” 

Climate change will impact water demand as well as supply

As the frequency of heat waves increases, demand for water by residents and agricultural users of the Bow River is also likely to trend upward, Frigo says.

But this isn’t news to him. Work to address growing stressors on water supply in southern Alberta began quietly about a decade ago, he tells The Narwhal. 

“What we have to recognize about the physiography of the basin is that it’s really steep, there isn’t a lot of natural storage. And just like a steep roof, when water hits it, it runs off very fast,” Frigo says.

“So unlike in other Canadian jurisdictions where you have large natural lakes — Lake Winnipeg, Lake Ontario — where there’s lots of surface storage, we’re in the situation where our upstream catchment is very beautiful and very austere, but it’s a very steep roof.” 

In dry years past, Albertans have already seen this problem bear out. 

With limited storage to draw from, during the turn-of-the-millennium drought, everyone who pulls from the water system — farmers, cities, industry — all had to conserve diligently in order for everyone to access the water they needed through the summer. And they still had to pass on 50 per cent of the water to Saskatchewan as is mandated by interprovincial agreements.

Growing concerns over water allocation in Alberta

Recent drought cycles have drawn increasing attention to Alberta’s water licensing system and just how water is doled out across the province. Anyone who pulls water from Alberta water systems needs a licence — with municipalities holding licences on behalf of their residents.

The system that controls water allotments predates the establishment of Alberta as a Canadian province. In theory, it gives the right to those parties with the oldest licences to draw their entire allotment, before the next in line gets a drop. 

The agricultural sector accounts for 60 per cent of issued water licences in Alberta, according to provincial documentation. These licences are controlled by 13 irrigation districts, and their oldest claims to water were documented in the late 1800s.

The power of those irrigation districts came into focus after the extreme drought in the early 2000s. Legally, their licence holders could pull water ahead of towns and cities looking to fill their residents’ glasses, sinks and toilets — no matter how desperate the shortage.

Droughts in Alberta threaten the province’s massive agricultural industry. Photo Jose Ibarra / Flickr

The issue was sidestepped through cooperative efforts of licence holders, and the irrigation districts made a pledge to always allow for priority to be given to ensure “human needs and livestock sustenance” is secure before crop farms pull water. Legal experts have since called into question whether or not that pledge would ever be enforceable. 

Both Frigo and David McAllister, general manager of the Western Irrigation District, say cooperation between stakeholders — such as weekly meetings to determine who will withdraw water — has allowed for the licensing system to serve everyone as needed. And they say there’s no reason to believe that will change any time soon. 

McAllister also said new infrastructure, like the proposed dams and reservoirs, will help mitigate the impact of changes in the river system on its users by offering more storage and the ability to control peak flows.

McAllister and Frigo are confident the people of Calgary have nothing to fear when it comes to water shortages. 

But the City of Calgary is far from the bottom of the list of licensees. 

Many First Nations never applied for licences prior to the early-2000s drought, believing that rights to the water came with the land designated to them under federal treaty agreements.

“As we moved into acute water scarcity in southern Alberta, it necessitated the introduction of a water market and closing the basin to new water licences,” explains Clayton Leonard, senior counsel at JFK Law Corporationin Victoria, B.C. “What Alberta had put on the table for ‘accomodation’ of First Nations was the last licences out of 22,000.”

Leonard represents a number of First Nations in disputes over water rights both in B.C. and Alberta, including Canada’s largest reserve, that of Kainai First Nation (Blood Tribe), in southwestern Alberta.

Effectively, Alberta’s “first in time, first in right” allotment system, in a time of water shortage, gives farms the first kick at the bucket and First Nations communities the last. If water shortages were to reach new extremes, all that prevents irrigation districts from taking their fill, leaving none for those at the back of the line, is their pledge not to.

Legal disputes around water rights have been ongoing for years, and Leonard expects they will only escalate across Western Canada as the critical resource becomes more precarious. 

Solutions to the water shortage, like the moratorium Alberta put on new water licences in the early aughts, have been reactionary. “They froze that because of recent conditions, they weren’t even looking ahead to climate change,” Pomeroy says. 

But anticipatory measures are more complicated.

A couple degrees of warming can have drastic impacts on these waterways, and those will be felt by every user across this system.

Pomeroy points out that how dire this problem becomes is within human control.

“There’s tremendous uncertainty with climate change, because the extent of climate change is in part a human decision: how we limit carbon emissions in the future.”

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High concentrations of a potentially toxic element have been found in fish in the Kootenai River of Montana and American scientists are pointing the finger at Canadian coal mines for the contamination. 

In late September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a report documenting elevated concentrations of selenium in fish just south of the U.S.-Canada border. 

The study found some fish contained selenium concentrations surpassing the U.S. recommended maximum levels. Researchers found similar concentrations of selenium in the eggs of mountain whitefish.

“Selenium loads have been increasing over time in the Elk River, British Columbia, Canada, due to coal mining operations and runoff from associate spoil piles,” the report reads.

The Elk River is a tributary to the Kootenai River in Montana as well as Lake Koocanusa, where the ongoing research is being conducted. Coal mines in the Elk Valley, near Fernie, B.C., have been singled out as the main source of the contaminant.

Teck’s five metallurgical coal mines are all upstream of the transboundary Koocanusa Reservoir. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

While selenium is an essential element for survival, overexposure can have devastating effects. In fish, it can lead to facial and spinal deformities, or an absence of the plates that overlay and protect the fish’s gills. In humans, it can lead to hair loss, muscle weakness and decreased brain function, among other issues, according to Health Canada. 

Canadian scientist finds some invertebrates wiped out by selenium

Meanwhile in Canada, a growing awareness of selenium as a byproduct of mining, paired with numerous unknowns about its impacts in different aquatic environments, led toxicology researcher Stephanie Graves to take a closer look at its impacts. 

Graves, a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, spent the last two years dumping various doses of selenium into lake enclosures in Ontario to monitor the effects, both at and above the recommended government thresholds.

Stephanie Graves collects samples from her research enclosures. Photo: Emilie Ferguson / Experimental Lakes Area

Graves monitored the effects of selenium on a number of species, from fish to invertebrates, such as this copepod. Photo: Stephanie Graves / Experimental Lakes Area

Her research was done in two lakes reserved for such research at northwestern Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area — a collection of 58 lakes cut off from nearly all human influence, used by researchers to conduct studies free of other contaminants and influencing factors.

Graves wanted to address two things in her research: how much selenium accumulated in invertebrates like zooplankton and other aquatic insects, as well as larger species such as fathead minnows. She also wanted to know what elevated concentrations did to these species. 

Tiny invertebrates often don’t receive a lot of attention, but they are an integral piece of the aquatic food web.

“What we found so far is that those organisms can be very sensitive to selenium,” Graves said. 

In fact, she found that some of the invertebrates were wiped out, or nearly wiped out at higher concentrations of selenium. Mayflies are often used to demonstrate impacts of pollution, Graves explains, because they are so sensitive — and this was no exception. 

“They’re an important food source. So losing [mayflies] could have implications for higher trophic level organisms like fish. And invertebrates in general have very important roles in the ecosystem, in nutrient cycling and the transfer of nutrients to higher trophic levels,” Graves said. 

The loss of even some of those organisms is significant, she added. 

Grave’s research also found significant losses in a kind of zooplankton — another principal food source for fish.

And if you doubted just how important these seemingly small shifts are, Graves only exposed fish to the selenium-dosed environments for six weeks, and that time was enough to notice decreased growth of the fish. 

Even the highest concentrations Graves used in her experiments can be found downstream of mines in Canada, she said. However, her research was very purposefully conducted in a lake, to consider what she calls the “worst case scenario” where those high-concentration flows aren’t diluted before arriving at a low-flow body of water. 

“These concentrations aren’t unrealistic,” Graves said. 

In one of her papers, published in the journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Graves suggests that recommended federal guidelines for selenium, which is 1 microgram per litre, may not be sufficient to protect all ecosystems — specifically lakes. 

In the end, Graves’ research doesn’t bode well for the health of places such as Montana’s Lake Koocanusa.

A group of scientists and conservationists paddle out on to the Koocanusa Reservoir where they are conducting independent water testing. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

More regulations to come

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy said that the provincial government is continuously working with partners in Montana to further selenium research. 

“The Province of British Columbia is committed to improving water quality in Lake Koocanusa and its tributary river systems,” the statement read.

The B.C. government said that the consortium is working toward setting a new target for the water system that will be followed by both B.C. and Montana regulators starting in 2020.

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Earlier this month, we heard from Alberta teenagers who said they feel like they aren’t being taught enough about climate change in school.

Now, a new study published in PLOS ONE shows that Alberta schools aren’t the only ones getting a failing grade on climate change education.

Seth Wynes, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, spent time paging through the curriculum for each province’s secondary schools and spoke with the authors of those education guides.

Wynes and his coauthor Kimberly A. Nicholas from Sweden’s Lund University rated the provinces on a scale of zero to three in five different components of climate change education:

• “It’s climate,” the foundational principles of climate science.
• “It’s warming,” the basic concept that the climate is warming and observations to accompany this idea.
• “It’s us,” humans and anthropogenic emissions are the cause of the majority of global warming.
• “Experts agree,” establishing that there is no debate that climate change is real, significant and human caused.
• “It’s bad,” expressing the dire consequences of climate change.
• “We can fix it,” focusing on solutions to the climate crisis.

The pie graph shows the rating for each province on each of the six components of climate change education. Graphic: Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas / PLOS ONE

Three provinces include materials from climate denial group

Significantly, all provinces except Saskatchewan were missing any focus on “experts agree.” Most also missed any focus on solutions to the climate crisis.

“If students don’t understand those facts then they’re unlikely to be motivated to help solve the problem,” Wynes said.

“For instance, if you believed that there was great debate among scientists — when there’s not — or if you believed that there weren’t any solutions — when that’s not true — then you’d be really unmotivated to contribute to solving the problem.”

The study found that Manitoba’s education program doesn’t merely neglect to include in lessons that experts have reached consensus on human-caused climate change, but goes in the opposite direction by providing documentation from the organization Friends of Science, a known climate change denial group.

The provided supplementary materials for Grade 11 chemistry say: “It should be noted that there is significantly polarized debate on the issue among scientists. Students should be justifiably cautious about accepting unsubstantiated claims about global warming.”

Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island have similar supporting documentation included in their education guides.

“This speaks to the official curriculum writing process and points to how important it is to review how climate change is being taught,” Wynes said. “Because it might very well be out of date.”

Saskatchewan and Ontario come out on top

The study concluded that Saskatchewan and Ontario have the strongest programs, while New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have the least effective. Wynes notes that British Columbia has made some changes in its curriculum since the research began there in 2015.

Another important factor is whether or not the courses that touch on climate change are mandatory or merely elective. In Alberta, Northwest Territories and Yukon climate change is only covered in non-mandatory courses. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan and Ontario had five of the six categories covered in mandatory courses.

In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia “it’s climate” was all that was covered in mandatory secondary science courses.

The people behind the programs

Wynes wanted to know if politics and lobby groups played a role in shaping the curriculum, but generally he found they did not.

Special interest groups are permitted in many cases to appeal to the authors of the curriculum, but interviews showed that the authors — typically seasoned teachers and educators — didn’t feel unduly pressured.

“They weigh those things into consideration, but no one is dictating what they do,” Wynes said.

Another interesting finding was that chance contributes in a big way to curriculum development.

“Sometimes you might get one or two of the teachers on your small team who are very passionate about climate change and then suddenly your science curriculum guide can have a substantial focus on climate change, but the opposite might also be true,” he said.

Wynes acknowledges that his study only looks at what is in the education guides for teachers. It doesn’t look at what education looks like in practice.

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Alberta’s curriculum currently calls for students to be taught the basics of climate change. But young people studying in Alberta high schools have found those lessons vary from classroom to classroom — and from teacher to teacher.

Some students say a climate change education is missing altogether.

For example, the Grade 10 science curriculum includes in its “key concepts,” both “social and environmental contexts for investigating climate change” as well as “human activity and climate change.” An aim of social studies classes is to “assess the impact of human activities on the land and the environment.”

Students say that’s one thing in theory and another in practice.

Faline Darling, 18, is about to graduate from a high school in Calgary, Alta. “None of my courses have ever taught me anything about climate change,” she said.

“I remember in middle school it was something we briefly touched on but at that point in time it was still, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ And that was the question that was being posed.”

Kiera Williams, 16, shared a similar experience with The Narwhal. “We mentioned [climate change] briefly in science, and the teacher — she’s really funny — she was like, ‘OK and that just sucks.’ And then we just moved on.”

Is the curriculum the problem?

Alberta’s curriculum is in the process of a complete overhaul initiated by the previous NDP government before being handed off to the United Conservative Party when it won the spring election.

Given the past comments of Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney it seems unlikely that a new curriculum will have an increased focus on climate change.

In 2017, Kenney attacked the proposed curriculum review that was going to add focus on climate change and Indigenous history. At the time, he said the NDP was engaging in “social engineering” in order to impose “political correctness” on students.

Kenney has said he believes man-made climate change is real, but he also supports MLAs who have a “spectrum of views” on the topic — views that often stand in contradiction to the available scientific evidence.

How these views will impact a curriculum update remains to be seen.

This comes at a time when youth climate strikes — inspired by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — have become increasingly commonplace. Under the Fridays for Futures banner, students have been walking out of classes to advocate for meaningful action to address the climate crisis in more than 130 countries across the globe — including a march last month at the Alberta legislature.

The office of Alberta’s Minister of Education Adriana LaGrange told The Narwhal by email that she is “being briefed on a number of priorities, including the curriculum review. More information is anticipated in the coming weeks and months.”

In the meantime, The Narwhal took a trip to Calgary’s Central Memorial High School to get a sense of how some teachers are turning things around and engaging students on climate change.

Community gardens and solar panels

Walking into the energy and environmental innovations class is a bit of a shock to the senses — a stark contrast to the bustle of teenage life outside its doors.

There’s the gentle sound of the trickling water flowing through the plant wall and into the tank of tilapia. On the far side of the workshop, several students cut and sand wood into rustic, live-edge benches and tables — using only recycled or upcycled wood, of course.

Then off to the side, a door leads to a regular classroom where a handful of students sit with their teacher, Mr. Robb, writing a presentation that will be given to partners at one of Seattle’s biggest green-architecture firms on the next class field trip.

This unusual and specialized class is run and developed by Adam Robb, who won Canada’s environmental educator award this year, and represents his effort to engage students with the environment and science education through hands-on, self-driven learning.

In Alberta, this sort of environmental education is fairly unique, and Robb is motivated by memories of his own education, which he often felt was lacking.

“I think I was doing dioramas and bristol board presentations,” Robb said. “I remember sitting in class feeling like I had all this energy to give, I was very conscious of it, and being very frustrated that all we are doing that day was copying down notes, or reading out of the textbook and filling in fill-in-the-blanks.”

“The real learning I’ve done in my life is when I’ve needed to learn something and I want to present students with those opportunities.”

Kiera Williams, 16, stands with her teacher Adam Robb in a new community garden as they plan out where to put benches (made by the class) to encourage locals to come and spend time in the garden. Photo: Sarah Lawrynuik/The Narwhal

‘We go out and stand on the glacier’

The energy and environmental innovations class differs in its approach in that it puts climate change front and centre — something not all teachers are willing, or able, to do in Alberta.

The class has offered students the opportunity to join in on myriad projects, all sharing the common thread of understanding the impacts of climate change‚ both globally and locally. Over the course of nearly four years, students have negotiated approval from the City of Calgary as well as the Calgary Board of Education to commandeer a jointly owned segment of land to convert into a community garden that opened this spring.

Other students have participated in policy-heavy initiatives, like being a part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meetings in 2018 in Edmonton. One created a youth advisory committee to work with Parks Canada on sustainability initiatives. Another of the proposals resulted in the former provincial NDP government committing $9 million to installing solar panels on school roofs.

When asked how much knowledge students generally have about climate change when walking into his class, Robb laughs. “One in 20 students will be a diehard advocate on climate change, environmentalism — the type of kid you would assume would choose to take an energy and environment course,” he said.

“The other 19 have zero concept of climate change. We’re starting from square one and the basic science of the greenhouse effect.

“We learn it in a way that’s not, ‘Here’s the worksheet on what climate change is about.’ We learn it by looking at water temperature in rivers. We look at the amount that the Athabasca Glacier has receded. We go out and stand on the glacier. We talk about pine beetles.

“We talk about all these real tangible things that students can experience and feel for themselves.”

All of this, Robb says, empowers students to take action on climate change.

Robb’s class is “wonderful, superb, superlative work” done by a driven teacher, says Gareth Thomson, the executive director of the Alberta Council for Environmental Education.

But the class is the exception to the rule.

Adam Robb, a teacher at Central Memorial High School, in Calgary won Canada’s environmental educator award in 2019. Photo: Sarah Lawrynuik/The Narwhal

Teaching climate change in a petroleum-producing province

Neither the Calgary Board of Education nor the Alberta Teachers Association has prepared any additional resources to help teachers when it comes to climate change education, so the Alberta Council for Environmental Education has stepped up to try and fill that void.

The council offers suggestions for peer-reviewed research to read, potential field trips and resources that can be used in classrooms like YouTube videos, podcasts and books.

Thomson explains there are a number of reasons for why the energy and environmental innovations class is the exception to the rule, and it’s a lot more complicated than what is or isn’t in the curriculum.

“If you do a scan of all of the Word documents of all of the programs of study in all of the Alberta curriculum, yeah the word ‘climate’ pops up here and there, a couple of times,” he said.

“Is it in there to the extent that it could be in there? Probably not. Is it in there in the context in which it should be in there? Probably not.”

But he suggests a bigger problem is that most teachers have no background in the topic, so being able to confidently teach about climate change in a polarized, petroleum-producing province is challenging. Thomson advocates focusing on or incorporating solutions to climate change issues into their lessons.

Thomson also says he’d like to see school boards across the province step up and make this a priority, not only in science and social science, but by incorporating an appreciation of sustainability and the environment into all subjects.

“Teachers are very good at finding opportunities to help deliver the education that they know their students are hungry for, in a way that they think will work best with her the student group,” Thomson said.

“They simply need the opportunities for their own professional development and they simply need the planning time to weave that into their lesson plans and take the next step.”

Kids educating their peers

Coming back to the students and what this all means for them, Williams — the student who told The Narwhal her teacher told her class that climate change “sucks” — says the lack of education on climate change is evident when she talks to her peers that aren’t in her environmental innovations class.

She says many of her peers are already convinced climate change is overblown and exaggerated, which puts her in an awkward spot because she shies away from confrontation, but still feels compelled to educate them herself.

Abby Storrow, 16, says she didn’t know anything about climate change when she walked into this class for the first time. She says what she’s learned will change how she plots her future after graduation.

“We’re talking about what we want to be when we grow up and the roles that we are going to have in society, and not knowing about the issues and not knowing about what we can do when shaping our lives, it’s kind of frightening,” Storrow said.

“Lots of my peers don’t know about it at all,” she added. “And when I’m talking about it they almost think of it as a joke because they’ve never learned about it and it’s not the curriculum so [they figure] it shouldn’t matter.”

Neha Pattar (left) and Abby Storrow work on a presentation about making school buildings more environmentally friendly. Photo: Sarah Lawrynuik/The Narwhal

‘Our education system is preparing us more so for the past’ 

Darling, as she heads for the convocation stage, is completing the second iteration of the environmental innovations course and for her final project she is determined to find out why there aren’t more classes like this one being offered in Alberta. Darling has set out to interview teachers and members of the administration and so far the answers she’s come back with aren’t encouraging.

“No one has been able to give me a clear answer,” she told The Narwhal. “From the research I’ve done, the best answer I can give is there’s not enough funding available for it.”

Neha Pattar, a 16-year-old who hopes to become a doctor, feels that generally her education isn’t properly preparing her or her peers to make a difference in the future.

“I feel like our education system is preparing us more so for the past than the future.”

Updated Nov. 7, 2025, at 4:04 p.m. ET: This article was updated to correct the spelling of Neha Pattar’s name.

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Ted Hogg’s research usually takes him much deeper in Canada’s boreal forest — but on a chilly day strolling through Edmonton’s river valley, it doesn’t take long before he sees examples of the damage he’s looking for.

Pointing to several of the snow bearing trees, he indicates the deaths he’s already witnessing from climate change.

“There’s a lot of trees dying. Different types of trees. There’s dead poplar, you can see the dead tops up there. Behind us is dead birch. And then there’s spruce ahead of us that’ve died a few years ago,” he said.

Hogg is a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, a subsector of Natural Resources Canada.

“This seems to be a pattern throughout our urban forest here in Edmonton, but it’s also something that’s been happening over a larger area of Western Canada.”

Edmonton sits at the southern edge of the boreal forest 一 the largest forest in Canada. The behemoth covers more than half of the country’s land mass, a swath that stretches from Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Water, or lack thereof, is the biggest factor in the forest’s slow death, Hogg said. Repeated droughts have pretty well made dry conditions the new norm since the turn of the millenia.

“The rate of tree death will increase for up to 10 years after even one severe drought,” Hogg said. “With these repeated droughts, that’s where we’re really seeing an escalation of tree mortality.”

Trees are adaptable, but only within certain limits, and right now they’re dying at a consistent rate two to nearly four-times what was seen before 2000.

About four to five per cent of the Aspen Hogg studies as an example species is dying each year.

In the most extreme cases, tree stands that used to house birds and forest animals are flat out disappearing with mortality rates nearing 100 per cent. Where trees once stood, there is now Prairie grasslands.

“We have some examples of that, but it’s generally over smaller areas. And it tends to be in the more drought-affected areas,” Hogg said. Overall, it is mostly a slow degradation and deforestation isn’t widespread, yet. “Although that’s a concern for the longer term.”

With dry conditions and standing dead trees, there are two imminent threats that arise. The first are pests and disease ravaging the already-stressed trees, which are now more susceptible to attack. The mountain pine beetle has been able to spread its range from B.C. to Alberta across the Rockies because warmer winters allow it to thrive.

The second threat announces itself each summer with socked-in red skies in Western Canada as the forest transforms into a tinderbox, resulting in record wildfires.

In 2009, the Alberta government intentionally set several thousands of hectares of forest near Banff National Park on fire to prevent the spread of mountain pine beetle and to a barrier for future wildfires. Cameron Strandberg / Flickr

Carbon sink, no more

A tree — or in this case a massive forest — offers an opportunity for a natural process to strain carbon from the atmosphere using photosynthesis. The trouble is that while a tree can store carbon in its biomass, it can also spit it back out. Forest fires offer a very quick release of the stored carbon, sending it billowing into the air in choking grey plumes.

But as the trees die off more slowly over the course of years, carbon is still being released.

“It is a huge effect on the carbon cycle,” Hogg said.

“Huge effect” may well be an understatement.

For years, some Canadians have hid behind the myth that the country isn’t a net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions because of the presence of such vast forests working as our personal atmosphere vacuums. And up until the last two decades, it is true that those forests had the power to sequester in excess of a hundred megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year.

But that is no longer the case.

Natural Resources Canada tracks the estimations of carbon released and captured by the managed forest each year — with managed forests accounting for about 65 per cent of the country’s trees.

The results: Canada’s forests have not captured more carbon than they’ve emitted since 2001.

This isn’t a small swing in the wrong direction. In 2015, Canada’s forests emitted the equivalent of 231 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. To put that in perspective, all of the people in Calgary emit 18.3 megatonnes.

The biggest cause of this shift is what Natural Resources Canada terms “natural disturbances”  — fires, pests, disease and increased mortality.

“So we try to figure out ways that we can store the carbon longer,” said Carolyn Smyth, a research scientist with the Pacific Forestry Centre run out of Natural Resources Canada.

Smyth and her colleagues are looking at ways to mitigate emissions from managed forests.

“In some cases that might be putting the carbon into wood products that we use to build houses, that we use for paper, and for many other uses.”

Equipment at a flux tower operated by UBC Micrometerology measures wind, heat and water 25 metres above a forest canopy attacked by the mountain pine beetle in Kennedy. B.C. The project is designed to better understand how pine beetle forests influence greenhouse gases emissions. Photo: Andreas Christen / UBC Micrometerology Flickr

They’re also considering using altered seeds when replanting, ones meant for warmer drier climates ─ perhaps allowing for new trees to adapt to the new climate. Using dead trees as biofuels is also in the works.

“We’ve looked at some conservation strategies as well,” Smyth said. “So if we set aside regions and we say, ‘You can’t harvest these.’ It can be good, it keeps the trees sequestering carbon for longer. But there is a risk of reversal. There’s a risk of having a wildfire, or pests, or drought kill the trees and then it no longer stores a lot of the carbon, it releases it back into the atmosphere. So we want to be very careful in conservation strategy.”

The big deal about peat

Mike Flannigan looks at Canada’s estimated emissions and says they are vast underestimations of what is really being emitted.

As a professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta he’s looked at areas outside of Natural Resources Canada’s managed forests and says the same patterns can be seen there but to even greater extremes.

Peat bogs are what really concern him. These wetlands can have meters of moss and peat built up over long periods of time and they contain far more carbon than the regular upland forests do. And nearly all of these bogs are found in unmanaged forests, he says, since they don’t have much use in the forestry industry.

So what’s the big deal about peat?

“It burns really well,” Flannigan says to start. He uses Indonesia as an example.

In 1997, they had a particularly bad fire year where huge areas of peat were burned. When researchers tried to estimate how much carbon was emitted in those fires, they couldn’t pin down an exact figure but estimated between 0.81 and 2.57 gigatonnes of carbon. That would have been the same as between 13 and 40 per cent of global annual average emissions from fossil fuels at that time.

“The boreal [forest] has 30 times more peat than Indonesia. Indonesia is a drop in the peat bucket,” Flannigan explained.

So needless to say, the numbers published by Natural Resources Canada are bad, but the emissions that aren’t being accounted for would worsen the numbers substantially.

Army officers and and firefighters work to extinguish fires in peatland areas outside Palangka Raya, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia in 2015. Photo: Aulia Erlangga / CIFOR Flickr

Fires devastating in a new way

Researchers are looking across national borders to learn from one another as they face similar threats. “It’s the same everywhere,” Michel Vennetier said, from subtropical African climates to the boreal forest.

Vennetier is one of the world’s leading experts in forestry engineering based in southern France at the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture.

“Each time I go into the forest with representatives of the towns, the services of state, and so on, I tell them, ‘Just look at the forest and tell me, do you think something is wrong?’ And recently I was in front of a beautiful landscape forest and people were saying, ‘Well this is normal.’ And I tell them, ‘Just look. One fourth of the trees are dead,’” Vennetier said. “And they just didn’t notice.”

Fires have draw attention to France’s deteriorating forest health. Fires that used to be regarded as natural opportunities for regeneration, have become devastating in a new way.

Michel Vennetier is a forestry engineer based in Aix-en-Provence, France. Photo: Sarah Lawrynuik

Vennetier says part of the problem is that people have gotten used to seeing dead trees and they’ve normalized it. Photo: Sarah Lawrynuik

Since different ecosystems have varied thresholds for how often they can stand to be burned, the forests near the Mediterranean coast of France, Vennetier says, have thresholds between 25 and 30 years.

But fires are no longer that patient.

“When you are over that threshold, regeneration is easy. When you go under this threshold, it’s not just a progressive trend, it’s just a very rapid collapse of the ecosystem,” Vennetier explained.

“So the fact that a [small] percentage of the landscape is burned more than the threshold is not bad. But the problem is when the majority of the landscape is. And in the last years we’ve observed an increase in the area that has burned more than once in 25 years … And then we observe that the ecosystem is collapsing. The trees are disappearing.”

Looking to the future

What France is facing is likely foreshadowing for Canada, Flannigan says.

“[The boreal forest is] used to fire and has survived and thrived in fire. But if fire becomes too frequent the forest will disappear,” Flannigan said. “I have some colleagues who think it’s going to happen this century. I don’t think it’s going to happen as quickly as that. I think there’s still a fair bit of resilience.”

The Canadian Forestry Service anticipates at least a doubling in the area of forest burned annually by 2100.

What all of these researchers are certain of is that the positive feedback loop is in progress: the hotter it gets, the more fire there is, the more fire there is, the more emissions there are, so the world warms even further.

Hogg says the most direct way of slowing these changes in the boreal is to drastically reduce global GHG emissions, but that is above his paygrade.

“It is difficult to see these large-scale changes especially when we think about what it could mean down the road, you know, 10 or 20 years from now. I have an ammateur interest, for example, in bird watching, bird photography. We know that’s important habitat. Those trees are what allow all these species to be here. So it’s a big concern.”

Flannigan says there are ways in which forest management can be used to mitigate fire risks but they are financially unviable in Canada due to the magnitude of the forests here. He too concludes lowering emissions is really the only way to change course.

“Sometimes it takes a few bloody noses for human behaviour to change,” Flannigan said. “People sometimes need a couple lessons before they change behaviour. I actually think we’re going to need another bloody nose or two.”

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The election of the United Conservative Party government in Alberta has kept one Edmonton-based librarian very busy.

In what has come to be known as “guerrilla archiving,” Katie Cuyler, a public services and government information librarian at the University of Alberta, has gone about saving all data and information hosted on the Government of Alberta web pages before it is turned over from the NDP to the UCP.

“We know that when governments change, they usually change all of the websites. That can often include a lot of reports or data that was made available through those websites,” Cuyler told The Narwhal.

“We’re going to make sure those are captured and they continue to be made publicly available.”

Cuyler crawls and archives government web pages every six months or so but ahead of the election she started additional rounds. Cuyler said it used to be that paper copies of the information was sent to libraries, but in the age of the Internet, information can vanish more easily without notice.

Katie Cuyler on February 15, 2018. Photo: John Ulan / University of Alberta Libraries

Academics and industry experts alike reached out to Cuyler to express concern that climate change policy and environmental monitoring documentation and data, as well as information about NDP social programs might be erased.

Cuyler’s archival efforts are a part of a broader network of university librarians across the country called the Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network, whose mission is to preserve digital collections of government information.

“The initiative started around the Stephen Harper era,” Cuyler said. “People are concerned and people have seen trends recently with stuff happening in the States, and in Ontario where more information, more reports have been going missing.”

Under the Harper government, 16 federal science libraries were quietly shuttered, in some instances their archives  destroyed.

In the United States after President Donald Trump was elected, “thousands of web pages with climate change information have been removed or buried at agencies including U.S. [Environmental Protection Agency], the Interior and Energy departments and elsewhere across the government,” Scientific American reported.

Similarly in Ontario, when the Progressive Conservative Party came to power last summer, documentation of previous programs seemingly disappeared overnight. The Ontario government recently cut the province’s library service budget by 50 per cent. 

“Environmental initiatives like the GreenON rebate program were shuttered and then their web presence was removed within days,” said Nich Worby, the government documents librarian at the University of Toronto.

“That information is only available now through the archives created by the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.”

All of the information Cuyler is archiving for Alberta is being made available on the University of Alberta website or through Wayback Machine, if the URL of the previous site is known.

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“If it requires a subsidy, we won’t do it.”

The leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, Jason Kenney, has vowed that no government money will go to support the province’s renewable energy industry if he is elected when voters go to the polls this spring.

“Part of the Alberta advantage must be competitive and affordable power prices. We will not replicate the disaster of Ontario Liberal power policies that the NDP is trying to copy in Alberta,” he told reporters last week.

Kenney’s comments raise two questions: would he keep contracts already signed by Rachel Notley’s NDP government? And does Kenney recognize that renewable energy contracts look much different in Alberta than they did in Ontario?

The difference between Ontario and Alberta

After Ontario Premier Doug Ford was elected last summer, he scrapped 758 long-term contracts with renewable energy companies and set out to eliminate the province’s Green Energy Act.

The province’s feed-in tariff models had generated controversy because they gave renewable electricity producers a guaranteed rate far above the average price for electricity. The public was outraged by rates ranging from 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour to 80 cents per kilowatt-hour for small solar photovoltaic projects.

But Ontario’s program was drastically different from Alberta’s renewable electricity program.

“The mechanism that was used in Ontario was probably not ideal,” said Andrew Leach, University of Alberta associate professor of environmental and energy economics.

Leach chaired Alberta’s climate leadership panel, which proposed policies to the NDP government when it came to power four years ago. The renewables industry subsequently became a vital part of the plan to phase out coal power by 2030.

“One of the things that changed in Alberta was going to competitive procurement. So let the market compete for who can do it most cheaply,” Leach told The Narwhal.

In the Alberta model, renewable energy companies go through a competitive bid process. The lowest viable bid price proposed wins the contract.

So far, under this model, Alberta has given the green light to 1.3 gigawatts worth of wind power.

Capital Power, an Edmonton-based company, recently won a contract for the first phase of the Whitla wind project near Medicine Hat, Alta., with a bid of 3.9 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The average pool price of electricity last year in Alberta was 5 cents per kWh. If electricity prices rise, the renewable energy generator rebates the excess to the government. If the pool price is lower than the guaranteed bid amount, the province tops up the company’s return, as per the diagram below.

Image: Alberta Electric System Operator

Recent advancements in technology have seen global renewable energy costs plummet, and Alberta is no exception. Last week, the province’s NDP government announced it was signing a 20-year contract with Ontario-based Canadian Solar Solutions Inc. to bring 100 megwatts of power online in southern Alberta, at a cost of 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour.

To put that in context, the average cost in the province of natural gas electricity using the lowest-cost technology — before a carbon tax is factored in — is 5.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute. The same data says the average cost of wind power generation in Alberta has fallen to 5.2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Could Alberta see cancelled contracts too?

With multi-decade contracts in place, it is unclear where Kenney stands on the cancellation of contracts. He said in last week’s press conference that he would not cancel what he called “good-faith contracts.” However, his bottom line was that he would not subsidize renewables. So would he uphold contracts with a minimum-price guarantee?

When the United Conservative Party media representatives were asked for comment they said the rest of the party’s platform would be revealed in due course.

“The challenge in renewables in Alberta has been the lack of availability of long-term power purchase agreements,” said Dan Balaban, the CEO and president of Calgary-based Greengate Power. “And that’s really what the Notley government implemented through its renewable electricity program.”

Balaban says he is confident the industry will remain viable regardless of who wins the upcoming election, but he hopes the industry’s policies aren’t politicized.

Renewables ‘lowest cost source of power’

Leach speculates that Ontario’s feed-in tariff program has led to a “massive influence” over the perception of renewables in Alberta.

“I think in some ways Mr. Kenney’s comments are reflective of the impression that people have about renewables in Canada, in Alberta, in Ontario — that they’re more expensive and the only way you get them in the market at all is through large subsidies paying above-market prices for electricity.”

Balaban pointed out that growth in renewables used to be driven by environmental considerations and the need to address climate change. “But now that renewables are the lowest cost source of power generation that we have available to us, it also makes economic sense.”

Kenney did leave the door open to the growth of the renewables industry, saying “if more wind and solar can come onto the grid by competing on a market basis with other forms of power production, we’ll absolutely embrace that.”

“A lot of this stuff is right now being subsidized by the carbon tax, which we’re scrapping on Day One of the legislature. So no carbon tax [and] no subsidies for power sources and power that are higher than the market rate.”

Even without cost guarantees, Leach said it’s not likely renewables will disappear. But he said eliminating cost guarantees would make financing the initial capital investment for wind or solar farms much more challenging.

“That doesn’t mean that the project wouldn’t make money in the long term. It just means that it’s harder to finance.”

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