In rural Alberta, landowners stopped receiving lease payments from an oil and gas company called MAGA Energy. They’re frustrated that taxpayers are likely to foot the bill instead
Karl Zajes gave Prairies reporter Drew Anderson a tour of his rural Alberta neighbourhood, where landowners are frustrated by outstanding lease payments from an oil and gas company.
If you couldn’t pay your rent, would you send a note to your landlord suggesting they try to get the government to pay instead?
You might — if you’re an oil and gas company in Alberta.
You see, in this province, landowners can’t stop a company from drilling a well on their land. In return for this disruption, they’re owed lease payments from the company — and the government guarantees landowners will be paid.
Prairies reporter Drew Anderson recently obtained an email from one company, MAGA Energy (that’s Make Alberta Great Again), in response to a landowner who said their cheques had stopped arriving.
“MAGA is in difficult times right now,” the vice-president of operations wrote in the January 2025 email. MAGA has been in “survival mode over the last 14 months,” he added, and the company “has not been able to pay landowners and other vendors for many months.” (MAGA Energy declined to answer Drew’s questions — including when he visited their office in person.)
The Land and Property Rights Tribunal, established for that purpose, has paid nearly $150 million on behalf of delinquent oil and gas companies since 2010, including hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of what the tribunal found to be unpaid leases for MAGA Energy.
As one landowner in the area told Drew, “I’m paying myself.”
In September, Drew and photojournalist Isabella Falsetti went out into the field — literally — to tag along with Karl Zajes, a tireless 84-year-old landowner rights organizer who has been talking to his neighbours about all the money they say they’re owed by MAGA.
As Drew and Isabella went from property to property, it quickly became clear: the farms and tracts of forest southwest of Edmonton aren’t exactly hotbeds of anti-oil and gas activism.
But collectively, a group of just five landowners says MAGA owes them approximately $40,000 since the cheques stopped coming at the beginning of the year.
And that’s got them mad — at the company, but also at the Alberta Energy Regulator, which approved MAGA to take on 170 more wells right smack dab in the middle of the time it was in “survival mode” — with unpaid tax debts already racking up to rural municipalities.
Shaun Fluker, a law professor at the University of Calgary, questions whether the regulator is doing its job. “If you just read the Alberta Energy Regulator’s materials, it sounds like they’re doing a fabulous job,” he said. “The problem is there’s real doubt that they actually do this work.”
Drew’s two new stories this week drill into the gulf between how oil and gas regulations are supposed to work and what’s really happening — and who pays the price.
It’s 2025. Ontario just had its worst wildfire season in years, made more intense and longer by climate change and the burning of fossil fuels. And the Doug Ford government now plans to scrap all legal obligations to take climate action.
The move was buried in the government’s fall economic statement, released today: it proposes axing requirements to make a climate plan, set emissions-reduction targets and publicly report progress.
As a former provincial public servant told me, climate change isn’t going to be solved by “Tinkerbell or Superman or whoever.” And it’s a big deal that Canada’s most populous province won’t hold itself to any commitments. That’s why my colleague Carl Meyer and I cleared our desks today to find out what this all could mean. Here’s what we learned.
— Fatima Syed, Ontario reporter
Hot off the presses!
This week, immersive storytelling by northwest B.C. reporter Matt Simmons won a 2025 Jack Webster award, recognizing the best environment reporting in British Columbia. Along with photojournalist Marty Clemens, Matt witnessed a Gitanyow-led cultural burn and explored the power of fire to heal ecosystems and restore relationships with the land.
“What the Gitanyow and other Indigenous leaders working with fire are doing to heal the land and protect communities is incredibly inspiring and hopeful,” B.C. bureau chief Lindsay Sample said at the awards ceremony in Vancouver, accepting the award on Matt’s behalf.
Work by The Narwhal’s B.C. team was honoured as a finalist in three additional categories: best news reporting, best feature reporting and commentator of the year. Check out those stories here.
This week in The Narwhal
Immigrants send billions home already. Storms like Hurricane Melissa add to the pressure By Rebecca Gao
The effects of climate change are hitting developing countries hardest. Devastation in Jamaica could increase money transfers from Canada by as much as 10 per cent.
These are the environmental programs to be cut under Carney’s first budget By Carl Meyer READ MORE
Don’t complain, get paid: Kitimat resident offered thousands from LNG Canada By Matt Simmons READ MORE
Fish fight: Is the decline of Atlantic salmon actually the fault of striped bass? By Jeremy Hull READ MORE
Tiny birds, and their tiny superfood, could decline due to ‘irreversible’ effects of Vancouver port expansion By Steph Kwetásel’wet Wood READ MORE
Oh, hello there! Did you know The Narwhal has stories about the natural world in Canada you just can’t find anywhere else? Tell a friend, and remind them to subscribe!
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Karl Zajes gave Prairies reporter Drew Anderson a tour of his rural Alberta neighbourhood, where landowners are frustrated by outstanding lease payments from an oil and gas company.
Your access to our journalism is free, always. Sign up for our newsletter for investigative reporting on the natural world in Alberta — and across Canada — you won’t find anywhere else.
Your access to our journalism is free, always. Sign up for our newsletter for investigative reporting on the natural world in Alberta — and across Canada — you won’t find anywhere else.
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